WEBVTT

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One summer afternoon in 2013,

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DC police detained, questioned
and searched a man

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who appeared suspicious
and potentially dangerous.

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This wasn't what I was wearing
the day of the detention, to be fair,

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but I have a picture of that as well.

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I know it's very frightening --
try to remain calm.

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(Laughter)

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At this time, I was interning

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at the Public Defender Service
in Washington DC,

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and I was visiting
a police station for work.

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I was on my way out,

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and before I could make it to my car,

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two police cars pulled up
to block my exit,

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and an officer approached me from behind.

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He told me to stop, take my backpack off

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and put my hands on the police car
parked next to us.

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About a dozen officers
then gathered near us.

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All of them had handguns,

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some had assault rifles.

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They rifled through my backpack.

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They patted me down.

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They took pictures of me
spread on the police car,

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and they laughed.

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And as all this was happening --

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as I was on the police car trying
to ignore the shaking in my legs,

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trying to think clearly
about what I should do --

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something stuck out to me as odd.

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When I look at myself in this photo,

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if I were to describe myself,

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I think I'd say something like,

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"19-year-old Indian male,
bright T-shirt, wearing glasses."

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But they weren't including
any of these details.

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Into their police radios
as they described me,

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they kept saying, "Middle Eastern
male with a backpack.

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Middle Eastern male with a backpack."

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And this description carried on
into their police reports.

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I never expected to be described
by my own government in these terms:

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"lurking,"

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"nefarious,"

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"terrorist."

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And the detention dragged on like this.

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They sent dogs trained to smell explosives
to sweep the area I'd been in.

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They called the federal government
to see if I was on any watch lists.

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They sent a couple of detectives
to cross-examine me on why,

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if I claimed I had nothing to hide,

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I wouldn't consent to a search of my car.

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And I could see
they weren't happy with me,

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but I felt I had no way of knowing
what they'd want to do next.

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At one point, the officer
who patted me down

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scanned the side of the police station
to see where the security camera was

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to see how much of this
was being recorded.

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And when he did that,

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it really sank in how completely
I was at their mercy.

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I think we're all normalized
from a young age

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to the idea of police officers
and arrests and handcuffs,

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so it's easy to forget how demeaning
and coercive a thing it is

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to seize control over
another person's body.

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I know it sounds like
the point of my story

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is how badly treated I was
because of my race --

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and yes, I don't think I would've been
detained if I were white.

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But actually, what I have in mind
today is something else.

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What I have in mind is how
much worse things might've been

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if I weren't affluent.

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I mean, they thought I might be trying
to plant an explosive,

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and they investigated that possibility
for an hour and a half,

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but I was never put in handcuffs,

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I was never taken to a jail cell.

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I think if I were from one of Washington
DC's poor communities of color,

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and they thought I was
endangering officers' lives,

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things might've ended differently.

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And in fact, in our system, I think
it's better to be an affluent person

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suspected of trying
to blow up a police station

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than it is to be a poor person

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who's suspected of much,
much less than this.

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I want to give you an example
from my current work.

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Right now, I'm working
at a civil rights organization in DC,

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called Equal Justice Under Law.

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Let me start by asking you all a question.

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How many of you have ever gotten
a parking ticket in your life?

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Raise your hand.

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Yeah. So have I.

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And when I had to pay it,

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it felt annoying and it felt bad,

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but I paid it and I moved on.

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I'm guessing most of you
have paid your tickets as well.

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But what would happen if you
couldn't afford the amount on the ticket

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and your family doesn't have
the money either, what happens then?

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Well, one thing that's not supposed
to happen under the law is,

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you're not supposed to be
arrested and jailed

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simply because you can't afford to pay.

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That's illegal under federal law.

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But that's what local governments
across the country are doing

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to people who are poor.

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And so many of our lawsuits
at Equal Justice Under Law

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target these modern-day debtors' prisons.

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One of our cases is against
Ferguson, Missouri.

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And I know when I say Ferguson,

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many of you will think of police violence.

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But today I want to talk
about a different aspect

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of the relationship between
their police force and their citizens.

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Ferguson was issuing an average
of over two arrest warrants,

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per person, per year,

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mostly for unpaid debt to the courts.

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When I imagine what that would feel like
if, every time I left my house,

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there was a chance a police officer
would run my license plate,

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see a warrant for unpaid debt,

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seize my body they way the did in DC

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and then take me to a jail cell,

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I feel a little sick.

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I've met many of the people in Ferguson
who have experienced this,

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and I've heard some of their stories.

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In Ferguson's jail,

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in each small cell,
there's a bunk bed and a toilet,

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but they'd pack four people
into each cell.

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So there'd be two people on the bunks
and two people on the floor,

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one with nowhere to go except
right next to the filthy toilet,

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which was never cleaned.

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In fact, the whole cell was never cleaned,

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so the floor and the walls were lined
with blood and mucus.

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No water to drink,

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except coming out of a spigot
connected to the toilet.

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The water looked and tasted dirty,

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there was never enough food,

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never any showers,

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women menstruating
without any hygiene products,

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no medical attention whatsoever.

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When I asked a woman
about medical attention,

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she laughed, and she said, "Oh, no, no.

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The only attention you get
from the guards in there is sexual."

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So, they'd take the debtors
to this place and they'd say,

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"We're not letting you leave
until you make a payment on your debt."

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And if you could -- if you
could call a family member

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who could somehow come up with some money,

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then maybe you were out.

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If it was enough money, you were out.

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But if it wasn't, you'd stay there
for days or weeks,

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and every day the guards
would come down to the cells

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and haggle with the debtors
about the price of release that day.

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You'd stay until, at some point,
the jail would be booked to capacity,

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and they'd want to book someone new in.

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And at that point, they'd think,

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"OK, it's unlikely this person
can come up with the money,

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it's more likely this new person will."

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You're out, they're in,
and the machine kept moving like that.

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I met a man who,

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nine years ago, was arrested
for panhandling in a Walgreens.

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He couldn't afford his fines
and his court fees from that case.

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When he was young
he survived a house fire,

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only because he jumped out
of the third-story window to escape.

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But that fall left him
with damage to his brain

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and several parts of this body,
including his leg.

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So he can't work,

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and he relies on social security
payments to survive.

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When I met him in his apartment,

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he had nothing of value there --
not even food in his fridge.

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He's chronically hungry.

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He had nothing of value in his apartment
except a small piece of cardboard

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on which he'd written
the names of his children.

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He cherished this a lot.
He was happy to show it to me.

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But he can't pay his fines and fees
because he has nothing to give.

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In the last nine years,
he's been arrested 13 times,

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and jailed for a total of 130 days
on that panhandling case.

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One of those stretches lasted 45 days.

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Just imagine spending from right now
until sometime in June

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in the place that I described to you
a few moments ago.

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He told me about all the suicide attempts
he's seen in Ferguson's jail;

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about the time a man found
a way to hang himself

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out of reach of the other inmates,

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so all they could do
was yell and yell and yell,

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trying to get the guards' attention

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so they could come down and cut him down.

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And he told me that it took the guards
over five minutes to respond,

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and when they came,
the man was unconscious.

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So they called the paramedics
and the paramedics went to the cell.

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They said, "He'll be OK,"

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so they just left him there on the floor.

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I heard many stories like this
and they shouldn't have surprised me,

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because suicide is the single leading
cause of death in our local jails.

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This is related to the lack
of mental health care in our jails.

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I met a woman, single mother of three,
making seven dollars an hour.

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She relies on food stamps
to feed herself and her children.

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About a decade ago,

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she got a couple of traffic tickets
and a minor theft charge,

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and she can't afford her fines
and fees on those cases.

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Since then, she's been jailed
about 10 times on those cases,

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but she has schizophrenia
and bipolar disorder,

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and she needs medication every day.

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She doesn't have access
to those medications in Ferguson's jail,

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because no one has access
to their medications.

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She told me about what it was like
to spend two weeks in a cage,

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hallucinating people and shadows
and hearing voices,

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begging for the medication
that would make it all stop,

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only to be ignored.

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And this isn't anomalous, either:

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thirty percent of women in our local jails
have serious mental health needs

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just like hers,

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but only one in six receives
any mental health care while in jail.

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And so, I heard all these stories
about this grotesque dungeon

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that Ferguson was operating
for its debtors,

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and when it came time
for me to actually see it

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and to go visit Ferguson's jail,

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I'm not sure what I was expecting to see,

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but I wasn't expecting this.

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It's an ordinary government building.

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It could be a post office or a school.

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It reminded me that these illegal
extortion schemes

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aren't being run somewhere in the shadows,

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they're being run out in the open
by our public officials.

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They're a matter of public policy.

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And this reminded me
that poverty jailing in general,

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even outside the debtors' prison context,

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plays a very visible and central role
in our justice system.

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What I have in mind is our policy of bail.

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In our system, whether
you're detained or free,

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pending trial is not a matter
of how dangerous you are

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or how much of a flight risk you pose.

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It's a matter of whether you can afford
to post your bail amount.

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So Bill Cosby, whose bail
was set at a million dollars,

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immediately writes the check,
and doesn't spend a second in a jail cell.

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But Sandra Bland, who died in jail,

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was only there because her family
was unable to come up with 500 dollars.

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In fact, there are half a million
Sandra Blands across the country --

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500,000 people who are in jail right now,

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only because they can't afford
their bail amount.

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We're told that our jails
are places for criminals,

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but statistically that's not the case:

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three out of every five people
in jail right now are there pretrial.

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They haven't been convicted of any crime;

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they haven't pled guilty to any offense.

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Right here in San Francisco,

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85 percent of the inmates
in our jail in San Francisco

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are pretrial detainees.

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This means San Francisco is spending
something like 80 million dollars

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every year

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to fund pretrial detention.

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Many of these people who are in jail
only because they can't post bail

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are facing allegations so minor

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that the amount of time it would take
for them to sit waiting for trial

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is longer than the sentence
they would receive if convicted,

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which means they're guaranteed
to get out faster

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if they just plead guilty.

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So now the choice is:

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Should I stay here in this horrible place,

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away from my family and my dependents,

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almost guaranteed to lose my job,

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and then fight the charges?

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Or should I just plead guilty to whatever
the prosecutor wants and get out?

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And at this point, they're pretrial
detainees, not criminals.

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But once they take that plea deal,
we'll call them criminals,

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even though an affluent person
would never have been in this situation,

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because an affluent person
would have simply been bailed out.

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At this point you might be wondering,

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"This guy's in the inspiration section,
what is he doing --

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(Laughter)

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"This is extremely depressing.
I want my money back."

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(Laughter)

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But in actuality,

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I find talking about jailing much less
depressing than the alternative,

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because I think if we don't talk
about these issues

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and collectively change
how we think about jailing,

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at the end of all of our lives,

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we'll still have jails full of poor people
who don't belong there.

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That really is depressing to me.

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But what's exciting to me is the thought
that these stories can move us

00:11:48.933 --> 00:11:50.976
to think about jailing in different terms.

00:11:51.000 --> 00:11:54.371
Not in sterile policy terms
like "mass incarceration,"

00:11:54.395 --> 00:11:56.381
or "sentencing of nonviolent offenders,"

00:11:56.405 --> 00:11:57.571
but in human terms.

00:11:57.595 --> 00:12:02.180
When we put a human being in a cage
for days or weeks or months

00:12:02.204 --> 00:12:03.648
or even years,

00:12:03.672 --> 00:12:06.021
what are we doing
to that person's mind and body?

00:12:06.045 --> 00:12:08.803
Under what conditions
are we really willing to do that?

00:12:09.329 --> 00:12:12.135
And so if starting with a few
hundred of us in this room,

00:12:12.159 --> 00:12:15.203
we can commit to thinking about
jailing in this different light,

00:12:15.227 --> 00:12:18.707
then we can undo that normalization
I was referring to earlier.

00:12:18.731 --> 00:12:21.769
If I leave you with anything today,
I hope it's with the thought

00:12:21.793 --> 00:12:24.225
that if we want anything
to fundamentally change --

00:12:24.249 --> 00:12:27.529
not just to reform our policies
on bail and fines and fees --

00:12:27.553 --> 00:12:30.606
but also to make sure that whatever
new policies replace those

00:12:30.630 --> 00:12:33.681
don't punish the poor and the marginalized
in their own new way.

00:12:33.705 --> 00:12:35.337
If we want that kind of change,

00:12:35.361 --> 00:12:37.886
then this shift in thinking
is required of each of us.

00:12:37.910 --> 00:12:39.094
Thank you.

00:12:39.118 --> 00:12:42.788
(Applause)