The Pomp Podcast - 425: Eliza Orlins on Criminal Justice Reform

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Eliza Orlins is a Manhattan public defender who has represented thousands of New Yorkers over the last decade. She is currently running for Manhattan District Attorney with a focus on criminal justice reform. In this conversation, we discuss private prisons, bail reform, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, police immunity, mandatory minimums, sentencing reform, and how we can change the system. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Eliza Orlins is a Manhattan public defender who has represented thousands of New Yorkers over the last decade. She is currently running for Manhattan District Attorney with a focus on criminal justice reform. In this conversation, we discuss private prisons, bail reform, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, police immunity, mandatory minimums, sentencing reform, and how we can change the system. I really, really enjoyed this two-plus-hour conversation with Eliza, and I think you'll learn a ton from it. Before we get into this episode, though,

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keys while using those tax advantage dollars. So go check them out, retirewithchoice.com slash pomp. If you don't use the slash pomp, you'll end up on the waitlist. So make sure you use retirewithchoice.com to skip the entire waitlist. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 85,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Eliza. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his

guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang i've got eliza here this is going to be a very very special episode we are going to sit here remotely and talk for as long as possible about criminal justice reform uh eliza is intimately familiar with a lot of these issues for um kind of what she does on a day-to-day basis and she is also running for uh an elected da office which we'll get into but uh just thank

you so much for sitting down and doing this. Great to be here. I'm so glad that we got connected and that we're having this important conversation. Absolutely. Let's start with your background. Walk us through where you grew up, how you got into the criminal justice system, and then what you've been doing over the last couple of years. I'm a born and raised New Yorker. I grew up in Manhattan and lived abroad in China when I was young. My sister's Chinese. She's adopted. And I always had a passion for helping people. Even from the time I was very young, I recognized the privilege that I had from being white and having a non-white sister and recognizing the racism that existed and always speaking out and fighting for those who were less fortunate and

who were often marginalized. And I realized when I was like a teenager that I wanted to be a public defender. It just, I had a calling. I went and interned at the public defender's office here in Manhattan. And I was like, yep, this is it, found it. This is what I'm going to do with my life. And so everything I did from that point forward was to get that job. I mean, it was the reason I went to law school. And the only job I applied for when I graduated, I remember an interview, in my final round interview with the head of my organization, he was like, well, Eliza, it was great to meet you. You know, keep us posted if you get any other job offers. And I was like, would that enhance my application in any way? And he said, well, no, we just want to, we just want

to be kept apprised of if you're thinking of taking another job. And I said, okay, in that case, you should know there won't be any other job offers. It was like all my eggs, one basket. I tell law students that I speak to, don't do that. But I, but I really, I just knew that this was what I wanted to do. And I anticipated being a public defender for life. And I started working at the Legal Aid Society in October 2009. And I, I mean, listen, I have loved being a public defender. It's, you know, it's an incredible job and getting to fight for people who are treated so unfairly is really incredible. But after over 10 years of representing over thousands of people charged with crimes, I realized how rigged our criminal legal system is.

And you'll notice throughout our interview, I don't even call it a criminal justice system because it's not justice. I mean, it's justice for some, but certainly not for all. And people will say, oh, our system is broken. But to them, I say it's not broken. It's operating exactly as designed as a rigged system is supposed to. And it's marginalizing the very people it was designed to marginalize. And that's people of color, LGBTQIA folks, people who are just everyday working Americans, and non-citizens, victims of sex crimes, sex workers.

I mean, it's just people who are already at a disadvantage, and then they're just marginalized by the system, which just perpetuates this cycle. And I realized that if we want to change the system, we have to change the DA. And so I made this huge decision to run for Manhattan District Attorney. Awesome. So let's start first with just the design of the system. Most people who are listening to this, they've heard somebody somewhere along the way say like, hey, there should be criminal justice reform. They don't even necessarily understand the issues first, right? It's almost like people jump to the solution. So I want to kind of go step by step here and just walk through how the criminal justice system works. And then we'll get into what some of those issues are and how we can solve them. Yeah, I think that that's a great way to do it. And I think that some of these things are really exemplified well by stories that I have from my, you know, 11 years as a public defender. And one that sticks out in my mind is a client of mine who I'll call John for the purposes of the story. and he was an assistant manager at a Gristiti's in lower Manhattan, a grocery store for those who don't live in New York. And he had worked at the same grocery store for 25 years. He'd made his way up to assistant manager. And one night he was closing up the store around 11 PM. He bought

two bags of groceries with his employee discount to bring home to his family. And he walked over to the subway and he got on the uptown A train, set his groceries on the seats next to him and prepared for his long ride home. At the 125th Street stop, two uniformed NYPD officers got on the train, grabbed his groceries, dumped them to the ground, and placed John in handcuffs and proceeded to take him to jail for the night for the crime of occupying multiple seats on a transit facility. Literally taking up two seats on the subway. And I met him the next night and I got him out of jail. But for over 10 years, the frustration and heartbreak and anger with the way the system continues to operate has never gone away. And I've seen cases like this and people

being jailed and bullied for as little as taking up two seats on the subway. And so when I say that the system is designed to systematically disenfranchise so many, it's why I say the system is not broken. It's working as designed and it's operating in such a way that someone like john would get arrested and yet if i set my purse down next to me on the same subway there's no chance i would be arrested for that crime so so this is like a really really important i think kind of story that starts to highlight there's tons and tons of nuance and complexity here and i think you and i are going to do our best to kind of highlight a lot of that complexity um for people who uh do not understand that story that you just described what is the police

response right because i can already hear people saying okay that that is an example where there's going to be a crowd that says uh the letter of the law is that you can't take up two seats in the subway and therefore uh the police are just doing their job then there's another side that says uh yeah but if you or i did that we wouldn't be arrested for it and then there's a whole bunch of people in between who kind of just throw their hands up and they're like i don't understand how this even happens and so kind of if maybe we start with like the police officer's perspective there Is this a thing where the police are targeting somebody? Is it a race thing? Is it a poverty thing or like an income thing? Like how do you kind of just wrap your head around that specific

incident and like why it happens, if you're even able to identify that? It's such a hard question because so many of these things have really just existed for as long as our society has existed. And, you know, these are all pretty much founded on racism, on white supremacy, on maintaining the status quo for the wealthy and privileged and well-connected. And from its inception, you know, our system was white male landowners who wanted to maintain their power. And, you know, we'll probably get into talking about this later, But, you know, how all of this kind of stems from Jim Crow laws and the ways in which we systematically disenfranchise people. And so I think that, you know, are there police officers who wish they didn't have to make the arrests of people who are taking up two seats on the subway,

but the system of incentives for police officers is is is messed up and maybe but like also it's just such a such a the the system as a whole operates in such a way that it really is propping up and maintaining the status quo in like a very significant way yeah when you say police incentive it described that a little bit because i think that part of this is um i almost think of the criminal justice system has like kind of stages. And so if you're John in that scenario and you're riding the subway, you're just a private citizen kind of going about your business. The first stage of kind of going down this path is like there's an encounter with the police, right? And then there's an arrest and then there's kind of bail and sentencing and like all

that stuff will come. But just talk a little bit maybe about the police incentive, whether it's that incident or another uh kind of situation how do you see maybe the challenges with some of the police incentives uh and why it may lead to some of uh these examples well i mean i think there's some very very serious and important conversations that we're having with regards to the police right now and i think that you know there's just been so little um police accountability, so little police transparency. You've probably heard a lot of conversations. I mean, there were so many people posting about 50A in New York, the repeal of 50A. You saw all these big time celebrities saying repeal 50A, which was the mechanism by which they kept police

misconduct records secret. They just maintained the secrecy. So even if someone had committed misconduct um you know even if there had been massive settlements paid out because of that misconduct uh it was extremely difficult to get access to those records so you know they're just is there a reason for that or like what would their argument be as to why that was important or why that was passed well i guess oh gosh i know you always you want me to make the opposite the opposite argument um and it's so hard on something that you know to argue that the personnel records of police that shield their misconduct records should be, um, should remain hidden. Um, well, I guess the question is, is it specifically misconduct only, or is it just

personnel records total? And the reason why I ask is like, um, I always go to like the extreme arguments and trying to understand, like, is it something where if a police officer has a health issue that would also be protected underneath this? No, no, this is, this is the access to the disciplinary records. Got it. Okay. So this is specifically around disciplinary misconduct, those types of records. This isn't personal information around your health or anything else that might be protected. Correct. Correct. And I think that there were so many advocates who said that transparency about police misconduct is like a panacea for preventing violence by police officers. But we want to see more significant change as well. You know, there has

to be more that we do that should really make sure that, you know, I mean, the law basically first existed to prevent defense attorneys from going on what they were calling phishing expeditions, you know, by placing broad subpoenas of police misconduct records. But over time, you know, the courts started interpreting that law as barring any police officer misconduct records from being disclosed. And that secrecy increased because the police obviously are very powerful. And it was one of the, one of the worst laws in the nation with regards to the public's ability to access these records. And, you know, a majority of states allowed like way before New York public disclosure of at least some misconduct. And this is something that, you know, it's like,

it's so straightforward as to why this should be public. You know, officers are given such enormous power in their jobs and a history of abusive behavior should be available to the public that they are charged to protect. Yep. And so with kind of going down this conversation with the police specifically. You know, one of the things that I've continued to say is like a lot of the conversation appears to be retroactive or kind of the effect in a cause and effect relationship. You know, I was a, an infantry soldier deployed overseas. And I, one of the things that just is so mind open, you know, or kind of mind bending to me is myself and many others that I deployed with have much more training than the police that walk our streets

every day. And there's a balance between, um, I don't know necessarily that that's the police officer's fault, right? They're looking to get a job. They want to, uh, you know, kind of get paid, do all these things. And so they go through the training that a police department, whether it's in New York city, uh, North Carolina, where I'm from, I think you can literally become like a, uh, a sheriff with like six or eight weeks of training or some very minimal amount of training. And so it's almost like if you look at like, yes, would the files being public change behavior? Probably. Right. And it would actually make it much easier to identify and hold accountable those who have kind of done the wrong thing or acted in a way that isn't in the best interest of the population. but is the problem actually like even more in front of that? Is it a training problem? Is it a militarization of the police? Like we almost create this culture where, uh, the police are

going to do things that we don't want them to do. And so finding out about it retroactively is great, but like we should be able to stop that or prevent it up front. Right? Yeah, I think absolutely. That's, we want to, we want to prevent it. We want to stop it. Um, we want to hold accountable people who do abuse their power. But I think that, you know, the data has shown that like training is not, I mean, yes, there's so little training that goes on, but training is probably not the answer. I mean, if you think about Minneapolis being like the quintessential example of that, like where George Floyd was murdered when a police officer kneeled on his neck for over eight minutes, they had tried reform. You know, five years ago, they were under

all this pressure in the wake of other police killings. And they undertook all these reforms proposed by the Obama Justice Department and procedural reforms and really implemented all these trainings on implicit bias, on de-escalation, on mindfulness, on crisis intervention, and even on, I think it was like enhanced early warning systems to identify officers who are problematic and they brought in amazing, you know, scholars and initiatives and they spent millions of dollars on, on this to, to do that. And all of these training programs and, and whatnot, and it didn't work. So, and this may be a misunderstanding on my part. Um, but a number of people I've talked to, my understanding was that, uh, a lot of these programs, um, and maybe

not so much the reform programs as much as some of the accountability type programs have actually been able to identify uh certain police officers that are like higher risk or more likely to do things that violate the promise to to the community the problem actually is enforcing that stuff right so there's almost like this immunity the um the police uh unions are able to help people get back their jobs, even after they've been fired. It almost seems like the identification, whether it's perfect or good, is definitely up for debate. But even if we were able to identify here in a force of 500 police officers, here's the two bad apples, it almost seems like it's ineffective for anything that we can do in terms of being able to basically get them off the street. Is that

accurate or do you have some other understanding of that? Well, I mean, I think that that is accurate. I think that there's just so little actual accountability when there is misconduct. So I think misconduct stems from, I mean, there's so many different types. Like when we talk about it, is it just the, you know, brutalization and harassment and assaults and murders that we see on the streets? It's not just that. It is the physical violence in the streets, but it's also the false arrests, the falsifying documents, the perjury under oath in the courthouses. And these are all types of police misconduct that I saw as a public defender with stunning regularity. Even when raised with the district attorney's office, these examples of chronic

misconduct on the part of the police erode our public trust and harm our communities. And I think our district attorneys have really failed to and been complicit in the continuing misconduct perpetrated by our police departments. Yeah. One of the things that is really interesting to me is this idea that if you look at the data, right? So my understanding of the data, and again, you're much more of an expert on this than I am. So correct me if I'm wrong here, but somebody, I wrote this big piece earlier this year about basically the police and race and kind of systematic headwinds for certain socioeconomic classes, certain demographics, all this stuff. And somebody sent me a thing and they said, look, the problem is that everyone

talks about the most extreme case, right? A George Floyd situation, a Breonna Taylor. And those are obviously very, very bad and we should do everything we can to stop them. But the data on, I think it's per 1,000 arrests, the FBI data is like, you know, for every 1,000 arrests of a white person, nine people are killed. For every 1,000 African Americans that are arrested, eight people are killed. And so that data, if you just look at that as a single piece of data, you would say, oh, we don't have a racism problem in the police force and our criminal justice system, whatever. But what you just described is it's not just about physical violence or about use of fatal force. Although there are issues there, it's also just simply who do we stop? Who do we arrest? Who do we harass? Who do we do all these things? And so I think that the hard part in this is almost a conversation of there's data that can be twisted and used and every party uses it to kind of tell a different story. But then there's also things that just don't show up in the data, right? Of just like, why, again, does the example you used of John, why does he get arrested for putting his groceries in the chair next to him, but if you did the same thing, you don't, right? does that actually actually show up in data or not? And I think that's what kind of makes some of this conversation really hard and also, you know, quote unquote controversial when you kind of pull it out to a national level. Right. And, and I think that the data is quite clear when it

comes to, um, you know, the, the over 10 million arrests per year in, in our country, um, who is being arrested and what, you know, what their race is. And I think that those are the kinds of things like here in New York, we have a gang database. And the way in which you get on the gang database factors as innocent as who you walk to school with, or what color your shirt is, or tattoos you have, or social media posts, who your friends are. And there are children as young as 13 on this database. And there's been like really no public scrutiny of this. And it's become a huge issue here in New York. But the, the unbelievable thing about it is finally, you know, we were able to, to get some of the, of the data around it. 99% of the people on the, on the gang database

are black and brown, 99%, 1% are white. And, you know, I mean, if you're going to, if you're going to tell me that, that that's because, oh, well only 1%, no, it's just not true. It's simply not true. It just, you know, we just criminalize people for the color of their skin. And it's, it's just, it's just completely unjust. Yeah. Here, here's another perspective that I've heard people argue. And this one I think to me is much harder to kind of just sift through because, because I think a lot of this is interrelated, but there's a number of people who have made the argument that, look, black, brown, and minority people are much more likely to be arrested, you know, targeted, et cetera, by our police forces. There's another group of people

that say, it's not a race thing. It's a socioeconomic thing. It's a poverty thing, right? And so again, like in many cases where, you know, if the police are over patrolling certain areas that happen to be lower socioeconomic classes and also have certain demographics in them, it's hard to decipher. Are they patrolling that place because it's a poverty thing or it's a race thing? Is it both? Are those two things intimately tied together? How do you just think through that relationship between socioeconomic status and race when it comes to policing and arrest and things like that? Well, listen, don't get me wrong. We have certainly criminalized poverty in this country. We've criminalized also, you know, substance use

disorder and mental health issues. And we must change that. I mean, there are so many people who end up sitting in jail, charged with a crime. You know, we say that we have presumption of innocence in this country. We say you are innocent until proven guilty. And yet, people sit in jail innocent of any crime, have not been convicted, have not pled guilty, but they cannot afford to buy their freedom. And therefore they are incarcerated while someone who is charged with something far worse, is charged with something far more serious, or is charged with the exact same thing, but has money in their bank account, can pay their way out and not sit in jail. And we know that when you sit in jail, the outcomes are far worse. People end up taking

pleas to things just to get out of jail. When you're locked up for whether it be three months, three weeks, or even just three days, you become exponentially more likely to reoffend or get rearrested. And it all makes sense, right? Because if you're locked up even just for a matter of days and you have a job and you miss work for three days, well, you get fired. And then you can't afford to pay your rent. And then if you're a single parent, you lose your children to foster care. It's like all of these things that just truly criminalize poverty. But we also see the racial disparities and those cannot be denied. If you are a person of color, you are much more likely to have bail set. So your poverty does exacerbate the situation. But if you are black

or brown and you're likely to have a higher bail set, which means you're likely to have a worse outcome in your case, you're more likely to take a plea, you're less likely to take your case to trial because, you know, the case drags out and you've just been sitting incarcerated for all this time. So, so I do think that like, to answer your question, it is both things, but like they are inextricably intertwined because of the systemic disenfranchisement and systemic racism that exists in our country. Okay. Before we get into kind of some of the bail stuff in that, I just want to kind of finish up the police conversation, which is there's issues, right? You know, and the way that i'd uh described it to a friend and you know i grew up in a family of five boys uh literally

went to war in iraq uh there's very few things you're going to show me uh on the internet that would shock me but one of the videos that absolutely shocked me earlier this year was uh i think it was in madison square park right right in the corner there was literally a fist fight between a private citizen and a police officer and there was a uh a mob type mentality was the police versus protesters. Uh, and I literally saw, uh, a cop with a baton just wailing on somebody and the protester was absolutely engaged as well. Right. So it wasn't a, the protester was standing there and kind of not doing anything, but it was a fight. And just in that environment, I think when you just see it in kind of a 32nd clip, you're like, what is happening right in the middle of

Manhattan, you have literally people fighting with the police. But then when you start to understand, well, wait a second, why are the police there? What were the police doing? Are the police actually egging some of this on? By the way, are the protesters doing some of the same things? Are they agitating the police, right? And you start to unpack some of this, where you ultimately decide is like, hey, you're not going to off a 30 second video clip, understand the whole situation. And so what you've got to ask yourself is if you zoom out from one situation like that to kind of the holistic picture, what is the answer around police reform? Is it addressing police immunity? Is it, you know, addressing some other way? Like,

how do you think about it as the police reform that everyone's talking about? Like, what is that solution? Listen, I think that, first of all, some of these videos that have come out in the last four months have really done more to radicalize people than, you know, advocates and activists and those of us who've been shouting about these things for decades have been able to do. And I think the video that a lot of people reference to me when they say, and then I was like, oh my God, and I had my come to Jesus moment was the one of the 70 something year old man in Rochester just approaching the police and got pushed over and slams his head. Yeah. And he's still recovering from that. But just like watching the way the police operate in this way and just

like grabbing someone like oh don't even help a person who's bleeding out of their head i mean and watching them um peddling peaceful protesters i mean i was out in the streets protesting i've seen the police violence you know firsthand and and so the idea that like you know oh we can fix this with training is i think kind of a pipe dream and i think that well and one thing real quick just before you move on from the rochester example because i think that's like a perfect example of the two perspectives, right? You've got one where people see a video and a cop basically shoved, for those who haven't seen the video, they shove a 70-something-year-old man. He stumbles backwards and eventually falls over, kind of lands on his ass, then his back hits, and then his head

slams into the concrete. I believe he's bleeding from his head, right? And basically the police walk right by him. What later came out was the police's argument was, we said over and over and over again uh clear the square clear the square where he was standing they didn't comply with the police and therefore we moved through and that was kind of um you know a side effect of us going to kind of quote unquote do our job and where i always kind of find the nuances well hold on a second these two things can actually be true at the same time right of hey you can say we told everyone to leave the square they didn't do what we said we have a job to do and therefore we went and executed our job. And still at the same time, it'd be true that, okay, but you still shouldn't

push over a 70 something year old man, slam his head in the ground and walk by as if nothing happened and basically treat your fellow citizens as if they don't matter or you have some right to do that to them. And to me, it was always this like middle ground of like, how do you implement the nuance? Because I think people with common sense can talk through it, but in the moment, how do you get to American citizens to realize in that moment that they not are, they're actually not on different teams. They should be somehow on the same team. And that's what I just, I can't wrap my head around how you implement it. You know, I think that some of it is, well, first of all, I was thinking about the Rochester police because that was the murder of Daniel prove the

41 year old man who was, um, unwell and they put a bag over his face and killed him. But this was the buffalo police who shoved the 75 year old man over who slammed fell backwards and hit his head and um and then they released a statement saying he tripped and fell and was injured which obviously was not the truth um and and i think you know there was just there's a lot that that came out about that but i think that when we think about the fact that you know billions of dollars of our budgets are allocated to policing, to surveillance, to punishment, instead of into fostering equitable and healthy and safe communities, you know, that is a way that we all, I think we all can come together on that issue, because it seems to me that when police have to respond to mental health

emergencies, you know, like Daniel Prude, like many other, you know, people who've recently been killed in police encounters, like, they shouldn't be responding to mental health issues. They shouldn't be the ones, they're ill-equipped to deal with it. You know, we should have mental health professionals doing that. But to do that, we need to invest in, in our communities, we need to invest in, you know, supporting people in social services for mental health, for domestic violence, for homelessness, we need to fund schools and hospitals and housing in those communities, because that is what will keep us safe. And so I think that we need to focus government budgets on programs beyond policing as like an essential step to achieving those goals.

Yeah. What is so true about what you're saying right now is I've got a lot of friends who are cops, used to be cops, right? Just coming from the military. It's a natural kind of career path for them to pursue at the state, at the federal and the local level. And what people don't realize as soldiers, if you talk to them, are usually the first to say, do everything you possibly can not to go to war, right? Because they've seen it. They understand what war is. And they say, if you send me, I am going to do what you were sending me to do, but you should do everything in your power not to go to war. And they're not pacifist in the traditional sense, but they are absolutely deterrence of violent engagement with other nations. When I talk to cops, what I find

so fascinating is there's a similar element of exactly what you're saying. They're saying, why are we sending men with guns right men or women with guns to respond to a mental health issue or to something else exactly it's almost like you know somebody scrapes their knee and we show up with surgeons and the surgeons are ready to do surgery but all they needed was a band-aid and so i think that's part of what you're talking about here is like is that actually our idea of what the quote-unquote police or the responding force can be is almost it matches the threat in some way. Like the person who's a mental health situation doesn't need somebody with a gun. They need somebody who can help them with the situation that they're in.

Right, exactly. So we want to take away responsibilities from police officers that they themselves don't want. There are all kinds of mental health and social work functions that are rarely, if ever, improved by someone showing up with a gun. yep it it makes a lot of sense and then talk a little bit just about the police immunity uh topic so my understanding is that whether it's the buffalo police um and a whole number of other uh police forces around the country we've seen over and over again something happens generally the public opinion immediately is hey that was bad uh that's not what we want our police officers to do. Sometimes the police officer is at fault. Sometimes it's just they're in a

situation and they end up doing something. It's a reaction. They're humans. They make mistakes, whatever it is. Regardless of kind of intentionality, it's something that ends up being misconduct. And in that situation, any other job, people get fired, people get fined, they lose pay, they lose rank, like whatever the repercussion is. With police officers, that's not necessarily the case because of this kind of overarching immunity to a lot of what they do. And so how do you think about that? So when people talk about qualified immunity, which is the, you know, the doctrine that shields government officials from being held personally liable for constitutional violations, this is a, you know, a statute that exists, but this is, this is about, that's about

their monetary, their civil liability. In terms of what we would do to fix the problems that I see with the way in which police misconduct is handled, the Manhattan District Attorney, Cy Vance, has been complicit in the continuing misconduct perpetrated by the NYPD. And instead of using his power to hold them accountable, he has used his power to shield and protect police officers, including the ones who perpetrate brutal assaults, who falsify documents, who lie under oath. Explain that a little bit. When you talk about shielding, just so most people, they don't see this every day, right? So what do you mean by that in terms of the district attorney is shielding police officers? Well, if an average

citizen walking down the street, pulled out a baton and hit someone over the head with it who was doing nothing wrong, that person would be charged with assault. If the average person got behind the wheel of a car and drove a car into a group of people, that person would be charged probably with attempted murder. If a person got up on the stand in court and said, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing about the truth I do and lied under oath, that person would be charged with perjury. Yet we see over and over and over again, police officers engaging in these different behaviors, committing crimes and not being held accountable. And, you know, this is, you know, I think there's a huge problem with the way in which DA's offices and the police are

so deeply intertwined. And so district attorneys across the country, we've seen a huge problem with the accountability on the part of holding police accountable by the district attorney. And I've talked about this a lot. And I say that after I win my election and become Manhattan DA, I will establish a dedicated unit that is specifically designed to prosecute police misconduct. And when there's accountability for true police misconduct, our communities will be safer. And that is how we will restore trust and integrity. i think we see eye to eye on this is it fair to say that you agree that majority of police officers do the right thing go to work every day want to make a living go home etc and the problem is

there's a minority that do misconduct bad behavior and kind of like the bad apples spoil it for everybody or do you disagree with that you know it's hard to it's hard to say because first of all, there's so little transparency and accountability. I don't know that we necessarily know, but I think that police leadership, if we can garner anything, if we can take anything away from police leadership, the overwhelming hostility the leadership has shown to even the mildest of reforms and accountability measures certainly mean that it's going to be a difficult road to go down. I would hope, and I know that there are police officers out there who, you know, went into, went into law enforcement for the right reasons, who don't want to be out there brutalizing people

or engaging in, in some of these, these behaviors. But, but I think the problem is just the way in which this, this system operates right now, the what, not only like what we've asked police officers to do, such as policing those who are mentally ill or who are poor or who are suffering from substance use disorder. But I mean, I think the police should want to be free from those obligations, you know, to stop punishing people and arresting people for those things. But it's going to take like a really, a pretty, pretty big overhaul of the mindset of the whole, you know the whole force yeah one of the last things i want to talk about the police and i want to move on because i know we got a ton of other topics to cover is um i listened to i think

it was the police union chief and i may have that incorrect so if i do uh somebody correct us but um he basically gave a a speech at one point earlier this year and one of the data points that he presented that i found um counter to what i had thought was he basically said look if you take the total number of interactions that he was talking specifically about the new york police department have with constituents and then you look at the ones in which there is misconduct reported issues etc it's a very very small percentage i don't remember the exact percentage but it was like abnormally low compared to what i thought it was right the way that they reported it was like i don't know i almost want to say one percent and maybe i've got that wrong

but it was like very very small number and the other data point that was interesting in as he was talking about this was just how many interactions the New York Police Department has with constituents. And so I think, you know, we've already talked about kind of, if you don't have police go to every single time somebody calls 911, and you've got other people, you can take down the number of times that the police have to interact with people, right? And kind of save them for the more appropriate things that they're trained to do. But how do you look at, Is it a thing where like the number of bad incidents are actually not great from an aggregate number, but the severity is really bad? Or is it maybe that the reporting is wrong? Like, how do you kind of just think through, and maybe even have a number of like, what percentage of police interactions are falling into this category of like misconduct or things that if people saw them would say, hey, that's not what we want the police to do? uh so i i mean i i'm not looking at the data points that you're referencing so i would need

to see them but if they're coming from the police directly i think that you know there would definitely be pushback from a lot of activism groups and and um organizing groups and people on the ground uh because i think in carrying out the way that the nypd engages in their quota driven, you know, broken windows tactics, they have an extremely high number of punitive interactions with the Yorkers every year. So I think, you know, this is, I think it's a much higher number than what you just cited. But I don't have exact percentages. That's fine. And that's helpful. Let's move on to, I want to talk about the war on drugs. mainly because it feels like there is a change happening across America right in

New York it is kind of one piece of it but across America and my understanding of this is you know a couple decades ago we basically decided as a country drugs are bad and we're going to go and enforce the law and if you are engaged in drugs either as somebody who is importing them somebody who is selling them or somebody who is consuming those drugs, we are going to put you in jail, we're going to punish you, etc. Now, with the hindsight bias of many decades of data, I think that we've seen one, this war on drugs may not be nearly as effective as we once hoped. Two, there are certain people who have a disproportionate kind of impact in that war of drugs or they're targeted or arrested.

And then three is this change that's occurring is basically now, as we saw in the recent voting around the election, there are states that are choosing to decriminalize certain drugs or to legalize certain types of drugs. And so maybe just let's start kind of from a high level, how you see the war on drugs and kind of what the current situation there is in terms of policing and sentencing and the entire criminal justice system. Yeah, well, you know, I think the war on drugs is not a war on drugs. It's a war on people, black and brown people, poor people, people with disabilities. And I think we've seen now that there's no material difference between blacks and whites for the use of drugs or the sale of drugs. But if you're black, you are more than three times more likely to be arrested for those crimes. We exist within a profoundly racist system. And we live in a nation where now there are more black men incarcerated or under criminal supervision than the entire number who were enslaved in 1850. So, I mean, the characterization of the war on drugs being anything other than a way to continue to marginalize people of color, to prosecute and jail people with substance use

disorder or mental health issues, or just simply those who are poor, is just completely untrue. And I think that, you know, the only way to fix this is by decriminalizing all drugs. um we need to i mean it's far past time that we should legalize marijuana expunge all previous convictions i mean that is and reinvest in the communities that were disproportionately harmed by by these these you know draconian laws but but i think that that it really needs to be all laws and and we did we had a huge victory um i think that across across the country we've seen people uh really coming around to this position and recognizing that you know that that rehabilitation

and treatment and, um, helping people is much more important than, than just incarcerating them for, for, for drug crimes. So, and this is, I'm going to go really deep in the weeds here. Uh, my understanding of, um, the number of people who get arrested for drug possession, right. Or intent to sell or whatever, is a proxy or kind of an effect of where we police, right? And so the extreme example and very much an overgeneralization, but just to kind of highlight the difference is if you have somebody standing on the street corner in a neighborhood and they are selling drugs versus you have somebody consuming it in a suburban home, right? There tends to be race intertwined there, but just the ability for the police to drive by on a street

corner and arrest somebody um and understand they're selling drugs is very different than their ability to go into your private home you know outside of a metro area etc how much of this is uh the again socioeconomic the urban environment like that type of stuff and therefore that leads to race being involved verse do you think it is literally we are turning a blind eye to one part of the quote unquote drug problem in America. Right. So like prescription narcotics would be a great example of, uh, Hey, that may be even worse. Right. And if you kind of look at deaths, like that's pretty bad, uh, compared to, uh, while we're turning a blind eye to one part, we're actually targeting, uh, another type of drug, another type of, uh, consumption,

uh, dealing, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, our approach to um to to thinking when we think about like criminal justice reform including drug policy requires like really transformational like out-of-the-box thinking it can't just be the way that we've always thought about things you know this this ineffectual like oh just say no approach is just it simply doesn't work it's just it's completely flawed and it ignores all of the public health concerns, and it disproportionately harms people. And so I think that, you know, we should be treating the public health issue that exists as a public health issue and not criminalizing and punishing it for people who struggle with substance use disorder.

And, you know, I think that we've seen the surging number of opioid overdose deaths, not just here in New York but across the country and we should be supporting you know safe safe consumption sites we should be supporting evidence-based treatment we should be supporting opportunities that provide people with you know stability and I think that this is something that like we have to approach with a with like an eye towards like seeing the humanity in each and every person. You know, I think that there's so much of our criminal legal system that exists that it just dehumanizes people on such a like massive level. I mean, you'll hear even just the wording that people use when people say, oh, that person's a criminal, a felon, a convict, an inmate, prisoner,

a drug addict, whatever they just refer to, it's not, they're not human. And so like when we approach these things with compassion, with thinking about people as people, people first, you know say oh a person who a person who is suffering from substance use disorder a person who is currently incarcerated a person who has been convicted of a crime so as not to define the person by the thing um you know then we can actually think about these ways of transformationally changing our approach and and i think that when we think about about how to approach these these issues with drugs like we just need to think about what kinds of impacts these have on human beings If we think about each person who we lock up for a drug possession crime being someone's

mother, someone's father, someone's partner, someone's sibling, someone's child, then maybe we can have, oh my God, this is a massive impact on not just that person, but their entire family, their entire community. And we are actually making them, we're not doing anything to treat the underlying issue. And then they're going to cycle back through the system. And nothing that we do while we incarcerate people helps them kick a drug habit, for example. And like far too often as a public defender, I'd seen clients who, who wanted so desperately to get better and the Manhattan DA's office, instead of being like, yeah, absolutely. That is definitely

a person who could use a treatment program says, no, no, we don't think that person's worthy for one reason or another. I mean, like treatment should be the rule rather than the exception. We should be giving everyone who, who wants it treatment for, for drug use. Yeah. Well, you mentioned a safe consumption site and this will kind of lead us, I think, into kind of the Oregon and what happened there recently, but explain just what is a safe consumption site? Yeah. So I think people call them safe consumption sites or supervised consumption sites, which are, you know, facilities that are medically supervised and designed to provide a safe place for those who are dealing with a substance use disorder. And usually it's

like you know it goes in conjunction with like a harm reduction approach towards drug problems and the facility provides a you know sterile injection equipment provides information about drugs health care treatment referrals access to medical staff and you know prohibits the sale or or you know purchase of drugs but but basically it allows people to and I think you know we we really hear about it in terms of like, I think in the Netherlands and other places where it's like a place where people can drop in and they have these centers that are needle exchanges that are where people can receive support. And it actually helps reduce drug use, reduce, you know, overdose deaths, reduce and reduce crime. And so like those are the kinds of things that we really need to be

thinking about here in the United States, like across the board? So again, let's go to kind of the extremes. And I always caveat this stuff with like, we live in such a divisive society and using the extremes of that division is great to highlight the differing opinions. But I wish people would meet in the middle is kind of the solution. But I think that when people hear this, so there would be one side that says, this is amazing. We can actually reduce drug use, we can reduce crime, kind of treat people with humanity. Like all the things that you just said sound fantastic, right? And that's kind of one perspective. There's another perspective that says, oh my God, Eliza, like, are you guys crazy? You're going to just help people do drugs,

right? And again, the reason why I say like meeting in the middle is like, there's usually a lot of common sense and moderation and kind of, you know, the central viewpoint. How do you think through or communicate to the people who are in the extreme view of like, you just want to help people do drugs, right? And like, you want to provide sterile needles, but like, you're still helping them kind of continue a habit. What is the argument or the articulation that you think can kind of pull those people more towards the center of, no, there is a benefit to this and there is a kind of a positive impact that can happen, you know, by simply just putting, let's say, these supervised consumption sites or something else?

well so I think that the thing that most people want is to feel safe in in the city in which they live they want to be able to walk their kids down the street they want to feel safe they don't want to see people you know shooting up on the street it makes them feel unsafe now whether or not it actually makes them unsafe is a different story but it makes them feel unsafe and I think that that when we talk about like the what the actual literal data shows like you can look at the numbers and you say, oh, look, if we remove one of the most common justifications for law enforcement to harass, arrest, prosecute, incarcerate, and deport people, which is drug crimes, we see a domino effect on the way in which that uplifts all people, the way in which

that helps cities become safer, you know, we see crime goes down. We see when we shift to prioritize health over punishment, we see, you know, I think that they're predicting in Oregon that the felony and misdemeanor convictions for drug possession now with the new ballot measure they just passed will go down by 91%. I mean, that is an unbelievable number. And if you also think about it fiscally. I think there are so many people who are like, like, so their, their default is send people to jail. But, but when you think about the fact that for taxpayers, and I can't speak to anywhere except for, except for New York city, but, but when you send someone to Rikers Island in New York city, that costs taxpayers $975 a night. I mean, that is, that's wildly

expensive for taxpayers. I mean, people, more than a hotel, more than a very nice hotel. Like you could stay in a nice hotel room for that amount of money, or you could get an apartment for a month for, for some people, you know, you could get a room, you could get, and for much less than that, for much less, for like dollars, you know, we can invest in people and make it so they don't cycle back through. And so we are actually saving taxpayers money. So for those who, who maybe don't buy the, the compassion argument or the humanity, but if they fiscally care about where their tax dollars are going, they can say to themselves, well, I would rather spend X amount of dollars up front and then not pay the $975 a night for every

time that person continues to get arrested and get incarcerated and get locked up on Rikers Island, which they will continue to do if we do nothing, if we don't think about the long-term consequences, if we don't think about how using our criminal legal system for substance use is counterproductive. And I think that, you know, I mean, I feel like Oregonians are really leading the way and I'm so like heartened to see these real reform measures pass across the country and show that people have a real appetite for this. Yeah. So for those that don't know, recently there was a ballot measure that was put forward in Oregon. And basically there are a couple of different nuances to it. But the general takeaway is that the Oregon voters decided or chose to, and I think it still needs to be ratified, but at least the majority of people voted to decriminalize basically hard drugs. So I think it's heroin, meth, LSD, maybe cocaine's in there or not. But just basically drugs that you would consider a hard drug will now be decriminalized.

The understanding I have of the decriminalization means that if you are in possession of a minor amount of these drugs or you are actively using them when you encounter the police, they will not arrest you. Instead, what they will do is they will give you a fine. I think the amount right now seems to be about $100. And that $100 fine can be waived if you agree to basically some sort of treatment-based protocol, right? And there's some pre-approved program. And basically, if you go through that program, then they'll go ahead and they'll remove the financial fine. So that was kind of one part of it was what I'll call the decriminalization

of hard drugs. The second piece was the legalization of some psychedelic compound. It's the most popular one. It's found in mushrooms, and it's specifically being legalized for use in mental health treatment, so in supervised use, kind of medical-type environments with specific use cases. But I think that Oregon, to your point, is really at the forefront of doing this. And the argument that I've heard is basically the Portugal argument, right? Portugal in 2001 decided they were going to decriminalize all drug use and consumption. And they basically just said, look, we're not going to treat this as a crime. Instead, we're going to focus on rehabilitation. I think most people think that it's proven to be pretty effective in Portugal. There's still some people who say this is an absolute nightmare. We should have never done it, whatever. But I think the general consensus is like this was a positive. And so now that Oregon's going to do it, it sounds like they're basically going to try to replicate the experiment that's played out for the last 20 years in Portugal and say, look, if we focus on the rehabilitation, that changes the relationship that people have with the criminal justice system.

Is that kind of how you see at least the goal of what they're trying to accomplish? Yeah, absolutely. And if you think about the fact that someone could be charged with possessing such a tiny amount of drugs, they get charged, they end up pleading guilty, they now have a criminal record. This excludes them from jobs, from housing, from loans, from, you know, and this makes it's like sometimes even though it's only like they got a very minimal sentence when it came to the actual crime, they're sentenced to a lifetime of unemployment or difficulty,

you know, finding, getting into school or getting into homes. So if you think about what that does to somebody, saddling them with a criminal record over minor possession of drugs, something that they were, that was for personal use, it's really like a huge change. And, you know, what we have seen in Portugal is that there was no surge in drug use. People who say, oh, well, if you decriminalize now, everybody's going to use drugs. But it turns out that's not in fact what happened, that there was no increase in usage, but the deaths, the number of deaths from drugs fell significantly. And the number of people who were able to access treatment, who wanted treatment for substance use disorder rose significantly. And so I think it's just like such a huge step

in moving towards a health-based approach instead of just criminal punishment. And so I think ultimately it ends up saving your state or your country money to do that as well. Is it possible that we could see decriminalization of all drugs in New York State or New York City? Like, is that a world where the environment in which we all live could stomach that and kind of get the votes needed to pass something like that, do you think? It's possible. I think we have an uphill battle. I mean, we haven't even legalized marijuana here in New York. That's what I wanted to talk about next. We are fighting tooth and nail for that, which I do actually think is likely to happen in the next legislative session. But I think that what we can do in the interim is elect

me as Manhattan district attorney, because I am committed to say, you know what, this is what's so wild about, about DA positions is they are just so immensely powerful because even if there's a law on the books as district attorney, it will be within my discretion to decide what crimes get prosecuted, how they get prosecuted, who gets prosecuted, who gets the opportunity for treatment, whether someone gets sent to jail, you know, and one of the things that I'm very committed to is decriminalizing drug possession, meaning even if New York State has not enacted legislation to do that, I will not prosecute people for low-level drug possession. It's just simply, it doesn't keep us safe. It doesn't, you know, stop recidivism. It doesn't address the public

health issues people are facing. And instead, it saddles people with criminal records. It tears families apart, you know, and it destroys people's lives by charging them with crimes when really what we could do is think about ways of doing this, like what Oregon's doing, like what Portugal has done to really facilitate something that would just bring a better future for everyone. So you just described something that is not a new idea. I think we've actually seen, I think it was the Baltimore DA basically said, look, decriminalization happens one of two ways. either we change the laws or we stop enforcing the laws. And as the DA, I believe it was an African-American woman as the DA, she said, look, I grew up in these communities. I'm not going to

enforce these laws. And I think it was specifically around kind of minor possession of marijuana specifically, right? So not kind of all drugs. I think it was just marijuana. And what it did was it changed the police behavior, right? Because the police said, if I keep arresting somebody, but we're not going to enforce the, like, we're not going to go after them, we're not going to try to convict them, then what's the point of even arresting them? And it was almost like this, like, pseudo decriminalization because of the DA decided and made it publicly known, I'm not going to prosecute these cases. And that's really what it sounds like you're talking about in terms of not just around marijuana, but you would effectively try to do that across all drugs,

you know, low-level drug type crimes. Exactly. And it's very similar to what Marilyn Mosby, the DA in Baltimore, did with regards to marijuana possession. She basically said, is law enforcement and possession of marijuana making us safer as a city? And the answer is emphatically no. Do we need to prosecute this? If we scale back prosecutions, if we end prosecutions, if we decriminalize, will we make our city safer? And in fact, as it turns out, you know, they dropped all of these cases and it actually did help. It didn't, it didn't, you know, utilize police resources, squander police resources really by, by prosecuting people and arresting people for, for drug possession. You know, nobody thinks, I don't think that anybody

thinks that using resources to jail people for marijuana is good use of resources. I think that has become pretty universally accepted. You know, I think more and more people are coming on board with that with regards to all low-level drug possession, and especially with the use of certain therapeutic, the therapeutic use of certain drugs to treat PTSD. But I think that there are so many amazing studies going on, including at Johns Hopkins, at other, you know, really prominent medical institutions that are showing that these drugs have been able to treat people for whom treatment has been impossible with traditional means. And I think a lot of those people are war veterans. I've represented a number of clients who came back from serving

in Iraq or Afghanistan and suffered from pretty severe PTSD. And all the traditional methods of treatment, whether it be just prescription medication or talk therapy or other ways that people typically get treated, were unsuccessful. And it led to a spiral and a cycle and a life that, that was really, I don't think one that they, that they wanted to be engaged in. You're being incredibly kind. I go pretty hard on the legalization of marijuana only because one, it's a damn plant, right? Two is we're basically putting people in jail for smoking a plant. Three is you ever seen anyone who's overdosed, right? Or who's kind of done anything that you would associate with maybe the harder drugs or alcohol or anything like that. And

then on top of that uh we live in a world where right now you or i could go invest in cannabis businesses but if we walk down the street with cannabis in our pocket we end up getting arrested and then there's just this crazy um disconnection right between what you can do with your money versus what you can do with your body uh and it just feels like uh that is something that's going to fall right i i uh used to think that it would take a very long time but now even in conversations with people who tend to be much older, right, much wealthier, or not as wealthy, like it's just across the spectrum, you are seeing more and more people warm up to the idea and say, you know what, like, yeah, it's about time that that we go ahead and legalize this. And there's momentum, right,

kind of nationally, you're seeing different states kind of do this. So it feels like that'll happen at some point. It sounds like you think it could happen, you know, relatively quickly in the next legislative session? I hope so. I hope so. I think, you know, it's just, there's really no justification. You're absolutely right. There's no justification for it continuing to remain illegal. And I'm hopeful that, you know, we're seeing it fall. Even this week, we saw legislation passed that permits the use in, I mean, New Jersey legalized, Montana, Couple of states. Yeah, there are like a handful of states.

And, you know, this is now there are, I think, 36 states that have legal distribution for medical marijuana. And so I think that, you know, we're getting closer and closer to being able to pass this across the board. So before we move on from kind of this war on drugs topic, my last question is, if marijuana is legalized, do we just go let everyone out of jail who was previously arrested for marijuana possession? Or how does that kind of mechanically work, right? And one of the things I've kind of thought through is like, that's a lot of people, right? And so there's an argument of like, hey, get those people out of jail as soon as possible, right? Because now they're basically in jail for a crime that is no longer a crime. There's a whole nother argument around how do you execute the release of

you know, a million plus people or a couple hundred thousand people. Um, and kind of how does that work? What's your perspective on like, if marijuana is legalized, uh, you know, in all 50 States, what do we do with the people who are already in prison for low level marijuana crimes? Um, I mean, first of all, we should definitely release all of them from jail. Uh, you know, I think, you know, the way you describe it is like something's going to happen and all of a sudden we'll snap our fingers and everyone will be released. It's not, it's never going to be that simple. You know, even if, you know, first of all, there are some that are incarcerated for federal and then every state would have to, you know, so it's, there's so many different overlapping

things, but I think not only should we be letting everyone out of jail who is incarcerated for a marijuana offense, but we should be expunging their criminal record. And probably, you know, I don't even think that goes far enough. I think we owe them reparations for the victims of America's mindless war on marijuana. And, you know, the damage that the prohibition of cannabis has done is probably irreparable. And it has destroyed people's lives. It has destroyed families um and i think it will uh continue on for forever and you know here here we are even in places where we're seeing it legalized and there are all of these people who were not harmed by by this in by this you know criminalization of marijuana and now they're

poised to run big marijuana businesses and cash in and and make many many millions of dollars maybe more, as opposed to impoverished black kids who ended up in prison for possessing or selling weed and whose families and futures were destroyed. So I think it's so important that not only that we legalize, but that we atone for the harms that were committed because of this. So to play devil's advocate on that one, I know for sure there's going to be a bunch of people who listen to this and say, wait a second, why would we ever atone for something where somebody quote unquote broke the law at the time, right? And I think that, again, I always think of these things as kind of a spectrum. You're going to have a whole community of people who say

marijuana should never be legal. And anyone who thinks that is an absolute psychopath and it's a drug, it's illegal, and it should stay that way. I think that population is getting much, much smaller over time, right? There's a bunch of people now, and the increasing population is like, hey, this is pretty ridiculous. We should legalize marijuana. Okay. Then it's, what do we do with those who've already been convicted? Again, I think that you've got a growing, but still small group of people who say, we should let people out of prison who were previously convicted because it's no longer a crime. I think that that actually, I've got pretty deep conviction that like that population is going to grow very quickly right and that'll become a very popular

kind of position of just like if it's a league if it was illegal you got arrested but now it's not illegal why are you still in jail type thing right where i think the uphill battle and i have a hard time seeing it becoming popular is like oh we let people out of jail and then also whether it's financial or some other kind of atonement for having put people in jail you then get in this like slippery slope of like okay well what other crimes were committed that now aren't crimes do we go and like is it just drugs is it across the board you know kind of how do you think through um what like identifying and almost like drawing the box of like this is what there's atonement for and like this is what it's not right and maybe we're not even close enough to having to

make those decisions to have those frameworks but just how do you think about that well i think that that's, yes, certainly we're nowhere near having those conversations. I think like we start with, you know, getting people out of jail and expunging criminal convictions. Because if you think about what a criminal conviction over substance use leads to, it is, you know, mounting economic difficulties because it limits access to housing, to employment, to student loans, which make recovery more difficult for all those people. And, you know, about like, it's not like this has always existed, but it was these harsher sentences that kind of cropped up, coupled with like racist and reactionary policies that meant that people could be incarcerated and prosecuted

for even like the tiniest amount of marijuana. You know, if you think about the culture of criminalization that has stretched like beyond policing and incarceration, even it has fueled like, wide-scale militarized policing. It has cost taxpayers over $1 trillion and has, like, really expanded punitive institutions and punishment-oriented systems in places beyond just prisons. It's in schools, in hospitals, in social service agencies. And so, like, this has been a massive failure as well. And I'm so glad to see now so many people changing their tune about drug criminalization in general. But I think that shift in thinking was spurred on by the fact that the opioid addiction predominantly impacted white people. And I think that at its core,

drug policy and criminalization is an issue of racial justice. And that is why now we have been able to see white people get on board with decriminalization of drugs because of the opioid crisis impacting not just black and brown people. So I got to ask, when you bring up the opioid crisis, we've seen Purdue Pharma and kind of the entire, I don't know, I'll steal the military industrial complex and say the, uh, the prescription industrial complex, um, what, you know, as the DA, you would have immense power, uh, and, and make a lot of decisions. How do you view, um, you know, going after the organizations that now, you know, that there are, uh, certain, whether they're federal or state bodies going after them, both civilly and

criminally, I think, or at least investigating. How do you kind of think about the implementation of laws when it comes to the opioid stuff, not just, you know, meth, LSD, marijuana, cocaine, et cetera? Well, so what's so fascinating is, you know, as someone who spent my entire career as a public defender, I have represented, I mean, countless people who were charged with possession of drugs. And yet, you know, the doctors who are over-prescribing and taking kickbacks, the pharmaceutical industries who are preying on people, you know, those are not people who are being held accountable. And it really just kind of feeds right into all that I talk about when I say, you know, how rigged our criminal legal system is, our criminal punishment bureaucracy,

which is designed to punish those who are poor, who are powerless, who are people of color. And meanwhile, those who are wealthy, who are well-connected, and typically who are white, get off with no accountability. And that includes, you know, certainly the drug industry. That includes all of these people who have really perpetuated this opioid crisis, and yet the people who are charged and incarcerated for using drugs are the ones who are held accountable, and then those who are extremely wealthy and well-connected and powerful or not. and we see it across the board like we see that with so many things if you think about the fact that like I represent people routinely who are charged with with you know minor theft offenses like someone who goes into a CVS and steals you know Reese's peanut butter cups or a pint of ice cream you know things worth like four or five dollars and yet and they are charged with a crime they're arrested and jailed and charged and yet there are employers out there who are committing wage theft to the tune of millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars,

and they are not held accountable. No one is prosecuting them. And who is that harming? Well, that's harming our communities. That's harming everyday people who don't have the power to fight back when their employer is skimming off their paycheck. And so, you know, as DA, like, this is what I want to do. I want to make sure that people are held accountable, that everyone, that no one is above the law, that the same law applies to everyone. And that, that just because you're powerful, well-connected, wealthy, you don't get to, to, to buy your way out of accountability. Yeah. What, what, um, is always fascinating to me is like the criminal label and the, uh, application of the law flows down to the most elementary, uh, application of it. Right. And

And basically, it is that person who runs it. And there's literally a CVS on the corner where I live. And there's a cop car parked outside every day. They got their lights on, no siren. And they're a deterrent. And I can't tell you how many times I've walked in there. And while I'm in the store, I'm in the store for less than 10 minutes, somebody is stealing something.

And it's gotten to the point where what the cops will do is they will literally just yell out the window to the person who's leaving with the stolen thing. and the person will walk back in and hand it back to the person on the cash register. And I think when people see that, they're like, oh my God, that's horrible. How could this happen over and over and over and over again at the same location? And how do you stop it? Whatever. Absolutely, that's a problem and that should be stopped and people shouldn't walk into CVS and steal things. I think everyone kind of agrees on that. But your point is the total aggregate economic damage of all of that is literally peanuts compared to what happens when people

are in boardrooms, white collar crime, things like that. And one of the jokes that I always share with people is the people sending the prescription drugs, those are just drug dealers with cologne. What's the difference, right? By the way, actually, they're worse. The person on the street corner. Sure. They shouldn't be doing that. Right. And, and given the laws today, it's illegal and all this stuff, but like the systematic kind of, um, implementation of a sales and marketing strategy and, and, and kind of all that stuff is way, way worse. And it has a way negative effect on people compared to the one individual on the street corner. And it sounds like your thought process is kind of, we spend a disproportionate amount of our resources going

after the person on the street corner, not necessarily going after the person in the boardroom. We do. We do. And this is just what we've seen time and time again. And it's just that we see, I mean, I talk about the current Manhattan DA because this is who I've gone up against for over a decade, but Cy Vance has routinely failed to hold those who are wealthy and well-connected and powerful accountable. Why do you think that is? I think that people, he sees them as his, they're like the people that he rubs shoulders with, that he goes to cocktail parties with, the Harvey Weinsteins of the world who have always been his friends, his allies. These are all rich, powerful white men. And so I think that it's been difficult to, you know, a lot of New Yorkers feel very betrayed by the fact that these people like Harvey Weinstein, who he didn't prosecute for six years, you know, he had recorded evidence that Harvey Weinstein was committing sex crimes, and yet did not prosecute him until after Ronan Farrow wrote an expose and Me Too movement started and public pressure mounted to the point where he literally was given no choice but to bring a prosecution. um you know he argued for leniency for jeffrey epstein he didn't prosecute the trump kids um

he gave like a sweetheart deal to that um columbia ob-gyn dr haddon who at the time they thought had had sexually assaulted you know a handful of his pregnant patients but it turns out it was dozens maybe hundreds of of women including andrew yang's wife evelyn who spoke out so bravely about you know, her victimization by this person. But the Manhattan DA's office gave him, you know, like a total, like a deal that my clients who were charged with similar things or even less would never have gotten. Yeah. I want to switch gears and talk about sentencing and bail. Maybe let's talk about bail first. And as like a one-on-one level, this will be super elementary for you, but just for the listeners and viewers,

help people understand uh you get arrested there's bail hearings and then there's kind of the trial right and then there's the sentencing um just one is that accurate from like a sequence standpoint and then kind of what the issues are that you see with those various touch points whether it's the bail or sentencing so there are a bunch of issues but basically the way that the you know the track works is you get arrested. You get brought to central booking where you come up through arraignments. You meet your attorney for the first time. You go before a judge and hear the charges against you. And that's where the initial bail determination is made. And then you, you know, yes, theoretically, if you're going to go to trial, that happens. But the process is often

the punishment. You know, people come back to court for years sometimes before they get their day in court. And then there is a post-trial sentencing, but also fewer than 5% of cases go to trial because the system is not designed to take cases to trial, despite the fact that that's what we see in the media, that every case on law and order goes to trial. What we're really seeing is upwards of 90% of cases resulting in a plea of some sort. And people plead guilty for different reasons. There's what's called a trial tax, meaning if the DA's office basically says, if you take this case to trial, we will be seeking the maximum sentence. We'll be seeking X number of years, X number of decades. But if you plead guilty right now, you can have

this great deal of six months or of probation or of whatever. And they make it so that the consequences of taking a case to trial are so severe and extreme that, you know, most people take pleas. And so before we get to the sentencing and kind of plea deal part, the bail process is kind of that first step, right? So you've been arrested, you meet your attorney, you go in front of a judge, and this is what you were kind of alluding to earlier in the conversation around, basically, if you don't have money, you're screwed, right? It's the understanding. And, And, you know, to kind of give you the context here, from my perspective, I did not understand this at all. And I had a woman come on who's building a company, and I apologize, I don't

remember the name of the company. But basically, it's a for profit company that specifically uses technology to try to help people pay bail. So it's things like, you know, payment plans, it's things like being able to auto draft and, and just all these things that help give the government and the legal process more confidence that if we let you out on bail, you will pay us, right? But talk a little bit about the issues with bail specifically. So the thing about bail is that bail, the purpose, the legislative purpose of bail is supposed to be to ensure someone's return to court, just to make sure that they come back for their court dates. and you know when we set money bail on someone all we are doing is making it so that if that

person does not have money they will not afford to be able to buy their freedom and so you know i've been very outspoken that we must end cash bail um the way is cash bail cash bail money bail that you have to pay to get released got it and there are other forms of bail so when we say So if you say bail as like a general thing, that can mean other things such as less restrictive means such as supervised release or electronic monitoring or, you know, a personally secured bond where you just say, yeah, I swear I'm going to come back to court. You know, and so there's ample evidence that the vast majority of people return to court without money bail. When you say vast, are we talking 55%? No, in the 90s. In the high 80s, 90s, I think is what we've really seen. And we've really been sold this false choice between public safety and incarceration. And it just represents such a

departure from the law's intent of ensuring someone's return to court. What bail ends up being is just about the balance of what is in someone's bank account. And, you know, I've represented clients who have been held in on as little as $250 bail that may as well have been a million dollars, you know, for something like jumping a turnstile or stealing a Snickers bar. And meanwhile, when Harvey Weinstein was finally charged and he was facing, you know, extremely serious charges where he, if he'd been convicted on the top charge, would have been facing a mandatory life sentence. He was arraigned and given a prearranged bond of a million dollars, did not spend one single night in jail before he was convicted beyond a reasonable doubt and

found guilty by a unanimous jury of 12. And meanwhile, the people that I've represented have been held in, unable to pay bail. They've lost their jobs, their beds in shelters. They've lost their homes. They've lost their children. They've lost everything. And cash bail really just perpetuates this biased, racist, classist nature of our system. And sorry to interrupt, but just what do you think the solution is? So if we get rid of cash bail, is it no bail? Is there some other form that you think is right? How do you think about there's an issue? What's the solution in your mind? So, I mean, as I said, there are less restrictive means possible. There are methods of non-incarceratory pretrial monitoring like services or electronic monitoring

or signature or non-cash security bonds. But the reality is like we need to make sure that we are not, you know, continuing to uphold this two systems of justice, one for the rich and one for everyone else. And, you know, the only difference between the people who were charged with offenses, who were sitting on Rikers Island and those who were walking around our neighborhoods and taking the trains and, and going to work was, is the fact that they have money and nothing else. And they're not there. Like there's no, you know, there's this mis, misnomer that like, oh, this person can't get let out of jail because they're more dangerous or more threatening. But it was never that it's really just, oh, we're holding this person in because they are poor.

and so you know I think we need to be legislating this and and we are seeing some changes on the legislative level here in New York we did you know pass bail reform which was subsequently partially rolled back but but still we are seeing some changes um but also we need district attorneys who will not seek money bail and you know I think that that again like when you point to what the data shows, like places where we are not using money bail, crime is not going up. And in fact, people who are not being held in jail, who are able to continue to go to work and provide for their families, and they still have to come back to court and fight their case. They still have a possibility for sentencing later down the line, but people who truly get to utilize the

presumption of innocence, of being innocent until proven guilty, those people get better outcomes. They are less likely to re-offend. They are able to remain in their homes with their families and their communities. And that really does benefit all of society. If I was talking to somebody who disagreed with you on this, what would their argument be for the downside of getting rid of cash bail? Is it just they're intellectually lazy? Is it they're scared a crime goes up? What would their argument be? So listen, I mean, I can tell you because it's what the New York Post publishes on a daily basis. So they, they really, they do this thing where they fear monger about the worst case scenario. Oh, there's this one person. And sometimes you'll

hear it called the Willie Horton effect. But it's like, yes, inevitably is one person who gets released who otherwise might've been held in going to reoffend. Sure. But to use that to extrapolate to say, oh, because of this one incident, we should now make every single person remain in jail just because they're not wealthy enough to buy their way out. No, of course not. Like, the overwhelming majority of people are better served, including, you know, everyone in cities and communities because of their, you know, this increases public safety. And so, you know, I do think that there is a lot of fear mongering if there is the fear of this one rogue case where someone gets let out of jail who otherwise would have had bail set and then re-offends.

And of course, nobody wants that, but that can't dictate the way in which we treat all human beings. Absolutely. Before I forget, the woman that I was thinking of earlier is Phaedra Ellis Lampkins. She's the CEO of a company called Promise. And she's been on the podcast before. Really, really interesting kind of technology-based solutions. One of the other things that I want to talk about is sentencing. Obviously, there's all kinds of crazy issues here. One of, I'll use the word fascinating, but that has a positive connotation and I mean it in a negative connotation, is this idea that a judge sits there and says, you know what, Eliza, you've been arrested. I've heard the case. You are guilty. And now I'm going to determine how long you're

going to go sit in jail for as punishment. And I can choose between two years and 12 years for the crime that you've committed. The difference between two and 12 is quite large, right? The difference between three and four years doesn't sound like a lot, but that is 12 months of somebody's life. And the inability to constantly remind of the gravity in a sentencing scenario, right? If you do it all day, you can easily see somebody saying, eh, three or four years, like it's just a machine, right? And it almost becomes like a non-event choosing between three and four years, but has such a profound impact on individuals. And then when you kind of extrapolate that out to just the difference between two and 12 years. And how do I as an individual get to

decide whether you get the full extent on a sentencing basis or the minimum or where in between? It just feels like there is the ability to have a lot of introduction of bias. And then when you look at data, as I've talked to people, things like if you're already in jail, so you've been arrested, you've been sentenced, and now you're up for potentially getting out, right? And kind of a shorter sentence. If you go in and you see the judge or the person who makes the decision, and you are within like an hour and a half of lunch, you're more likely to get rejected. Right? So actually you want to be the 9am scheduled slot. You don't want to be the 1130 slot. And they've done this on, you know, across jurisdictions, etc. And it's literally people

are rushing to get to lunch. And so it's now, you know, you stay in jail. And so you start to understand that like the potential introduction of bias usually means that there will be some level of bias and doesn't have to be race or socioeconomic. It can literally just be, we're humans and I'm having a bad day today. Right. And so, because I got out of the cabin, I stepped in a puddle of water, I'm pissed off. And you know, my sentencing ends up being extra extreme today. From your seat, you've probably seen good and bad sentencing. What's your view on all of this? So it's really interesting that you ask this and that you frame it in the way that it's really the judge's decision, because I think that that's exactly what the vast majority

of people think. Oh, awesome. So if I'm wrong, I'd love to know. Well, no, no, no. But it's not it's not that you're wrong. Like, listen, the judge certainly is the person who typically makes the sentencing decision, but that is if there is a sentencing decision to be made. Okay. The problem is district attorneys have all the power and it actually like usurps the judge's power because what the DA can do is say, oh, I'm charging you with this crime. And let's say the crime has a sentence range of, I'm trying to think of a crime, like assault in the secondary, five to seven years. So you're facing five to seven years. As you say, 12 months still matters, but that's like a pretty minimal range as ranges go. But the mandatory minimum is five. Well, let's say the

DA says, I will offer you a different charge. So like your charge of the crime here, I'll depart down and I'll offer this crime and you can get a sentence of six months split with five years probation, meaning you do six months in question. So the DA basically becomes the person determining the sentence by proxy of, not forcing, but offering a plea deal that is so attractive. Exactly. So because of mandatory minimums that exist, these are statutorily mandated sentences that cannot be reduced by the judge. So let's say on a case where the minimum is five years, and listen, I've had cases like this

where the judge has put so much pressure on the DA and said, this person doesn't deserve five years, let alone more, but I can't make an offer because based on the mandatory minimum, this is all I can do. And the judges, their hands are tied. They're completely powerless. But the DA often overcharges

so that they can leverage guilty pleas from people who don't wanna run the risk of facing a prolonged mandatory sentence. like after trial or from a judge. And so people charged with mandatory minimums will often plea to a sentence that undercuts that and not what a judge determines is best. So the judge has so little power to make determinations about sentences, especially given that, you know, as I said, 90% or more of cases are resulting in pleas of some sort anyhow. And so when you're plea bargaining, it's really because the DAs have so much power. And this is why local elections

matter, why who you're electing to be your local district attorney matters so much. This is what I've been trying to tell people. It's like the most important elected position that you maybe don't know. So many people are like, oh, I didn't even realize we elect our DA. And yet that's the person who every day walks into court and says on behalf of the people of the state of New York. So the things that they are doing are in your name, you as the taxpayer, they're acting in your name. And so if you don't like the things that they're doing, you have to get engaged in your local government you know local elections they matter you have to vote these people out um and you know here i am trying to like upend the system as a public defender running for district attorney

who wants to see like real reform like transformational change so i i never understood how a lot of this worked um and thankfully i've never been in a situation where uh it was on the extreme end but the first time that i got my eyes open to this i had a speeding ticket right and uh this is going to sound so, uh, not important compared to what you deal with every day. But I remember it was in North Carolina, uh, where I grew up and, uh, I went into court and I had a friend who's, uh, I think like a friend of a friend's, you know, brother or something was a lawyer. And basically I was talking to some friends and they were like, Oh, when you go in, like you can basically talk to, uh, I didn't know what a DA was, but the person who's basically

against you. Right. And you can literally like negotiate with them. And so I remember going in there and being like, this is gonna be awesome. Like, like I got to negotiate. Right. And when I got there, I was shocked. There was a line of attorneys that were literally lined up against the wall and you know, it's just traffic court. So it's not super serious and it's kind of just mechanically going through everything, but each attorney would walk up and basically say, Hey, I got, you know, my client was, uh, doing a 75 and a 60. Um, how about we, and then they would basically offer something and the DA would just say like, yes or no. And then that person would walk over, they'd go in front of the judge and like the DA would basically say, okay, we're

willing to do X, you know, do you agree? Defend it? Yes. Okay. And then it would be done. And so I walked up there by myself, no attorney. And, uh, I basically heard somebody else say, uh, pretty similar to me. I, you know, I had a, whatever the speeding ticket was. And so I just offered the same thing that the attorney had offered. And the DA said to me, uh, okay, yes, but where's your attorney? I don't have an attorney. He's like, we need an attorney. And I was like, okay, I'll be right back. And I literally walked to the back of the room and I found an attorney and I was like, Hey man, like how much is it going to cost for you to walk up there with me? I already like, he already said he's going to do it, but I need an attorney with

me. And when I saw this, the attorney like just started laughing. He was like, Oh yeah, like this is how this works and i remember thinking to myself speeding tickets is one thing but this idea of negotiating with the da to simply get this push through and imagine if your freedom was on the line and and what i was dealing with was like i think literally it was like a moving violation versus the speeding ticket right and it like then you didn't have to go get uh points on your license yeah exactly whatever whatever again like so so unimportant compared to what you deal with on a daily basis. But it was the one time I saw this and I remember just leaving there being like, what a racket. Like literally, and that was traffic court. But what you're basically saying

is the same mechanism occurs when it's burglary, when it's murder, when it's assault, when it's like all of these much, much more serious things. And the DA knows that there's going to be a negotiation and therefore says, you know what, you push that person. And maybe that is, you know, kind of a level two offense, but I'm going to charge you with a much higher offense to get you then to plea down so that I almost go into the room negotiating from a position of power and posturing to get the plea deal done. But that's exactly what they do. And that's why electing someone like me, who's been a public defender, who understands like the grave implications of each and every case that is charged, like is so critical. Like the leadership

of these offices is typically people who've like never been on the other side, certainly not like like seeing those people as human beings. And it's like the, the, but it's just such a wild amount of power and that they do nothing. You know, the DA is really perpetuated this lock them up, throw away the key mentality. Doesn't think about people as people doesn't think about their underlying issues or how it affects their families or, or how we can really make changes. Um, and, and I think that like, this is, these are all the reasons why I'm running. Like, I really want to see how we can both make these changes that help everyone, but also that, increase public safety, that just like make our society better as a whole.

If I had a district attorney here and I said to them, hey, you people are negotiating, you're overcharging, you're doing everything we just described, what would their defense be? Like why do they, how do they go to sleep at night doing this? Like how do they rationalize it or explain it to themselves or what do they think the advantage of doing this is? um i think a lot of people who become da's like really believe in this carceral punishment system that we have they think oh well you know we should lock people up who commit crimes we should you know lock them up if they commit minor like they it's just that's what they believe and that you know they've i also think like historically you know it was the job of the

prosecutor to seek justice. But in a lot of prosecutorial offices, including here in New York, it's really become that the prosecutor seeks conviction, that like a win in their eyes is a conviction, that if someone gets sentenced, that's a win. And that really shouldn't be the prosecutor's role. You know, the way that I would want to measure success would be to think about if I, you know, got someone into a position where then I never saw them again. They never, ever, ever crossed the threshold of the courthouse or, you know, got charged or ever came back through our criminal legal system. Like that should be the way in which we measure success.

And I think that the way that we'll do that is by, you know, addressing like people's underlying mental health and substance use disorder and decriminalizing poverty and just changing the focus and just thinking about human beings as people. Are most prosecutors, did they previously serve as defendant attorneys, whether public defenders or in private practice, or do they come from some other pipeline? And again, there's always going to be outliers, but what's the normal path to become a prosecutor? Most of them were assistant prosecutors. Most of the pipeline had really just been, you're an assistant DA, you work your way up your, you know, your prosecutor for life, like prosecutors are going to prosecute and this

is what they do. And, and it really, I mean, if you had told me when I became a public defender, oh, Eliza, one day you're going to run for district attorney, I would have been like, yeah, right. I would never have believed it because it would have seemed, it seemed so impossible. But now like with this kind of change that we're seeing across the country with real reformers getting elected to DA positions. I mean, like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, what really started the whole movement. And now we have people like Rachel Rollins in Suffolk County in Boston, you know, Kim Fox in Chicago, Chesa Boudin, who was a public defender and is now San Francisco's district attorney. And, you know, that opened the door for someone like me

to run and to really think about, you know, the different ways in which we could approach prosecution. I told a couple of friends that you were coming on and naturally being in kind of the technology world, many of them live in San Francisco and you just brought up the DA there. There is a belief in certain circles that the DA has done a great job. There's also a belief that the DA has done a horrible job and has led to a lot of the challenges that the city has around drug abuse and crime. And, you know, you always see kind of a viral video of somebody runs into a CVS, steals a bunch of stuff. And, you know, everyone loves dunking on anyone in an elected position. So immediately it becomes, you know, hey, thanks so much to the DA, you know, you're

really doing your job type stuff. How do you think about a lot of the things we've talked about from like a, hey, here is how you can kind of holistically affect a system. How do you think about like the transition time right because like it almost seems to me like if you said tomorrow hey we're going to decriminalize all drugs and you're a portugal and you look back 20 years you can basically say it worked or it didn't but my guess is that like there's probably i don't know six months 12 months 24 months where like everyone goes wild it's kind of like when you you know if you never drank you turn 21 what does everybody do they go get so drunk that like they get reminded why hey maybe i shouldn't drink that much right uh how do you kind of think about

that transition period? And I don't necessarily, if like San Francisco specifically is going through some sort of transition period, but just, is there, um, almost this like, Hey, yes, this isn't going to be smooth sailing as we make a transition, but like the ends justify the means or the transition or like, how do you think about that? Well, listen, I think that certainly it's going to be a huge challenge. Rachel Rollins actually talks about it and she's like running for DA is like a pie eating contest and then the prize if you win is more pie like it's like the it's like it's not easy it's certainly going to require a lot of growing pains especially when the leadership is going to be like kind of a polar opposite from what the current leadership is um so i do think

that there will certainly be a you know there'll be transitions there'll be growing pains there'll be difficulties. But I do think that over time, you know, when we think about crafting new incentives within DA's office for career advancement, when we think about retraining employees and, you know, designating objectives to change the culture of prosecutors' offices, you know, instead of just, you know, just keeping the status quo and maintaining business as usual, Um, I think we should be, yeah, just reframing how we think about things. And I think that really what we're seeing right now in terms of like what we've seen with the nationwide protests across the country with like people are having a, there's a real reckoning in our country with the way in which our, you know, our, our criminal punishment bureaucracy operates. There are, like, broad calls for racial justice. There are people who are like, wow, maybe the objective of prosecutors' offices should be to achieve justice and not just to rack up convictions. So I do think that, like, people are kind of coming around to that position and that although there's going to be – there, of course, will be challenges to any change.

and of course, there will be people who are resistant to change. I think that there are a lot of people who are like, wow, we actually should think about different ways that we measure success. We should do a better job engaging with victims. You know, the funny thing that I would see across the board is like, you know, the DA would be like, oh, my victim, my victim, very protective of their victims. And yet, my clients, there's, we're today's, you know, person being accused and tomorrow's victim. Like, there's not really very much that differentiates them. And in fact the way the system operates does so little to to help victims we don't really think about uh you know there's um a woman who writes her name is danielle sarah she writes a book called

until we reckon and it's really about like restorative justice and thinking about our criminal criminal legal system in a different way and she says that if you picture you're walking down a hill with the you know human version with the anthropomorphization of the criminal legal system in you and you're walking down a hill and someone runs up behind you and shoves you down and tumble down the hill and you're you're laying at the ground at the base of the hill you're just like bloody and broken all the criminal legal system can do for you is chase down the person who did that to you and beat the shit out of them too and i think it's such a good demonstrative example because the person who's laying there bleeding and bloody and they're like hey can

someone help me and they're like we've got your back and they're just gonna go beat someone else up but but we don't think about really healing victims and how we can address helping them you know, with, with the issues they're facing too. And, and so I just think there are ways to like really reframe these, these thought processes. And I, and I think and hope that, that people won't be as resistant to them once they see how they can work. Last thing I want to talk about is private prisons. I asked for questions on Twitter and I got a ton of questions, but this is by far the most popular question is just like private prisons are bad. I know very, very little about this. You, I'm assuming, know way more, but I may be incorrect. Talk about just kind of

private prisons and what are the issues there and kind of how do we solve any problems you see? Oh, well, it's so interesting because so many people talk about private prisons. They're like, oh, private prisons, private prisons are the problem. They're so terrible. Look at all these people who are profiting off of prison, oh, the private prison problem. But the reality is, they're not the problem. I mean, listen, should private prisons be abolished? Absolutely. But they aren't the real problem. And I think that it's been like low-hanging fruit in terms of really thinking about these issues that people are like, oh, we need to end private prisons. And it's like, that doesn't address the much larger issue of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. You know, I mean, think of the fact that most of the people who are incarcerated are not incarcerated in private prisons, but they are still, it's still a multi, I think multi-billion, I don't want to get that wrong, but I think it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

and people who are incarcerated are charged for every little thing. I mean, if you think about like Securus being one of the worst offenders, like people who are being charged. That's the phone company? Yeah. If you've ever listened to a jail call, I've listened to so many hundreds of hours of jail calls, but it's like you have one minute remaining.

I mean, they charge people an exorbitant amount to just keep in touch with their family members. And this isn't in private prisons, but it's still part of the prison industrial complex and still part of, you know, thinking about all the people that we incarcerate and profit off of. I mean, I think like one of the big things that came out like during the whole COVID crisis was like New York state prisoners were being used to produce hand sanitizer. And it was, you know, you can't even possess hand sanitizer while you're in prison because it contains alcohol. So it's

contraband. And yet they're being used to, they're being profited off of. So it's just like one of the things that that you know i think private prisons listen by emphasizing private prisons people are saying like oh well non-private prisons are okay and really like you know state and federally owned prisons are downplayed um or implicitly i guess seen as a more ethical form of imprisonment but that's just it's just not it's not true it's like i think it's around eight percent of our um of our you know the massive number of people that we incarcerate in this country are in privately owned prisons um but is it fair to say federal and state-owned prisons exploit prisoner labor like as well yeah is it fair to say that uh in a private prison

there's a corporation or you know private group of individuals that are profiting but in a non-private prison it's just the state or federal government profiting like is the business model the same uh and it's just who's collecting the check kind of thing or is it something different well so even in state-run facilities people are still working for private industries and there are still private industries that are profiting off of them even in but like does the state like so take like rikers island right which uh my understanding is it's not a private prison. Is there a revenue, like, is there a profit being driven at Rikers that then whether the local state or federal government is taking in? Sure. So they are often produced, like, you

know, places that produce goods, for example, it's for the benefit of government agencies, but even then their labor is still hyper exploited to the benefit of the agency's bottom lines. Like It's really, you know, even if the profit is like for the production of the actual goods is for the government agency, it's still really, you know, like if the problem is profit, then institutions that are unjustly benefiting from the labor of people who are incarcerated, like that means that fighting private prisons is really only the beginning. Got it. That makes sense. Before I go into the kind of rapid fire questions to wrap this up, what's your like 30 second pitch to people? Like, why can you do the job of the district attorney better than anyone else that potentially wants to do that job? um you know i mean i think that it's really it what it really comes down to is that i am someone who has worked as a public defender for my entire career i've represented over 3 000 people charged with crimes i have gone up against the manhattan da's office against a criminal punishment bureaucracy that's cruel and unjust and i'm the only public defender running i never aspired to

be a prosecutor. I've never worked as one, but I know that we can do better. I know what we need to change and I know how to change it. And after a decade in the criminal courthouse, I'm ready to get in there to be unapologetic and fearless in making those changes and, you know, making New York a fairer and more just and safer place for everyone as your next Manhattan district attorney. It's a pretty good pitch. I asked the same two questions to everybody and then you'll get to ask me one to uh trap it up after i've badgered you with questions for two hours uh the first one is what's the most important book that you've ever read oh that's such a good one oh man i don't i don't have like an easy answer let me think for like one minute

the most important book you can say a couple if if you can't decide on just one oh my gosh let me like look at my my bookshelf oh man what are the ones that are coming to mind um you know i'm thinking about i'm thinking about like both you know i'm thinking about fiction and non-fiction um because i think like i'm someone who loves god i go back and forth like i try to read um i try to read both um and let me see i'm looking through my kindle now um god i'm just trying to think so like one of the like most heart-wrenching best fiction books i've read recently was called a little life okay have you

read it i have not oh my god it's just i mean it's just like absolutely heart-wrenchingly devastating and it is you know about about human beings and about lives and you know you you see the people in the in the novel and you kind of recognize that everyone is dealing with their own their own stuff their own struggles and you never know from the outside looking in because it goes from different people's perspectives what someone is facing and it just I think requires you to have like a great deal of empathy when you when you think about it when you read it and you you really like dive into the to the humanity in in different people and even if from the outside looking in you think oh this person's being whatever this person's

doing whatever and you judge them based on their words or their actions you know and then you see it from their perspective. Like that, I think, I don't know, it really, it really tugs at the heartstrings. It's a book that I read that like, I have probably not stopped thinking about since I read it. Wow. That's a great suggestion. You had another one? I do. I think that in a similar vein, because I guess this, this all kind of ties in. And the reason why I think both of these books are so important is probably because of what they do for the reader. And I think that the other one I'll say is called New Jack, Guarding Sing Sing. And it's a nonfiction book written by this guy who's a journalist. He's a reporter. And he always wanted to report on our prison system here in New

York. And every time he was allowed to go into any part of the prison, they would clear out everyone who was there. They would show him this sanitized post. They'd walk him in. They'd be like, okay, you're done. Out you go. And he never was able to report on it. And he's like, so I realized the only way I would get to report on it is by being on the inside. So I could either get arrested for a felony and sentenced, or I could become a correction officer. And so he became a correction officer at Sing Sing, which is one of our most notorious prisons in upstate New York, for a year. And he writes about, well, he intersperses the history of the prison itself with his experience as a guard. And he'd gone through the entire training and took the correction

officer test. And the way he writes about it is so important, I think, because he says some of the guards he worked alongside were monsters. They were sadists, and they were incredibly punitive, and they were really awful to all the human beings who were incarcerated there. And some of them were just decent people who were just waking up every day and trying to get a paycheck and trying to provide for their family and a stable job. And he said some of the people who were incarcerated were really, really dangerous, potentially dangerous people who'd committed very serious crimes and some were mentally ill and he saw the way in which they were impacted by solitary confinement or other horrible ways in which we, you know, punitively

segregate people. And some of them, he had beautiful relationships with like one guy who loved to read and write poetry and he would bring him poetry books and the two of them would sit and talk about poetry. And so like basically how he shows that all human beings, like there's no, like things aren't black and white and we can't view people as we can't other people and just say oh these people are criminals these people are and and therefore we can write them all off and it just kind of humanizes everyone in the process and i think like does a really beautiful job of that so those are the two books that come to mind right now that's great suggestion uh second question is more fun uh aliens are you a believer

or a non-believer? I think there are probably other life forms out there. I don't think that I'm so closed-minded as to think that we are it, but I don't spend much time thinking about aliens, admittedly. So I have to ask you only because it recently came up. I personally believe that there's other stuff out there. Who knows if we'll come in contact with them. But given that you have a legal background and spend all day thinking about the law. Recently, there were some people up in arms because Elon Musk was asked about, hey, if you actually get to Mars, what are you going to do about the law? And he basically was like, well, we're going to come up with our own laws. Like, of course, like we're the settlers. And people were freaking out and they were saying

about international law and, you know, kind of, you can imagine very quickly people don't like the fact that Elon Musk coming up with the laws of another planet. And so I now have spent way too many hours thinking about like, if you could design a whole new planet set of laws, like what would you change? I won't ask you to say that, but it's fascinating to think about, right? Because literally, I don't know if we do it in his lifetime, but like somebody is going to be the first person to get to Mars. And does that mean the United States laws become law? Does that mean there's new mars laws i have no clue but i don't either that's something that hadn't really crossed my mind until you just brought it up so it'll definitely be a a new a new place i don't think

it crossed a lot of people's mind until elon said something about it and uh you know it's hard to tell if he's serious or it's just a marketing ploy but uh but but uh he definitely got people talking about it so that was a good one um all right you could ask me one question to uh finish this up. What, uh, what one question do you have for me? Oh my gosh. Um, that's a tough question too, but let me think. Um, all right, I've got one. All right. It's personal. Is that okay? Of course. Um, when was the last time you cried and why? Ooh, last time I cried. That's a great question uh the last time i like full-on cried like full-on cry had to be when i was young i was probably like a teenager

trying to think like i have memories of crying but like stupid stuff happened like i don't know Like my, I got mad at my parents and I was like 15 or 14, you know, like went in my room and cried like a little baby. Um, like I have that in terms of like got teary eyed, uh, my wife will appreciate this story, which is, uh, we were, um, the New York city marathon, uh, comes down, I think second half or goes up second half. And this is maybe two or three years ago. And we're standing out there. And it's just kind of a cool thing. You see people running by whatever. And she tells me, oh, did you ever hear the story about the Texas dad? And I was like, there's a lot of dads

in Texas. Like, what do you mean? And she goes, no, one year for, I think it was the Boston Marathon. A guy who was a pretty athletic runner, you know, obviously qualified for the Boston Marathon was sitting at home. And before the marathon, his daughters said, hey, dad, we're going to see you on TV today. And he said, I promise you, you'll see me on TV today. And he's going to the thing and he's basically like, why the hell am I promising my daughters who are old enough to know that if they don't see me on TV, they're going to basically yell at me. He goes, how the hell am I going to guarantee that this happens? So he gets it in his mind that the only way to uh get on television is to lead the boston marathon and so he's in the first cohort which

basically means uh you know there's all the like hardcore professional marathoners and they're kind of joined by people who are fast but not quite as fast as them and so the way that she's telling me the story she's like this guy comes out of the block and uh basically just full-on sprints as fast as he possibly can at a pace that is impossible to keep up for any real distance but he gets out in front and so he's on television and she's telling me this and uh i don't know why like we don't have kids whatever you know like whatever we're staying outside and she looks at me she goes are you crying i was like no it's windy like i don't know there's like wind in my eye or whatever and so like for whatever reason i i literally can't like when you asked me when i

cried like i literally was probably when i was a teenager like i just am not super emotional you people pass away, just not. But for whatever reason, that one story, I remember thinking like, that's pretty cool. And so my next question to her was like, well, what happened to the guy? She's like, well, he kind of struggled the rest of the race because he was so tired. Yeah, of course. I cried at the marathon. I always cry at the marathon. I like to see people running. I don't know. It makes me, but I cried at everything. So if you cried watching a marathon, I'll tell you one more story before I let you go, which is uh, we went, um, I'm not a runner, but, uh, my, my girlfriend at the time was now my wife

says, uh, Hey, we should go do a marathon. And I'm like, I'm good. Like I, she, you know, she was talking about the New York city method. I was like, I've seen Manhattan. I don't need to like run around. Like I can just, you know, whatever. And she's like, okay. Comes back to me a couple of weeks later. She's like, I have a great idea. Why don't we go run the original marathon in Greece? Cool. And I was like, okay, like that's interesting. Uh, and you know, in hindsight she was playing on my egotistical uh desire to want every time somebody told me oh i ran a marathon me say oh but she didn't run the original so it doesn't count right uh and so we go uh fly away to greece we're running a marathon and uh all of a sudden i

look over and she's crying while we're running she's crying i ran a marathon i cried i fully cried why did you cry because it was just hard and painful and stuff no i they were they were joy tier. It was like something, there was something like really special about finishing a marathon. I'm like, like, I'd like have this huge smile and I'm crying. So you did it because you finished the marathon and it was exciting and all this stuff. She was crying because she saw somebody run up to an old lady and give them a hug. And I was like, how you were not focused on running. And like, I'm like suffering. I'm like walking at every water station. I'm like, this sucks. I have not enjoyed a single second of this whatsoever. And she's like running around,

you know just look at i was like we are living in two different worlds right now so and i had my name on my on my shirt and like people would be like go eliza and i'd be like oh my god like i it's like yeah you my wife would be like sister i feel like she would get me absolutely all right where can we send people to find you on the internet uh find out more about the campaign and learn more about uh just criminal justice reform in general where you want to send them Uh, they can check our website out at Eliza Orleans.com. That's E L I Z A O R L I N S.com. I'm at Eliza Orleans on Twitter, E Orleans on Instagram. Um, very active on social media. So people can, my DMS are open, you know, any questions, happy to happy to field them.

Awesome. Well, listen, thank you so much. You've been incredibly gracious with your time. I think we're going on two hours here. So, uh, hopefully people learned a ton from this. Uh, it goes without saying that we need to change a lot of things. And hopefully this just highlighted some of those issues for people, but we'll have to do it again in the future. This was so much fun. Thanks for having me.