TGS Live: Jeffrey Seaman, Robert J. Sampson & Ben Peterson on Crime, Community & Policing

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Our live stream broadcast mostly on Fridays at 1 p.m.

although we vary from week to week as exigencies require.

We're going to go for two hours today.

We have an exciting show plan for you.

Two part interviews on law order crime and policing in urban America and the race dimensions

of that.

Our first guest is Jeffrey Seaman.

He's Paul Levy Fellow at the law school at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author

with Paul Robinson of an article in the Fordon Urban Law Journal called Don't Black Lives

Matter and there's a subtitle.

What is it, Jeffrey?

In front of the problem of disproportionate black victimization.

Disapportionate black victimization.

It's a problem.

As it root causes, it has solutions according to Robinson and Seaman and we're going to

talk to Jeffrey about that.

Joining us at 2 p.m. this afternoon will be Robert Samson who's a very distinguished sociologist

and criminologist at Harvard University has been writing books and articles about crime

and punishment and inequality in urban America for decades and his new book is called

Mark by Time.

It reports on a longitudinal study of involvement with the criminal justice system of young people

in Chicago over an extended period of time and Rob is going to make the argument that

he's going to make.

We'll see him at 2 o'clock.

There will be a slight overlap between Jeffrey and Robert and give them a chance to talk

with each other as well but Robert will be joining us later in this hour and it will be with

us for the second hour.

So that's the setup.

We're here.

The Glenn Show team, Mark Sussman is unable to join us today but the reliable and regular

Nikita Petrov creative director of the Glenn Show and Robert Patton's school friend and

contributor to the Glenn Show are with us in the background.

I'm going to turn things over briefly to Nikita to do a little housekeeping and then we'll

start the conversation.

I'll just be very, very brief.

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So thank you for your contributions and I'll be in the chat throughout this conversation

collecting your questions or comments.

And if you have any questions, I'll bring them up in the interim between the two conversations

today.

That's all for me.

I'll hand it over to you guys.

Thanks.

All right, Jeffrey.

Tell us about this article and the genesis of its intellectual origins and how people

react into it, what you're arguing and so forth.

I give you a chance to talk about the article.

Well, thank you so much for having me on the show.

I'm a long time listener and fans, so it's great to be here.

I think this article really came about because of academia, particularly criminal justice,

academia and criminal law, academia's focus on the problem of race and crime and race and

police, the racial injustice has obviously been a bunch of stuff published on that over

the last couple of decades, often associated with wokeness and Paul Robinson, who is a very

renowned criminal law scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and myself, both had a somewhat

different perspective on this than what we were seeing with all our colleagues and peers

publishing on the topic.

Basically, we wanted to flip the narrative to say, yes, there is a racial justice problem

here, but it's not that the criminal justice system is oppressing black Americans and minorities.

It's that it's failing to protect them and to provide equal justice when serious crimes

are committed, and that's the real problem we should be focusing on.

We think that perspective is very underrepresented in academia, and this law of your article was

about putting that perspective out there, and so far, the reaction has been fairly positive.

Obviously, we've faced some pushback, but I think a lot of people recognize that we're

on to something here because we're just presenting the facts.

What are the facts?

The facts are pretty horrifying.

If you just look at the last year, which we have official numbers, in 2024, over 50 percent

of homicide victims in the U.S. were black Americans, despite the fact that blacks have

only 13 percent of the U.S. general population, and over 33 percent of the victims of violent

crimes reported to the police were black Americans.

Again, wildly disproportionate.

If you look at the statistics, the black American is nearly seven times more likely to be

murdered than a white American, 17 times more likely to suffer non-fatal firearm assault,

basically every crime category you look at, you're going to see that black Americans

are disproportionately victimized.

It's not just that they're disproportionately victimized, it's that then when you go

look at clearance rates and conviction rates, which is the rate at which the system

is actually punishing the offenders in these crimes, it's lower for crimes with black

victims.

It's about 16 points lower in terms of the homicide clearance rate, during the homicide

surge around 2020, it was about 25 points lower.

You're seeing a significant gap, both in terms of racial victimization, and then at the

rate at which these crimes are punished and the offenders are held to account.

Okay, to what do you attribute this disparity?

Well, I think there are sort of two ways to attack this problem.

One way to attack the problem is focusing on what causes crime in terms of the root causes

of crime in the black communities, predominantly black communities.

That is often associated with a particular right-leaning critique, which is, well, there

are going to be cultural problems, or a left-leaning critique of when not providing enough education

or welfare or opportunity.

I think there are probably elements of truth to both of those.

What our article is doing is saying, that's kind of the wrong perspective to look at it.

Whatever motivates the small group of criminals in a given community, the government, the criminal

justice system, has the exact same responsibility under the social contract to protect the vast

majority of innocent community members.

And regardless of what's motivating the small group of criminals, the government's failing

when it doesn't stop that crime, it doesn't punish the crime that is committed, and there's

just no way to deny that in America today, the justice system is failing to protect

predominantly black communities, and it is failing to punish serious crime.

And that's a very serious problem, regardless of race, that's for sure.

But when we do bring race into the conversation, and we have to recognize there is this massively

disparate impact on black communities when it comes to the cost of the crime and the failure

to punish serious crime.

Well, I think there is a legitimate racial justice issue here.

I'd like you to tell me a little bit more about what you think that is, because I'm not

sure I see it, I see a justice issue, I'm not sure I see a racial justice issue, there

are two parts to my concern, one of them has to do with causality.

That is, is race a material factor in causing the disparity of offending, which also creates

victimization?

The other has to do with remedy.

Is there anything racial about whatever interventions might be required in order to mitigate the

deleterious consequences of violent criminal offending?

So can you address yourself to those concerns, both on the causality side, or is there

something about blacks that is at work here, and I don't mean that in an accusatory manner?

I mean, literally, how do we get our heads around it?

Is there something about law enforcement, policing, or whatever that has an especially

racial coloration to it that needs to be taken into account here, or shouldn't we just be

talking about our urban residents and the extent to which they're subject to criminal deprivation,

and what it is that we have to do about depredation, and what it is we have to do about it?

You see my concern?

Yeah, I see the concern, and I think it's a legitimate concern, and I should absolutely

clarify that the problem of failing to punish serious crime and control serious crime,

that's a problem that transcends race.

There are high crime communities that are mostly white, or Hispanic, or Asian,

and obviously it's just as important to make sure those are secured and justice is being done

in them.

Address sort of the first part of your question, like, is there an inherent racial link here with

offending?

In the article Robinson and I, we sort of trace the historical instructional boots of this problem,

and it's quite interesting.

When you go back into the history and you get back to the Jim Crow era,

you see there was an intentional policy of under providing justice system resources to black

communities.

Again, the Jim Crow South, there was sort of a policy of, well, if the crime stays in the black

community, that's fine.

It's only when the crime sort of spills out of the black community that we're going to care about it.

What's interesting is you even see black editorialists riding columns and arguing,

we want more police protection and presence, even though we know it's going to be racist,

white police officers, we want more of that because the crime form is such an issue in our communities.

And what I think happened is that structurally this under provision of justice system resources

was never truly solved in the civil rights era.

I don't think there was any real attempt at equalizing the public safety and justice field there.

And I do think race is tied up with that in that there are a number of ideological

and political reasons why people on the left are particularly very skeptical that the idea

of the justice system could ever be a positive force to protect or help black Americans.

There's a resistance to using that lever of public policymaking.

So I do think race has to be part of the conversation because we don't see resistance

saying predominantly white communities or even Hispanic or Asian communities

for policymakers to pull that lever of additional police protection,

of additional prosecution resources.

That's just, it's a very, it's a problem that's the specific two black Americans in the sense

that policymakers are very hesitant to provide the additional protection.

Now for very different reasons it used to be was racist reasons.

Now there's a sense in which they're worried that the justice system is the enemy or hostile

to black Americans and it's somehow going to hurt the black community if we use that tool of public

policy. But I don't think we can separate it from race. We could definitely have a

completely race neutral conversation about the problem of just intercity crime and low clearance

rates. And I actually co-authored a book with Paul Robinson that sort of does just discuss

the problem of low clearance rates. And that is a problem that fans sense race.

But it's particularly acute due to I think America's racial history and the unwillingness

to see the justice system as a positive force for protecting black Americans.

Now you know as well as I do that much of the animus against the criminal justice system that

emanates from African American activists and political pundits derives from the disproportionate

hit that blacks take from incarceration and arrest and being harassed by police and so on.

Do you not credit at all that the community bears a cost as well as derives a benefit from

law enforcement and that the flip side of the disproportionate victimization that is the

disproportionate victimizing behavior sense. So much of the criminal offending is

intraracial so that if you react to the former victimization with a heavy law enforcement footprint

you're going to be imposing on the latter the victimizers. Does that not legitimate to some degree

a resistance from intellectuals and political activists to the kind of remedies that you

are proposing? That's definitely the major pushback. Obviously going along with disproportionate

black victimization there's disproportionate black offending. So if you are going to use the

criminal justice system to try to enforce the law more rigorously you are going to end up

ultimately punishing more black offenders. Where I think we would depart from the mainstream

thinking in academia is we don't see this as a bad thing for the black community and the truth is

most black Americans don't see it as a bad thing either because there is no I would say communal

interests between black victims, innocent community members and black murderers or racists or

robbers. These are not sort of the same set of interests and I think what academia does,

particularly critical theorists, is they sort of lump them into one group and view them with one lens

without realizing actually their two distinct sets of interests here and it's not going to hurt

the black community with leverage if we are enforcing the law against serious crimes. What I think

should be taken quite seriously is what some scholars have pointed as this sort of paradox of

over-policing and under-policing. There is some evidence to say that there may be over-policing

in black communities around very minor crimes like marijuana possession disorderly conduct,

that sort of thing which a lot of community members might say well these are this is an unfair

targeting in more enforcement and in an equivalent white neighborhood and we don't like that

and I think that's fair and policing should be informed by local community concerns. What you never

ever see is the residents of a high crime neighborhood saying it's unfair how much they're focusing

on solving murders or solving rapes or solving robberies like I don't like the fact they just arrested

two murderers yesterday nobody ever says that and I don't think there would be any pushback really

from the black community if you could say look here's an honest effort to solve the serious crime

problem we're going to have community informed policing on less serious crimes you don't want us to

enforce certain drug laws certain public ordinances we can have that conversation at the local level

and work something out with the community but on the crimes you do care about the really important

public safety ones we're going to go hard on enforcing the law here that doesn't mean increasing

punishments it just means increasing certainty so that if a crime is committed you are going to see

some justice done for that which right now you're not because the vast majority of serious crime

is going on punished I mean most people have no idea how bad the clearance rates are it's in these

communities less than half of murderers are being convicted and less than 10% of other serious

criminals for rapes robberies burglaries are being convicted so it's essential practical lawlessness

and that's not a good state for any community to live under I used to write for the new republic

magazine back in the in the day when it was worth writing for and I had a piece in the late 90s

called the impossible dilemma in which I observed in many African American communities the

offenders and the victims are often in the same family living in the same neighborhood maybe even

being the same people depending on what day it is and that on the one hand exactly what you said

I said which is people don't want to be victimized they want to be protected and in fact they have a

legitimate and compelling right to protection that's what the state exists to do to maintain order

and allow us to be secure in our person and our property so it's no surprise that a poll taker will

find African Americans affirming princes of law order and effective policing on the other hand

their son daughter uncle brother is being carted off to prison he's being roused on the corner by

the cops who are looking to see what he's got in his pockets etc those stories circulate within

families there's a concern even for the offender as a person within the community and when punitive

policy comes down like a ton of bricks on such people the pain is felt not only by them but by those

who are connected to them through bonds of psychic and personal affiliation what do you make of that

I mean doesn't that make a little bit more complicated the moral calculus that one needs to engage

in and confronting this problem I do think it makes it more complicated and it highlights

attention between what I think we should be doing with criminal law which is trying to punish

an accordance with an individual person's blameworthiness versus a very utilitarian approach to

criminal law where we're sort of treating this person as an object to show general deterrence and

to try to keep public order because a lot of where that confliction comes from isn't that you have

a family member who's committed murder I mean certainly people do have that and that's very sad

and I can understand why they have conflicted feelings but they're probably not going to want that

person still to be let off without any punishment or I think most of the confliction comes from is

when you have certain crimes enforced particularly drug possession drug selling which a lot of people

don't find this sort of intrinsically very immoral you hear the term victimless crime

it can have devastating societal consequences but on sort of an individual level it doesn't

feel the same as murder rate robbery burglary and a lot of people think we've been over punishing

those crimes and I think there's a good case to be made we've been doing so on a very utilitarian

ground we haven't been focusing on the individual judging their blameworthiness how much of a moral

violation have you actually committed and I think we should scale back some of those punishments

that are out of line with what the community wants I think the war on drugs some of the punitive

policies around drug possession that went along with that were a mistake and they produced a lot of

inflicted feelings as you said in the communities that have been most affected by that what I

don't think is really producing most of the conflicted feelings is enforcement around serious crimes

and I think even if you ask those people with family members who have committed serious crimes would

you prefer the justice system just step back and sort of did nothing enforce the law against

murder rate or robbery or would you like the justice system to enforce that law and try to get

some sort of nuanced calculation of the individual's blameworthiness and the punishment the

community sees is just I think the vast majority of family members would say we want that latter

state where we are going to enforce the law and try to do justice but I'm certainly not denying

the criminal law is an imperfect vehicle right now and it has some punishments that some community

members might say this seems excessive and when we can identify those instances we should work

on bringing the law back into line with the community's views. I mean intrigued by this distinction

that you draw between punishment as an instrument for social control and creating safety for people

and punishment as they just desert being mediaed out to someone who has earned the effect by their

misdee can you expand on that a little bit? Yes it's the fundamental distinction in criminal law

really but people who want to punish based on what an individual has done their moral blameworthiness

and those who want to punish based on what that punishment can do for society in terms of deterring

other offenders or incapacitating this seemingly dangerous individual. Now there's a lot of

overlap between those two because normally you can deliver a just punishment that also is going

to serve utilitarian goals like incapacitating the offender like if we put a murderer in prison

most people agree this is a just punishment it's also going to deter future murderers and it's

going to keep that murderer off the street so you can't achieve both goals. What's really difficult

is the clash comes about when you're trying to make something a crime or punish it very harshly

that our normal moral intuitions just don't see as that extremely blameworthy and that's why I think

drug criminalization is so controversial because it's the biggest area of law where there's a direct

clash between our retributive just deserts instincts and utilitarian policymaking because I don't

know about like there's some people who do sort of intrinsically feel that possessing drugs is

extremely immoral behavior that should be definitely punished but I think there's been now more

of a shift in society but we see it more as it's something that's tragic it's something that you

need help you need treatment there may be definitely a moral component there but it's just not on the

same plane as something that's arming another person's property or their bodies like violent crime

and if we are going to punish it very harshly then we're going to be relying on these utilitarian

instincts which they're just they just don't sit right with a lot of people because the moral

psychology research shows at the end of the day most ordinary people they are deontologists

they're not utilitarians they go based on their moral instincts but what seems right and just

in terms of a just desert sense and I think the law needs to go back to that in fact Paul Robinson

the co-author of this piece he actually his most important work I'd say in criminal law

is this focus on what's called empirical desert which is basically going out and surveying the

community and finding out what they think is sort of just deserts ranking between crimes is and

punishments are and using that to sort of guide policy makers I think that's the ideal because

utilitarianism as attractive as it sounds it's really not stable in the long run because it is

going to produce a bunch of discontent when the criminal law is punishing things that people don't

think should be crimes or over punishing something the most people think is only a minor violation

I get the impression reading your article that let me put this cruelly you guys blame

the woke left for the problem that you're diagnosing and I'm struck by the tension between that

position the woke lefties have got it wrong on pretrial detention the woke lefties have got it wrong

on deep policing and what you just got to be saying which is that the war on drug warriors got it

wrong by making such a big deal out of marijuana possession and the like that they

disabuse the citizenry of confidence and the legitimacy of law enforcement which has led

to political consequences that we that you and Paul Robinson decry so who's at fault here the

woke left or the woke writers there enough blame to go around I think there's enough blame to

go around I think this is a classic example of the pendulum swinging in each direction to frown

because I would say at the sort of the height of the tough on crime era things swung a bit too far

in terms of using the one utilitarian fashion now that can definitely be overstated those people

who claim that the rise in but of incarceration was purely due to the war on drugs that's just

obviously not true but even if you look at today the percentage of the prison population that's

in for any sort of drug offense is around 15 percent so most of the crime and incarceration surge

was not due to the war on drugs but I do think it's part of that legitimate concern was

prime policymakers reached for whatever tools they could to try to show voters were doing something

we're gonna try to bring down crime and that led to some extremely disproportionate punishments

you know there were the famous three strikes laws which before exceptions were added if there

was a famous story of a man in California who got life in prison because he stole a slice of

deep thought that was his you know third offense and there were extremely harsh drug laws which

you know you'd be seeing 30-year sentences or possessing a certain amount of drugs when murderers

were walking off with less and that just obviously strikes people as disproportionate and when

crime started falling in the late 90s and early 2000s I think people started paying more attention

to those sort of violations of morality the criminal law was engaging in and that fostered what

ultimately became the progressive criminal justice movement which grew out of some legitimate

concerns but then of course the pendulum swung are in the other direction and it got to the point

where instead of trying to correct certain targeted injustices it became a general sense of the

system is rotten the entire criminal justice project is wrong and racist and then you get to

extreme things like prison abolition which are you know utopian at best and sort of downright

downright contradictory to the vast majority of people's moral notions but of at worst and that's

an obvious swing in the opposite direction and so the sort of the woke left policies that we

could take in this article but of unfettered we trial release everybody gets out of jail with

our list of dangerousness massive deep prosecution doesn't matter if you're gun possessor doesn't

matter if you're a repeat robber just sort of go to a diversion program or we won't prosecute you

that's a clear example of the pendulum swinging way too far in the other direction to the point

where we're not doing justice because we're just refusing to punish crime as opposed to punishing

it too much where both of those extremes are at fault i'd say in terms of a justice lens is

they're refusing to follow the community view of what actually is a just punishment for this crime

that's where we should be trying to focus the criminal law and i would say if we look at the size

of the two problems now the under enforcement problem versus the over enforcement problem

like academia and the progressive left they're really focused on an over enforcement problem that

is very hard to detect a lot of the times for example police shootings they're super focused

on that yet when you actually look at the facts around 10 unarmed black people are killed each

year by police which that's 10 too many but it's not focusing on the 8,500 black people who are

murdered each year on the street and less than half of those murders are getting solved

but when we compare the size of the problems right now i think we need to ship the pendulum back

toward we need to take enforcement more seriously we need to actually be doing justice as the

community sees it what is the evidence i'll be devil's advocate here that let me stipulate we need

to take enforcement more seriously let me acknowledge that 10% clearance rate for criminal

funding is too low should be higher let me even stipulate that if we had more money invested in

police and if we had more punitive attitudes from the bench for the people who are hearing these

cases we'd have a higher clearance rate what's the evidence that that would lead to more

safety for the people living in these communities as opposed to simply churning with a larger number

of criminals going in and out of prison but with the baseline quality of life number of guns on

the street activity of gangs amount of violent predatory behavior card jacking murders and so forth

not being much effect yeah that's a that's a great question and it is sort of the main pushback

you hear i'd say within academia there's a lot of skepticism that policing works you often hear

that you know you can't enforce your way out of a crime problem the problem with that is we know

you can because the social science i'd say is very clear just to use a case example university

of Pennsylvania where i live they have their own police force of 121 extra members and they have

the pen police patrol zone sort of demarcates university of Pennsylvania's area from the rest

of west billy what's really interesting is demographically if you look sort of on one street which

is right inside the patrol zone versus one street right outside the patrol zone they're the same

so we would expect the exact same patterns of crime and what's interesting is we see a 50 percent

decrease in crime as soon as you go inside the pen police patrol zone those extra 121 officers

i managed to bring down crime by 50 percent and you see that repeatedly in sort of every area where

there's additional police presence you have a bunch of social science studies which show that

on average if you add one police officer to a force they're going to bring down homicides by 0.1

if you hire 10 additional police officers you're knocking off a homicide what's interesting is

those studies also find the effect is greater for homicides with black victims because there's

so much i'd say disproportional under policing of black communities we have the social science

evidence is in and if you want the most dramatic case example i'd say i'll salvador as a great

example of how you can police your way out of a crime problem i should clarify i'm not suggesting

we sort of adopt the specifics of the else salvador crime crackdown but if you look at the data

in 2019 the homicide rate in else salvador was i think the highest in the western hemisphere

it was around like 40 or 100,000 people and now when you fast forward to 2024 it was down to 1.9

and i think in 2025 it fell to 1.3 which is below Canada so now statistically it's the safest

place in the western hemisphere and what was did they have some massive anti-poverty or education

intervention no they didn't the truth is almost none of that changed what changed was there was a

massive focus on enforcement such that they arrested sort of all the violent criminals they could

find and probably arrested some people who they shouldn't have we should acknowledge that but

they brought the clearance rate for homicide up to almost 100% to the point where you killed someone

in else salvador you were probably going to be arrested for it and everybody knew that so even the

gang members who they didn't arrest decided not to commit crimes will leave the country that's a

dramatic example just a case study if you can use the tools of the criminal justice system to bring

down crime massively even if a country is still poor a community is still poor there's still all

sorts of problems in terms of other social services so what i'd say is if you think the criminal

justice system can't be utilized to bring down crime you're just ignoring with common sense and

the massive number of case studies and social science studies out there showing that it can be an

effective fuel enforcement well okay but i feel obligated to bring to your attention

the narrative that there are root causes of criminal behavior poverty is one of them

and structural racism is another of one's strike or another structural racism

redlining in the way communities organized in the labor market and the way police conduct themselves

and so on are you intentionally dismissing those root cause arguments have you given them some

consideration and decided to reject them on their merits and if so i don't hope that is the case

what what are those merits yeah i would say that looking at things in terms of root causes is

gain at things a bit backward from the perspective of appalling it because while it's absolutely

true that there are root causes that make it more likely for an individual to engage in criminality

that's for example going up in a single parent home or not completing high school or coming from

a poor background it's definitely true that there are criminogenic factors but we also know is that

most people with those criminogenic factors don't end up committing crime there's only a small

percentage of people who ultimately end up becoming serious criminals in their neighborhoods

and regardless of what's motivating them to make that choice and it may be in some sense we're

very sympathetic to them i i think that's definitely true for a lot of criminals who come from

very impoverished socially deprived backgrounds at the end of the day it's still the government's

responsibility to protect the rest of the community from the lawbreakers who are only a small

percentage and what we see with root cause interventions that are sort of focused on

providing more education more opportunity often they're very inefficient at actually reducing crime

would be great if we could just sort of cut a larger welfare check and get rid of crime but most

of the benefit of root cause interventions flow to those individuals who would never have become

criminals in the first place so if you're providing for example more educational opportunity

the people who are most likely to take advantage of that opportunity are the ones who

will least incline to be criminal in the first place and that goes for sort of every root cause

intervention so while there are maybe some good root cause interventions that policymakers should

consider to reduce crime i'm certainly not against that you show me empirically back evidence

there's a simple root cause intervention that will reduce crime i think we should definitely do

that i would say on the whole the literature suggests that they are not the most efficient way

to reduce crime the criminal justice system is still the number one lever we should be pulling

to reduce crime and i think we also need to recognize regardless of

everywhere else in society that's sort of causing people to commit crime or not commit crime

the government still has the same fundamental duty to protect people under the social contract

in the article we use the analogy of sort of a life guard and a swimming pool there are lots of

reasons why people drown swimming pool no one taught them to swim they slipped and hit their head

it's that those are all sort of the root causes but the lifeguard's not doing their job if they're not

sort of intervening to make sure nobody's drowning in the pool we don't say oh lifeguard's excuse

this person didn't learn how to swim blame their parents we say lifeguard had a job to do here

they didn't do that job i think the criminal justice system is sort of like that lifeguard

they have a duty and responsibility here regardless of any of the other root causes

they're not fulfilling that responsibility well a lot of america's communities particularly

america black communities i want to talk about the politics for a bit how are we going to get this done

let me assume i've been recruited to the to the team to do what you and Paul want to do

uh but i noticed that in chicago in oakland california and los angeles and philadelphia a lot of places

uh da's and uh uh mayors and whatnot are not doing what you want them to do

up to simply they're responding in one way or another to the electorate how you gonna get past that

if i knew for sure how to get past that i would be very happy and i'd write another article

we provide some suggestions as the sort of the way forward i think the most important change is to

try to change the conversation around this racial justice issue because i think what's preventing

the progress is a lot of democratic leaders because this problem is concentrated in cities where

the democratic party controls things and leaders in the black community are very ideologically

skeptical of using the criminal justice system to improve their community i think that you can't

really use the criminal justice system because academia and sort of the thought leaders have branded it

as racist and bad and immoral and we should be brooding it back wherever possible i think we

can change the conversation to yes there's a racial justice issue here but actually the criminal

justice system is essential to solve it because the problem is of failure to provide justice

failure to provide safety i think we can change that conversation we will get progress and i am

heartened by the fact i see signs of that happen even in philadelphia where i live

i think sherelle parker the mayor has done a pretty good job of trying to reorient

for policymaking to sort of a no-nonsense approach to public safety you pointed a new police

commissioner Kevin Bethel who's been doing a very good job they brought the clearance rate

from about 40 percent where it was and i think 2021 to up to around 80 to 90 percent today

you've seen a dramatic decline in homicides they're down about 50 percent from their peak in 2021

but i think even in the existing sort of democratic control of cities you've seen a shift toward more

no-nonsense public safety oriented policymaking with a focus on clearance rates which are focus

on providing safety and justice i think we need to accelerate that process and it has to be done

i'd say in the thought leaders in academia that but Paul and i are trying to do and it also needs

to be done at the grassroots level with people speaking out at you know their local council meetings

and in elections and primaries saying hey we care about safety and justice a lot we want more

resources devoted to that and demanding more resources because that's sort of a simple message

that i think if it's hammered at the local level it will eventually start producing results

we're talking about race here we're the black men and women supporting the line of argue that

that you and Paul are advancing wouldn't it be helpful to have them front and center with great

respect because in fact they would more credibly speak for the interest of the community then might

someone again with respect like yourself yes i think that there are plenty of black individuals

and leaders who have argued for more public safety and justice enforcement i mean you yourself are

one of those individuals i think we actually quote you in our article but i think it's important

to recognize that everyone has a role to play in this because this is not sort of an exclusively

black issue that must be addressed by the black community itself i'd say one problem people on

the right often make is they say oh this is a problem of black on black time and it's sort of

something for the black community to store out for self we need to recognize is i'd say everyone

in society has an obligation to try to make sure we are doing justice we have a social contract

with everyone black and white and right now i'd say that our policy makers at all levels

including the white ones including the black ones are generally failing to achieve that and i want

to be part of the effort to try to reverse that and to improve that justice i mean

i'm definitely not going to say that if we were having a national movement i would not make

myself a figurehead of that movement i completely agree with that but i think everyone has a

role to play in trying to solve this problem because everybody to some degree had a role in creating

it by tolerating a governmental policy system that disproportionately allowed this black victimization

to go on address fair enough and i just want to say thanks for quoting me but

you know my support in five dollars would get you a vanilla latte at Starbucks

but anyway rob has a question yeah there were questions from the chat that i want to throw

a follow-up on and this is from Martha and she says higher clearance rates for violent crime

typically require community buy-end and cooperation is non-cooperative behavior a big hurdle for

enforcement and clearance do you think you can couple this one i mean and then i have a follow-up

to that so what do you think Jeffrey yeah definitely non-cooperation that's one of a no-snitch

code it does prevent a lot of homicide prosecution it's actually one of the biggest factors that

keeps clearance rates down but i'd say a lot of that isn't so much just cultural on opposition to

the police it's a sense of witness intimidation and fear that the police are not going to be here

to protect you if you sort of cooperate it's probably not going to actually lead to anything and

even if it does there might be retaliation against you so again it is sort of a cash 22 where

additional community cooperation helps raises the clearance rate but you need to raise the clearance

rate help foster additional community cooperation so you can sort of try to start on one end or the

other the extent we can start on both that's great but there definitely ways you can raise the

clearance rate even with the existing level of community cooperation for example it's quite

interesting if you look at the data non-fatal shootings are cleared at vastly lower rates than fatal

shootings even though the case circumstances are exactly the same and if you just devote additional

resources to non-fatal shootings the equivalent you would do a homicide case it instantly sort of

increases the clearance rates the doubles them for non-fatal shooting so just adding more resources

even under the existing environment can increase the clearance rate and as you increase that

clearance rate you'll get a virtuous cycle of more cooperation as people realize oh if i speak up

it will actually lead to something being done and the person will be put away and i will be safer

and i i have a follow-up to it Jeffrey back in the 90s i was on the streets youth

anti-violence worker and i developed a motion picture called squeeze about this subject

and at our youth center when we began looking at it we thought this isn't a criminal problem we

thought it was a mental health problem and to follow up with that the opioid crisis in the 80s and

90s when i was a kid in the black neighborhood was a criminal problem and now that we see it in

white neighborhoods it seems to be a mental health problem so i would like to throw this at you

as a heterodox thinker on this subject that maybe what we see here is a crisis in mental health

and not a criminal crisis so for example in black communities we have shared an historical

trauma where our parents tell us the stories about the lynchings the thing it becomes a part of who

we are we're raised to be where we carry the trauma of our parents and our mothers and then maybe

just maybe that this is really a mental health problem what are your thoughts on that

i think that gets back sort of the root causes problem obviously mental health

and be a root cause of criminal behavior you're dealing with certain mental health

problems or substance abuse problems that makes more likely that you're going to commit crimes

and to the extent we can't address that with additional treatment that's good but i would still i

think it gets back to that point that regardless of what's motivating people to break the law

the government still has that fundamental duty to try to protect the rest of the community and to

keep people safe i would say that in terms of mental health challenges specifically i'm skeptical

that when you look at sort of a macro trends in crime or the micro ones in terms of cities

you can really explain them very well by trends in mental health i think that more important

than trends in mental health are trends in enforcement that's going on at the ground level i'm

not saying the mental health isn't important and that we shouldn't have additional treatment we

should in its own right but there's been a lot of attempts i'd say to have a mental health

first approach to crime control in a lot of cities i'd say the the current iteration of that

model hasn't been very successful would we get a more successful iteration quite possibly

and again i'm completely open to root cause interventions that are proven to work so if you

want to roll out but of a mental health focus clinic say in a high crime community to try to

we emptively address mental health problems or potential offenders i'm all for that if we have

data showing that work let me ask you a question about your question Rob because i can see how

transgenerational narratives of abuse based on race would undermine confidence in

the institutions of law enforcement amongst African-Americans i don't see how it would account for

taking a pistol and shooting somebody in the back of the head because you want it there while it

behavior which is the root of the issue here isn't it absolutely art but what we did came up

within the nineties and just to say it's success rate we had a two three hundred a year homicide rate

that currently is at 20 so i have some experience here where in Boston it worked um

to answer your question pop have you ever met and i mean when you meet a gangster a real gangster

someone who has that capability to shoot somebody in the head those people are nuts

there you can see it in their eyes you look at him you're like you're back sick crazy and it's like

i look at it and i say that's really mental health i mean and all the other stuff of course we're

scared of the police because we're raised to be of course the police are scared of black people

because plain Eastwood told them to be scared of black people and made a whole bunch of movies

called dirty heavy harry in the seventies when these cops are growing up about well it was going to shoot

them that's how we solve the problem so but again i mean pop they're you know the you know all

culture subcultures have criminal elements we know the Italians got the mob we know the irish got

to their own mob they're just more organized about it and and better about it maybe because they

don't have that one little thing that we have which is

we're scared of the police and they're scared of us

you know i was living in Boston in the 1990s you remember the ten point coalition

did you encounter revenue gene rivers uh of course Reverend Jeffrey Brown

Reverend Ray Hammond you know people would go out on the street corners and talk to these gangbangers

at one o'clock in the morning and whatnot and that's what we did i mean you know we were street

workers so we would get the kids at one o'clock in the afternoon and try to keep them occupied

till nine or ten p.m. and then drop them off back at the house and i remember driving these

vans around with these kids in the back and a lot of it was trauma like if you watch and see someone

get murdered on your block and you walk by that body with a newspaper covering waiting for the police

to get here you don't forget that and i remember that happening to me as a as a young man and it's

prom it's traumatizing so i i just want to say Jeffrey it's a mental in my heterodox opinion on

the streets having fought the actual fight for a period of time i've documented it in a motion

picture i created which i sold to Harvey Weinstein don't hold it against me but a million dollars

is a million dollars and it was Harvey Weinstein man i know i'm in i'm in the files

you know but reality is you know that's it i saw it with my own eyes and i know why the crimes

don't get solved because nobody trusts the police the police don't trust the community

and only when we got the police the reverence the teachers all on the same page look at the stats

you tell me i think i think it worked well i think that on that point of sort of getting all

the community players together that is very important for effective enforcement and even for

raising cooperation and clearance rates indeed Paul and i have written about sort of the need for

a closer relationship between policing communities through some sort of police community oversight

commission that isn't focused primarily on police abuses but is more focused on let's work

together to tailor the strategy to the community's needs such that everything from your stop and

fist policy to your drug policy to your murder investigations is being informed by the decisions

of a board that has multiple community members like the reverend like the person leading the mental

health or opioid initiatives plus you know various people from the the ordinary community and

the police chief i think decisions made and implemented in that context are the most effective

and there are definitely promising results that have shown that the closer community collaboration

you can get the more effective your policing is going to be at the end of the day i still think

there's no substitute for the fact that you do need to be solving serious crime it's great to the

extent you can reduce that even outside the justice system but if a murder is being committed which

it is sort of almost every day in america's big cities you still need someone to go out and find

who did that and punish you did that and the same goes for other types of serious crime but i'm

again i'm completely open and supportive of effective root cause interventions even before we get

the criminal justice system guys a quick note we have been Peterson's hanging out and i always

like to make a shout out to our previous guest so thanks thanks Ben but again this is a root cause

issue and if you're trying to fix it with a criminal justice model it's not going to work the white

folks figured it out because when they're trying to fix their opioid crisis they're making it

in a mental health issue so again i think that your work you know you've got to look into the

root cause stuff and i think that just applying you know using criminal justice as a way to solve

the problem is kind of have absolutely no effect because we there's no trust between either side

thoughts well i think that i mean i have two thoughts one i'd say when you say the white community

has figured it out i think a crucial difference isn't a lot of predominantly white neighborhoods

which are also generally more affluent they have a lot more to spend on policing and if you look

at the way police departments are funded it's primarily through local taxes so the richer areas

kind of forward is very well-resourced police departments they have a various sort of

eye police to crime ratio which helps keep things in check and to help keep clearance rates

eye in a way that poorer black communities simply don't have so i think we also have to remember

the differential police forces there and i also think we have to remember that

and a lot of crime is going to be committed regardless even if we have an effective mental health

intervention and we can do better at drug treatment and all that i agree but even in communities that

don't have huge drug problems often you'll still see significant crime occurring that isn't

drug-related but i think it's always a mistake to say there's sort of a magic bullet whether it's

on the root cause end or oh there's this one particular police intervention that will work but i

think the academic discourse right now it is very friendly to root cause interventions and some

of that's good because they will discover good ones but it's very hostile to criminal justice

interventions who are Paul and i are trying to do what this article is bring balance i'd say to

that discourse and say we have this really effective tool that can be used and should be used

in conjunction with other effective tools as pot mentioned i grew up in roxbury in the

in the 80s and 90s and i now live in a small small town of 4599 percent white folks

and these people are poor they are super poor they have they have tarps on their roofs they

raise chickens for food and they still sell drugs and the only difference that i can see

is that they don't kill each other and i and i think that that's probably a trauma issue where

they don't freak out so bad and get emotional they just look at it like the mafia which is its

business so i don't know i just want to throw it out there i think that your research will find

that most of america even white america is actually poor they're not let me take this opportunity to

reiterate something i said at the outset which is the racializing this discussion wants to be justified

it's not obviously the right way to go and i think that question looms behind everything that's

being said what has race got to do with it now if you think the cops are bent on messing with the

black kids on the street and abusing their authority racist cops who are off the chain that's

a racial issue or if you think culture is an important factor and the fact that there are

fathers in the home and the many of these black communities or that the gang dynamic works in a

particular way within racialized networks that would be a racial issue but it's no surprise for me

to hear from you Robert Patton Spruel not Robert three years i have three years of economic order three

names it's not surprisingly here for me that import white perhaps rural or semi rural areas that

there's a lot of mess being done and and a whole lot of other kind of chicanery going on because

after all it's not a racial issue at the end of the day thank you but i think even though

just want to get on it is it a racial issue there's a sense which would be nice if it didn't

have to be a racial issue at all but i think the discourse has been dominated in racial terms

because there is obviously disproportionate racial impact when it comes to crime and clearance

but i think that we do have to acknowledge the racial angle here because as you said

part of the poem is there is a lot of distrust between the black community and the justice system

and a lot of democratic party leaders and black leaders are very opposed to the criminal justice system

due to particular history or race relation but i think we do have to acknowledge there's a racial

component i mean you can acknowledge that and think about it but i think it's a human problem

and i think that honestly that if we're going to solve it if we want to solve

we have to take the approach that we have problems in the black community as as Glenn just stated

we have problems with single parenthood we have problems with shame where generally speaking if i

clean up my yard my neighbor will too if i paint my house my neighbor will too we have problems

in those areas but the crime that you're talking about when you're talking about murders and all

the other stuff honestly we fixed it in Boston you can use that as a model in my opinion i mean

2030 murders a year in a city of a half a million sounds to me like there's no racial problem

it's not a racial problem because we didn't approach it as a racial problem we approached it as a

root cause problem just throwing it back um we have another question let me ask something

no Rob Sampson is coming but he's not here yet you're a law scholar in a law school with aspiration for

a career in the law the Fordham Urban Law Journalism sure are very estimable institution but it

happens not to be the Harvard Law Review or whatever where is the support on the corridors of America's

law school for the general approach that you and Paul Robinson are advocating i would suspect

it's not exactly knocking the door down of which that kind of support and i want to know both why

you think that is and what you think can be done about that you're definitely right that no one's

knocking down the door i'd say to support the project there isn't a lot of support except the way

you will see the support is in the law and economics folks those who are more empirically focused on

the studies they will agree oh yes you're right actually more interventions raising the clearance

rate more police officers this does reduce crime we have the data for that so you'll get

supported from the empirical folks pretty much everybody else at a law school is going to be an

apostle to this interpretation because they are very the sort of reflexively anti criminal justice

enforcement or at least pretty skeptical of criminal justice enforcement and the reason for that

is what we identify in the article which is i think a set of ideological misconception and it

starts from very simple misunderstanding of the facts in terms of thinking that they're massive

sort of intentionally racistly caused disparities in police use of force or arrest from prison

meant to more more subtle belief that police are simply supporting this structurally racist system

that dates historically back to Jim Crow and it's all sort of just it's racist to the core because

of the way it started and i think those ideologies prevent people from seeing what's really the

obvious truth in which they can see in other context because there is a separate sort of literature

just focused on policing and criminal justice not in any racial context and that's a lot less

politicized there's a lot more i say openness to discussing crime and justice in other countries

so i think the problem with academia is everyone's thinking of it who particular ideologies

i think you are racialized ideologies and it prevents them from seeing the facts that are right

in front of them and this article is about trying to confront them with the facts to say look there's

this other angle you should be looking at it. Rob Samson is here. Hey Rob, how you doing?

Hi, Glenn, great to be here. Welcome to our society. Very distinguished professor of sociology

of criminology at Harvard University author of a book marked by time i believe is the title

forthcoming from Harvard University press argues that the cohort effects are very important and

that sometimes it's more important than the when a person is born than anything else that you could

know about them if you're going to try to forecast their interaction with the criminal justice system

and that's what i ask whether or not i correctly surmise from looking at your book. Yes,

yes, Glenn, i think you got it in a nutshell right i'm arguing basically that when we are born

makes us who we are at least in the strongest form you know what we might think of as the birth

lottery of history and in the book i go through and show how that shapes life trajectories across

a number of dimensions including arrest, mortality, gun use, gun carrying and a number of other things

so yes it's really about cohort inequality or cohort differentiation drawing an

eventable tradition in the social sciences to try to tease apart age and social change we know

that change is ever present but in a way it's kind of like the air we breathe it's there but it's

somehow at least i argue has not filtered down in terms of our conceptions our theories and even our

policies and part of the reason has to do with the way crime is studied and bit of an over

simplification but at least in the area of crime and human development there's a lot of studies

that focus on single birth cohorts but as we age time march is on and it's well known that age

history are confounded in that sort of an approach there's a lot of research on societal change

and crime rates the whole literature that was i think motivated in part by mass incarceration

but more than that i think the great crime increase of the 60s and 70s and the great crime decline

and these aggregate trends i think are very important but they tend to leave out the individual so

this is an attempt to integrate individual and historical change through i think are

pretty unique multi-coarch study that i can talk a little bit more about in terms of the design

so that's sort of overall the general argument well i have you and Jeffrey here and Jeffrey

with his colleague and mentor Paul Robinson i've argued that the racial disparity in offending

is a moral problem a racial disparity in victimization is a even bigger problem

and that more effective law enforcement is the answer to that problem and i'm wondering how you

respond if i correctly characterize Jeffrey and Paul how you'd rob would respond to that general

argument law enforcement more effective policing getting the claims rates up

keeping bad guys off the streets that's what we need to be doing in the face of the vast

disproportionate incidence of victimization by race and american cities yeah well i have thought

about race crime urban inequality for a long time and i would agree that the problem of violence

and crime has been somewhat i think under theorized or set aside in a lot of the literature

Bill Wilson i wrote an article back in 1995 toward a theory of race crime and inequality

where we're focusing heavily on the community level structures of crime basically arguing that

it wasn't anything unique to black culture or anything like that it was really more of the

structural and community level disadvantages that were disproportionately experienced

by the african american community so i would agree with that would i say that law enforcement

is the main answer i'm not sure i would agree with that i think it's one of the answers there's

a big debate you probably talked about it right in terms of under policing versus over policing

scholars come down on different sides of it my general approach over the years and i still

think it's correct for the most part is to focus more on the informal social control as a social

ties that in a sense prevent individuals from committing crime and so to me it's really more about

those kinds of social controls as opposed to formal social controls that doesn't mean that

you know i i think the police are on important i think there's a certain kind of policing

that can at least in theory interact pretty well with a community level social control

approach and that's been written about a lot so-called community policing although

it's very fuzzy in terms of what people mean but i think policing over the last uh

20 25 years setting aside um certain yeah obviously high profile killings there's been a

realization that policing needed to change and there's more of a I think integration of policing

with community initiatives that was seen here in Boston for example the 10 point coalition

community violence intervention programs so i guess what i'm arguing is there's a way to think

about the integration of the two it's just that i tend to think more about the social control side

of things that comes less from the state and more from peers and families in communities

definitely how would how would you react to that i think that it's certainly fair to approach

things from a social perspective in terms of the interpersonal norms and the community network

i actually i have a background in behavioral science and i way i see is interfacing with

clearance rates and police is if you're going to pull a policy making lever of trying to raise

clearance rates you're trying to more effectively propagate and enforce a norm against the behavior

that you're ensuring punishment for i think that when you have practical wallessness in terms of

a clearance rate for non-fatal shootings of 20 percent it's going to be very difficult to get a norm

that really binding about this behavior is absolutely unacceptable and you don't do it

it's going to be much easier to propagate that norm if the clearance rate is at 70 or 80 percent

so i see that criminal justice enforcement works along with these more informal modes of control

i sort of setting the tone for the community yeah and i think one way to think about that is

to the extent that police activity whether it be overly aggressive policing or abusive policing

or racist policing or as you're saying ignoring crimes or not solving crimes in let's say poor

or minority communities to me those are both forms of a kind of injustice right or a sense in which

people are justifiably cynical about law enforcement i think that's actually what we see in our data

and other people's data i mean actually way back now anything to do with this book but we we're

looking at sort of the legal cynicism and but also beliefs in the moral validity of law

norms about deviance and it was interesting because yes there was more cynicism about the police

among African-Americans compared to whites and even spanish or Latinos but it was driven largely by

the conditions in the neighborhood crime and this advantage and actually there was a higher

intolerance of crime and deviance in the African-American community so again i would want to see

both of these things you know going together um how do you even put me I guess the bigger question

right we could talk for hours and how do you establish a social norm right and is it

primarily something that the police can enforce or establish or is it something that

is more organic to the community yeah that's a that's a tough question one quick thing i'll say though

i think the clearance rate issue is a fascinating one it's been declining fill cook the economist

Duke i think maybe now retired um wonderful scholar um has argued that part of the

reason for the decline is that arrests are more quote high quality which is an interesting argument

and i think ties into the notion of well it may be that

i'm going to be a good aspect to it right that they're not just quote rounding up the usual

suspects that had nothing to do with with the crime and i found that a novel argument and i think

it complicates a little bit the the deterrence notion right in other words maybe not that they're

quote catching fewer people but they're the police have actually improved on a certain style that

was common you know at least over the last period that he was studying what's the evidence from

that Robbie pardon what is the evidence for Phil Cook's conclusion that the arrests are hitting

more active potential criminal offenders than used to be the case

well this is an article published in the annual review of criminology and part of the i mean

the argument at the end in terms of the quality of arrests was in part speculative i mean there's

not a clean way to actually measure that right we don't know but he basically got there through

ruling out you know alternative explanation if i recall correctly i think it's the same article

that i read one way they could help determine the quality of arrests is looking at the share that

ended up as convictions because if it's a quality arrest you probably don't have enough evidence

to show beyond a reasonable doubt and there was a higher share of arrests that led to no conviction

back in the older days when the clearance rate was higher now it's a lower share showing the arrests

higher quality i believe that yeah that's that's right um not only think about it and it's a really

interesting article blend now i'm an economist i confess and the the the religion is incentives

it's people are responsive to benefits and costs uh now if they are rational decision makers

who are choosing to commit an offense based upon their evaluation of the likely consequences of

doing so that's a good story about how to account for their behavior but if they're marked by time

if they're captive to the effects that are particular to us the civic cohort are marked by place

as Jens Ludwig would have it uh they're in a neighborhood the neighborhood has a certain ecology

that has an effect on their behavior over which they have no control then the rational model

isn't the right model and if the rational model again i just speculate as an economist isn't the

right model the deterrence model isn't the right model because deterrence is predestined on behavioral

response triggered by the incentives associated with the likelihood of punishment so uh which is it

is it that people are making decisions and can be deterred from making the wrong decisions by making

the cost high enough jeffery uh or is it that uh people are captives to the environment the lead

pain in that environment the general political attitudes to which their community is responding

in that environment and their behavior is derivative downstream from from that inheritance

which isn't that could be a question to either one of you but i'm asking jeffery

i would say that the traditional sort of becker model of i'm a deterrence obviously isn't

behaviorally science informed because people do not weigh certainty and severity the same

so you need to have a certain level of certainty to even approach deterrence and that level some

research suggests people need to proceed around uh about a third a chance that they'll be

arrested so around a 30% chance and then you start getting some significant deterrent so we do

need to keep in mind that people aren't perfect economist in the way they think about it i think

criminal behavior is very deterrent if you are able to manipulate certainty because

the people know that punishment is going to be fairly certain and fairly swift even if they're

fairly irrational they tend to avoid that behavior obviously you can change the environment to make

it less likely that they even want to pursue that behavior and that's great if you have those

interventions the answer is sort of both but we should definitely not count out the fact that you

can deter criminal behavior even by people who don't think perfectly rationally as economist might

wrap yeah so i think the mark by time and mark by place uh as uh what do i might uh put it

is a reasonable way to think about it the social control argument is that the deterrence and i

think of deterrence a bit differently um and that is again going back to what i was saying earlier

stemming less from the state and more from the kind of social bonds that do do not exist in communities

among families and friends and teachers and so forth the idea of social control theory i mean

the micro level is really about attachment and commitment involvement moral belief in the validity

of law and that we're not not committing crime because there's a cop on the corner because there

isn't a cop on the corner it's more that people um the incentives if i can use here the

but my economist had on even non-economist is that incentives are about our reputations are

ties to others that we lose and that that those kinds of social ties and bonds are more powerful

than the deterrent effect of the criminal justice system so to me i'm not ruling

out that there aren't deterrent effects of the criminal justice system i'm i'm put it on a scale

and say that at least based on a lot of at least the chronological research

but even if you think about Jens's work um you know economic research that

perceptions of the probability of getting caught and and so on and so forth and the data to me

on the relationship between let's say policing and crime is is pretty murky um even in terms

of looking at crime right so i think we we are probably better off thinking about

sanctions in terms of the more informal rather than punitive top state down so that's sort of

the general argument but it doesn't deny that deterrence works i think it tends to be relatively

specific situations um you know one example would be i mean one of the reasons for the crime decline

i think in part in recent years has to do with technology and surveillance and that's kind of a

right deterrent mechanism actually not not coming from policing but rather you know it's a

you mean the cameras everywhere right and so in a way that's a sanctioning mechanism

or a way to get caught and in fact a lot of people are getting caught that way so i i just

take a broad view of costs and benefits and how people um not assess them so much rationally

but how they're embedded in in social norms so i'm i'm a dear kiam at heart a lot of people

not going to know what that means sorry that's uh email durkheim and the durkheimian is in this

context the idea that we are you know moral beings to the extent that we are social beings

it's that's the essential argument that's that's where morality and you know pro social behavior

comes from and it's the inculcation of those norms and beliefs and supervision and attachment

that are something that's important across the life course it's important in families it's

important in neighborhoods i mean one of the most fascinating findings in a lot of the

delinquency research from Travis Hershey who wrote a classic book causes of delinquency

just back in the nineteen i think nineteen sixty nine showed that if you look at delinquency among

kids that supervision by parents just knowing where your kids are the kinds of discipline that one

uses that predicted delinquency way more than raised class anything else and so that was kind of

a more micro level study but you know you can move it up the chain in terms of families in

terms of school attachment with kids and teachers informal social control in neighborhoods that's

what my last book right american city Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect was really

focused on the collective norms or collective efficacy in neighborhoods it served as a kind of

deterrent as it were to prime and so it's just a you know a different way

independent way of thinking about social life that doesn't prioritize as does the economic

model at least some economic models i mean obviously behavior economics has made a pivot um

but you know it's less about the vectarian um state cost benefit analysis and as you

know to Jeffrey i mean a lot of research i i think it's well known that it just doesn't support

that that simple model if i could add on i think that when we're speaking about sort of

enforcing the law versus informal social control and norms this is definitely a both

and and they play into each other in Paul Robinson his theory of empirical dissert

part of his focus is you want to enforce the law because it strengthens the moral credibility of

the law with the community you think about whether community members find the law a source of moral

guidance out of what they're looking for is one does it align with their own views of morality

and two is it actually being effectively enforced or is it just sort of being disregarded because if

you see the law being disregarded a lot that is going to undermine its moral credibility and its

ability to sort of be a norm that you can then leverage the informal social control forces in

a neighborhood that's why having unjust laws that damages laws moral credibility and can

drive up primaries even beyond that one particular unjust law and i would say it also works in

reverse if you're not enforcing laws that people do support that's going to make it harder

for the informal bonds of social control sort of leverage that into a norm so i'd say they are

closely related in the way they were i would agree with that point and i would also add though that

it's the enforcement of laws fairly and justly there's a whole procedural justice literature of

course tom tyler and and so forth but i think people also care a lot about

accountability moral accountability if you will in terms of the institution and i think the

reason when there's a lot of cynicism about policing has to do not just with the way they're

enforcing law but also issues of corruption issues of how people are treated unfairly violence

you know in in the community so i think they both have to be taken into account in terms of we

can expect there to be respect and legitimacy accorded accorded to institutions if those institutions

are not in a way behaving properly and that's why i have some issues with you know a lot of the issue

a lot of the research on the decline in trust over the years i think part of that is quite understandable

given institutional and governmental dysfunction that people rationally see and therefore discount

in terms of the respect that they accord those institutions probably i wanted to give you a chance

to describe the impressive empirical found in for your book marked by time the study longitudinal study

of a thousand young people in Chicago and so on and to report a little bit about what you're

finding when you compare cohort born in 1980 to a cohort born in 1995 in terms of a similar

socioeconomic setting but very different the behavioral outcomes and what you make of that so can

you talk a little bit about the study and also about the the empirical findings that motivate you to

say or yeah and open at any time too i mean so i noted before there's this sort of separation of

research on individual life force development to pass and then sort of prime rate studies societal

levels attempt to put it together and that's really the challenge in one way i sort of present that

at least i start the book with a comparison of two kids one of whom was born basically in the mid 90s

and when we were starting this study actually in sort of the early 90s this was sort of the

hellish time in Chicago i was with the peak of murder it was an epidemic of violence

derives in mass incarceration and by all accounts including our own by the way prospectively at

the time the life path of this child that are now pseudonym look bleak right but almost as soon

as he was born it was almost like a historical turning point where i'm starting to drop the criminal

justice system began to act quite differently i'll explain that more and compared that to

child we named Andre was born in 1980 who came up through the crack cocaine epidemic as a child

early teen and the violence turned 25 which is the average age of first incarceration at the peak

of incarceration whereas darn out during 25 when and this is not well recognized the incarceration

or it had actually gone down so he was subject to in a way a lucky historical path whereas

um Andre was less graced by history now the key here though is that they were both or both

raised by a single parent on welfare both lived in the same poor neighborhood they were both black

the point being that a lot of the usual suspects demographically race class family structure

welfare were identical so it kind of poses a counterfactual question what if otherwise identical

individuals come up through these different historical times so how did we do that so in part the

book is a story of a project that i've worked on but many others have worked on for a long time

that too long i guess i was at the university of Chicago in the late um well early 90s

project started to be developed in the late 80s um and it was again a multi investigator study

in the short run let me just give you the sort of 30 second design but it's important

because what we did is to enroll a sequence of cohorts including

what we call the infant cohort is mothers that were pregnant or who had just delivered

child and then three years old six nine twelve fifteen eighteen and then they were each followed

intensive investigation again with this large research team with family interviews parental

interviews kid interviews when they were old enough assays educational tests self control you name it

and then we ended that around 2002 just ran basically ran out of money and and just thank me too much

effort and we resurrected i resurrected the project with um a demographer sociologist UCLA

Rob Mare in 2012 and then we did another follow up in 2021 and then matched to criminal history

records to bloodled levels of lead in the children the census data the neighborhood data so

in a nutshell we have then a zero cohort to older cohorts each followed through the same period of time

but what that means then is that each or came of age in a different historical moment

and i think there's you know quickly a few findings you want to know about glad i mean one i think

is just interesting what a few differences a year you know a few years can make right because some

of these kids were only born about ten years apart found arrest trajectories and by the way one of

the fundamental findings and all of criminology is the so-called invariant age crime curve or age

arrest curve where you know shoots up in adolescence peaks around 18 to 20 and then declines that

is absolutely true weren't true in our data today it would be wrong but the key is that these

trajectories are massively different for example the older cohort was arrested at about twice the

rate of a cohort just ten years later but that's not due to the usual suspects because there's

theories out there that well these are due to you know differential demography different racial

composition immigrant composition which is reshaping the city and the nation family structure parental

arrest in fact we showed these cohorts did differ in early life exposures but they don't explain

that change in other words it's kind of a variant on some of my earlier work in terms of the life

course when you think about trajectories that yes early risk factors matter but in this case the

perhaps biggest risk factor was the social change in conditions that were emerging when they were

adolescence and becoming young adulthood this is true um for arrests it's true for gun use gun

caring looked at mortality so it behavior and criminal justice and more over surprising findings

I think in terms of just how much the change differentially affected important social groups such as

those in disadvantage the improvements or the declines in arrest benefited the poor the most

in African-Americans the most so for example something like 60% of African-Americans of the

older cohort were arrested compared to only something like 22% of the younger cohort conditional on all

all other factors that's it quite a change similarly the disadvantage gap narrow that's a

positive story that when you couple it with the decline in incarceration rates and the decline

in racial disparity I think is important and works against certain theories that tend to assume sort

of an inevitable decline or social decline particularly when it comes to the crime and race the

other thing though and this is where I think the advantage of a developmental study like this

not just based on administrative records but we were able to measure things like

the self-control or the impulsiveness of the child which is a major construct in the

criminological but psychological and even the I think economics literature although it's not quite

perhaps called that maybe fast in king or something like that right people are quick on the draw

impulsive what we found is that and I'm not arguing against the idea that self-control matters

because in our data in each cohort high self-control kids had lower arrest rates than low self-control

kids again in its sense validating the data but I'm just asking us to look at things differently

through the lands of social and historical change and when you do that what we saw was the

high self-control kids of the older cohort at the same arrest rates as the low self-control kids

of the younger cohort which means that in its sense self-control isn't sort of the protective

factor it wasn't a sense in which good character if you will if you want to think about those who

equate you know a kind of non-impulsive even a more planning aspect to personality development

couldn't save in a sense the unlucky cohort so that's a way in which

yes the individual or what we might think is the most interior of our characteristics matter

that the manifestations the meaning and in this case the trajectories that those kids follow

in the future are very different and I think that has bearing on how we think about

so development how notions that came out of a certain time in history of things like

super predators and chronic offenders and these of low self-control bad character individuals

was quite misleading and is still maybe we can talk about that in the future still

shaping how we think about crime policy and many respects because we're sort of have a cognitive

bias about the past in that respect and the book goes on then to to look at the mechanisms

of social change at the macro level in terms of community institutions policing and I

basically argue that about 50% of the great declines that we saw were due to

policing changes for example the collapse of the drug war clients in public order arrests which

are so but surprising given that this is happening earlier I think then we might have anticipated

given that mass incarceration or the rise in incarceration was still going out but we were seeing

a decline in arrests and it continues and I would argue that it is not just that in fact if

you look at other literature the decline in problem behaviors across the board in terms of

drinking and I don't know what kids are doing nowadays but nowadays but they're doing a lot

less of everything whether it's drug use having sex they seem to be having less problem behaviors

and that I think is an interesting story but it's partly related then going back to one of your

earlier questions we look at the data there's a clear decline in youth that are in unstructured

activities so there's more supervision collective supervision of kids it's a better policing

environment it's a better environment there's massive declines in lead exposure so there's a

real key environmental component to the book I argue that environmental policy is in park crime

policy because that lead exposure particularly in kids affects cognition and affects behavior in

school in in turn behavior it also affects impulsiveness so it tries to tie together the individual

even biological but when is the biological social well these cohorts

entered changing you know changing social worlds in many different respects and then I play out

the implications of it across multiple dimensions one I think I'll just mention if I have

the chance and that's prediction which is everywhere in society algorithms are everywhere

and criminal history of course is huge it's used to in every stage pretty much

of the criminal justice system it's used tennis screening employment even check whether

perspective marriage partner has a criminal history I found this out weirdly looking at different

websites looking at how pervasive the use of criminal histories are but the problem from my

perspective is that the criminal history has history baked into it so it has what we call cohort

bias and when we do prediction models and train using the standards of the day prediction of future

arrest on the older cohort using risk assessment tools and then we apply them to the younger cohort

we see about anywhere from a 50 to 90 almost 90% over prediction in other words lots of false positives

importantly this holds within all racial groups so there's a lot of discussion about racial bias

in risk assessment this is an independent pathway through which social and historical changes

is shaping prediction errors and that has a pretty profound let me make sure I'm understanding

this this last point sounds important so retrial detention maybe the decision is based in part on

a prediction of the likelihood of re-offending if not detained or sentencing maybe the discretion

is deployed more punitively in the case where the offender is predicted to to reoffend is is that

it and the idea is that these cohort effects lead to an overstatement since they're trained on

historical data lead to an over prediction if the younger cohorts are much less likely to be

arrested or to offend in the future if that's not taken into account and like getting this yes

you're getting right because it's bail it's you know many aspects of the criminal justice system

and criminal history is sort of a even going back to earlier part of the 20th century that the

emphasis on a prediction was very you know sort of central to the discipline so this has

historically been the case but I think the what's been somewhat missed is this sort of yeah

cohort bias now you could say well that's because just the crime rates are changing and maybe we

can tweak the tool but the other thing that's happened and is shown in the book is that the

covariant structure well let me let me say it more simply the relationship between the predictors

and the outcome those are changing over time it links back to what I was saying earlier the

predictive power of race the predictive power of poverty relationship between family structure

and crime is changing so when you have that kind of changing predicting predictive power that

that also makes it very difficult so it's it's something that I think needs to be taken into account

and I talk about it in terms of policy I mean there's some simple things you can do like

update the system. New York City went about 20 years without updating the criminal record system

you can imagine what less resource apartments are like but I think it takes more than a tweak

in the algorithm I mean the radical implication of the book is we just do away with prediction

altogether now I don't hold fast and confirm to that but you know if you want at least think about

some of the possibilities that that would be one but I think there are some pragmatic

things and I'm not nihilistic and I offer some tools for going forward with that.

I want to hear about that but I also don't want to lose the opportunity to hear from Ben Peterson who

was on the screen a moment ago Ben is a political scientist at Abilene Christian University in

Texas and he was my guest on the show last week talking about governing the social commons and he's

been listening to this conversation and I wanted to give him an opportunity to contribute

by asking Rob the question or by making an observation of his own.

Well thank you very much Glenn and Robert it's really great to get a chance to talk with you.

I came across your work as I was working on the book we were talking about last week so I'm

delighted to get to kind of on the impromptu hop in. Yes a couple of questions and thoughts this

is going back to the earlier conversation you were having Dr. Samson with Mr. Seaman and you know

I'm an incredible I'm incredibly high sympathy with the ideas you brought up about sort of

shifting our reliance on to informal social control social bonds the reputation

you know governing the social commons through rep posting reputation costs and also in a positive

way and all these kinds of things I suppose I kind of have two questions for you one is and you've

been talking some about this so but one is what happens when in situations when those social bonds

the strengths of the you know underlying social infrastructure as weakened to such a degree

that it's not a reliable you know source of informal social control anymore you know what I

suppose that's one one big question that we're all trying to try to wrestle with.

Secondly I wonder if you might talk a little bit about I know you've worked a lot about on

the concept of collective efficacy which is slightly different than informal social control although

it's related it seems to me it's something like activating the potential informal social control

that exists in networks between people and so I suppose those are kind of the related questions I

have for you of how to think about these issues. Yeah thank you I mean those are great

questions um fundamental that uh I think we need to figure out so I mean overall I would say

that when the informal social controls fail I mean yes we need protection we need the state

we need the police I'm not I'm not an abolitionist I think it's more the balance and how to think

about really a theory of crime again the theory of crime that I adhere to starts with these more

institutional based and social control based institutions again school family and so forth

it's not that the police are important or are needed it's just that the primary sources

of social control I think are fundamental but of course we do need the police and I that's

why I mentioned earlier and I think more needs to be thought about how the police but also frankly

other institutions in the criminal justice system so for example it hope to the other end I mean

we have community policing which is again a fuzzy term but there have been some I think

really interesting and novel approaches to where the police really are on the ground and the

community organizations and people from the community again in Boston here every week there's

meetings between the police and community leaders ministers right that have the year of the

community that have the moral authority in many cases but they're working with the police and

they're able to tell the police like no you can't go and beat the hell out of these kids you have to

right um follow a certain you know kind of norm at least that's that's the theory

I think that we need more of that kind of integration and then on the other end in terms of

post prison release I mean there's the incarceration rate got so high that now people are coming

out of prison and the integration of prisoners with the community is essentially important so in

terms of parole and probation and how we can think in a more I think creative fashion about how to

create social supports right rather than just goodbye you're out of prison because that those

individuals will fail absent these kinds of social structures right and so therefore there will

be recycling back in prison and I talk about and we need better off ramps out of prison or for those

the unlucky cohorts that were sentenced let's say under the height of the drug arrests

because of really an unfair punitive regime of arrest we should probably think about those

differently on your question of collective efficacy it's really the combination of the fusion of

the expectations it's a norm of social control with elements of trust and interaction among

residents so it's really co the social cohesion or social networks in the community and

combining that with a willingness to take action and this is the idea of again if you think about

how even measured it like with people in your community do something if kids were let's say having

a fight in front of your house or kids were spray painting graffiti it's the idea of collective

intervention and one of the things that is important in all this I think are community-based organizations

that are a more structural and organizational way to think about promoting collective efficacy and

really interesting research that I talk about in the book in terms of one of the reasons for the

crime decline that we haven't thought about enough is research that shows that the rise in community

based organizations especially devoted to youth and youth support was one of the factors explaining

crime drop that's research by Patrick Sharkey at Princeton and I think reasonably causal evidence

showing that that matters that's the kind of thing I don't think we have appreciated enough

that again the community-based organizations the collective efficacy the informal social controls

the technological changes are all centrally important and then we have this other bucket

of the criminal justice system that we need to think about but there again I think it's central

to think hard about the the social norms of policing and that's where the legitimacy literature

or the literature on legal cynicism that really tells us why people don't trust the police

or are unwilling to call the police right and back to I think I don't know if you talked about

this line with Jeffrey but one of the reasons if there's a little clearance right part of that

could be because people don't call the police and therefore or don't cooperate with the police because

there's this mistrust so that has to clearly be part of the repair process and we did talk about

that a little bit yeah our time is running short and I wanted to ask you Robert because you're a great

sociologist and you've been doing this for decades where are we in the policy realm

relative to the kinds of ideas that you have been expounding are they making a difference in policing

are they making a difference in what state legislatures are doing I mean if you could tell

Brandon Johnson Mayor of Chicago what to do in his city what would you tell him to do that

would have an effect on the high rate of criminal violence that African Americans in Chicago

are experiencing etc I'm asking you to draw a link between the highfalutin theoretical and

more mundane day-to-day practical because is there not do you not agree with Jeffrey Seaman that

there's a real problem in terms of immediate need for our attention to the victimization of

people just trying to get from home to work or whatever it is on a daily basis and

what are your studies tell us we should do about that yeah absolutely I think that's important I

mean I I guess I'd say several things I mean in the book I talk about even though the book is not

an evaluation and doesn't study specific interventions but things like community violence programs

community violence interruptors for example some of the community like policing examples I was

talking about some of the community organizational research it's been shown to be effective so I

would say that we need more of that and you look at the literature actually and the evaluations

in the funding there's tons of money that's poured into the criminal justice system as a relative

amount of money very little goes into these other sort of alternative sorts of community crime

prevention programs so I would emphasize that I would also emphasize I guess good news part of

this story right that crime has declined I mean we saw the increase of course during the pandemic

employed era but in a sense it's it's come back down it's almost as if that was a you know

disruption but the fact that it's coming down and it is really a number of behaviors I think

sends a message sort of a positive message that we can bring down crime while we are bringing down

punitive arm of the state that is incarceration is going down arrests have declined dramatically

and crime has declined dramatically now and right in the old model you'd say well wait a minute

you know you got to arrest your way out of the problem or incarcerate your way out of the problem

no actually we're in a pretty good spot I mean I'm not highly honest but the point is just look

at the data in fact if you take the cohort perspective right in terms of turnover the kids

are my lucky cohort if you will right when they're turning aged to be incarcerated there's

going to be fewer incarceration so incarceration and others have written about this is

according to some falling off a cliff and is this not the flip side of the what we they were

climbing together too crime and incarceration were going up in the 80s and 90s and they're

coming down in the teens in the 20s that's kind of curious no yeah yeah it is it is and so

I think there's a positive story to be had here that we want again it goes to the what kind

of criminal justice system you want what kind of policing and I think that in a sense

given the if you go back to the argument about clearance rates or quality of arrests and community

violence intervention and my hope would be that those sorts of programs are emphasized more which

you know which emphasizes positive aspects of policing integration with community-based

efforts but what I think is dangerous is the rhetoric of

interpreting the present through the lens of the past so in other words not only is there a cohort

bias in prediction but I think we also have kind of a cognitive bias that we don't update our

mental models and I argue this in the book very well and frankly I mean certain

crime proposals the White House initiative 2025 for example

so it might be read as re-unleashing the rhetoric of super predators of increasing

punitive sanctions increasing incarceration but why I mean it's not consistent with the data and

that's not to say that policing is unimportant but we shouldn't be fighting

past crime wars or you know it's like ghost criminology we should be

really aligned with what's happening and I think there's a somewhat positive view here of course

things can change on a dime that's part of the argument of the book and so there's no inevitability

here there's no you know in there's no sense in which it's inevitable crime could start going

back up so you can't like let up on any of these dimensions I argue we want to you know keep on the

again this is all relative not that there's not crime and victimization it's way too high

any one crime or murder but anyone police killing right there all anyone is too high it's that

we really need to be thinking more about aligning and also following the policy and I think in part

that's consistent a little bit with the argument that the Yens makes in his book on the gun violence

problem in terms of the ports of place and community-based programs okay Rob Jeffrey has been

listening patiently as you have extended the discussion of your book and of the general point of

view and I'm wondering as we get near the end of the hour here how he and Ben I invite your

comment as well responds but I'm especially interested in Jeffrey because it seems to me that

the continent has been thrown down a little bit to you and Paul Robinson in your advocacy for more

effective and extensive law enforcement activity to catch bad guys and make sure they pay those

are my words but I don't think I do disservice to the general tone of your argument and I think

there is some tension is there not uh between the uh outlook that the Rob Sanson has been

expositing and the one that you embrace yes I mean I think there's some tension there I first

want to acknowledge though I very much appreciate all of Rob's work on

that getting the criminological data and I completely agree we need to have an informed view

that isn't tied to the past recognizing that each cohort is different where I think we would depart

most significantly though is I'm much more concerned about the absolute level of crime I agree that

compared to a few years ago our levels are going down right now actually clearance rates are going up

and that's all great and we can celebrate that we shouldn't forget that violent crime is still

twice as high as it was in 1960 we shouldn't forget that we're still seeing 15,000 people murdered

each year including around 8,000 or 9,000 black Americans murdered each year wildly disproportionate

rates and we should remember these are policy choices like we can control them there's no sort of

and I completely agree one crime is too many obviously we're never going to get to zero or one crime

but we with our policy making choices right now can dramatically reduce the burden of crime and

do more justice tomorrow in six months in a year and I think we need to take that seriously that

there's a lot of suffering and a lot of injustice right now in America's high crime communities

and it's at an absolutely unacceptable level and I just don't want that that pain and that problem

to be dulled by a sort of sense of well we're making progress things are moving in the right direction

if you're living in the south side of Chicago right now maybe it is better than two or three years ago

but you shouldn't have to experience violence on the daily level you shouldn't have to fear for your

life on a regular basis and until we brought sort of everyone up to a baseline standard of safety

and justice I think we can't take our foot off the gas in terms of enforcement and really focusing

on there is a problem here that needs to be solved Rob do you want to respond to that yeah yeah no I

I mean I agree I know I totally agree I mean about I mean the absolute level of violence I've

written a lot about this by the way I mean that most of my research is on community violence and

the early part of the book is about the horrific situation in Chicago I think there wasn't enough

emphasis on the trauma and the violence that was occurring and so I agree with that I think what

Glennon said the way I would phrase it is we need I agree we need more effective policing but we

need more policing right you see what I'm saying or please is it police size is it a certain kind

of aggressive policing or is it kind of a re you know kind of a transformed sense of policing that's

where I would go I'm not sure whether you agree or not but the one thing I think that's beneficial

about emphasizing the the clients is it's empowering in a sense it's empowering to communities that

suffered because it suggests I mean there's something that we said for hope and we're relying on

the idea that there are things that work that reduce crime and yeah so in that sense I'm not

sure would that far apart it's just I'm you know coming at it more from the community and governance

side as opposed to the the state punitive side but in terms of the fundamental problem of violence

is completely consistent with end of theoretical framework I would take I don't know Ben if you would

agree or have a different perspective on governance no I I do agree with this the kind of

multifaceted picture that I don't I don't see you two gentlemen disagreeing about you know I do

agree that there are a lot there a variety of interventions both in the sort of social support

and social intervention realm and in the law enforcement realm that I think and make a

difference take to your to your point Jeffrey you know about there are policy choices we can make

here I know I know both of your work addresses this also there's a really nice article by the

criminologist criminologist John McDonald who details several different place based social

control based law enforcement based interventions that all can contribute to increasing public safety

and I think it is a multifaceted thing I suppose the one I think this is the point you're making

Jeffrey there's a in Dr. Ludwig's book on you know place and on his becoming on the becoming a

man program that he evaluates and these kinds of character based interventions or behavioral

behavioral science based interventions really is how he frames them I think the one issue that he

runs into he talks and he talks about violence interruptors as you talked about Dr. Samson

the one issue you run into is that okay but when these community interventions fail you know

when when there is a murder committed there does have to be there's a justice question about

what's the what is the correct social response and that's a perennial sort of how does the

society respond when injustice in fact or when a crime does in fact occur is I think in enduring

moral justice question that we can't escape we shouldn't think we're going to reach some point

where that that question doesn't have to be asked and answered in a way that does ensure legitimacy

yeah I mean I would agree with that real quickly I mean the moral accountability I think can

essentially important and a sort of restorative justice framework it's just that I think we also need

think about the moral society part of it and how societal institutions can chip away at the moral

foundations of people's beliefs and law and so it's shifting up right defining social character

up is how I put it in the book and then another just very final quick point on the McDonald's study

it's an excellent point but he shows that simple things like greening vacant lots and environmental

interventions have really powerful effects the randomized clinical trials and Philadelphia showed

that what happens when you take a completely decimated vacant lot fixing broken land as it were

not broken people then people go out in the space they interact there's eyes on the street crime

goes down people are happier less depressed so those kinds of interventions are relatively

inexpensive so again it's another piece of the evidence that we we need to focus on and highlight

and again I think it's empowering to do that so do I Ben Peterson has had to leave but thank him

for his visiting with our session thanks very much to Jeffrey Seaman who's given us two

hours of his time this afternoon and we very much appreciated in the work that he and Paul Robinson

are doing and thanks so much to my former colleague and friend Robert Samson very distinguished

professor of sociology and criminology at Harvard this has been the glen she'll taken on a hard

issue from variety of angles and trying to get the most thoughtful and respectful disagreements on

the table that's what we're trying to do this afternoon so thanks to the audience for your attention

signing off Lynn Laury at the Glenshow