1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:04,200 My pleasure to welcome Tony Platt, who is going to be giving the talk today. 2 00:00:04,500 --> 00:00:11,430 And Tony is currently a distinguished affiliated scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Society at University of California, Berkeley. 3 00:00:12,270 --> 00:00:17,910 He's previously taught at the University of Chicago, at Berkeley and at other California state universities. 4 00:00:18,870 --> 00:00:24,989 He's the author of 12 books, 100 and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of criminal justice, 5 00:00:24,990 --> 00:00:28,560 race, inequality and social justice in American history. 6 00:00:28,860 --> 00:00:31,620 And I've been listening because lots of people have been coming up to Tony since he's been in 7 00:00:31,620 --> 00:00:35,790 the room saying that they read his work and that they although they met him some time ago. 8 00:00:36,120 --> 00:00:43,410 And I have to say, I have one of these stories, too, which is that as as an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia in History, 9 00:00:43,800 --> 00:00:47,990 I set out to do my dissertation on juvenile detention centre. 10 00:00:49,200 --> 00:00:52,230 And of course, one of the books that I read was The Child Saver. 11 00:00:52,240 --> 00:00:55,500 So so it's actually very exciting for me to meet you as well. 12 00:00:55,950 --> 00:00:59,130 And Tony's here today to talk to us about his most recent book, 13 00:00:59,760 --> 00:01:04,050 which is called Beyond These Walls Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States. 14 00:01:04,950 --> 00:01:09,300 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation and being here. 15 00:01:10,920 --> 00:01:16,260 I'm glad to be here. Glad to see people who remember meetings with me that I don't remember. 16 00:01:16,260 --> 00:01:19,260 But maybe that maybe the memory will come back. 17 00:01:20,970 --> 00:01:23,970 And I'm glad you started on time in one of the other rooms. I'm staying here. 18 00:01:23,970 --> 00:01:31,440 There's a sign, and it says For visiting fellows and researchers, please make sure that you observe rule number 11. 19 00:01:32,520 --> 00:01:37,110 So I don't know what that rule is, but we all need to observe. 20 00:01:37,110 --> 00:01:40,610 It is nice to each other. Thank you. 21 00:01:41,160 --> 00:01:47,460 So I'm glad to be back in Oxford where I spent three awkward years here from 1960 to 1963, 22 00:01:48,180 --> 00:01:52,170 begrudgingly studying jurisprudence because I didn't know what else to study. 23 00:01:53,610 --> 00:02:03,000 And I'm especially glad that my college roommate is here, Jerry McCarthy, who we have room together out in an a house in Italy. 24 00:02:03,390 --> 00:02:11,720 And he helped me to survive at Oxford in those years as I wavered between scorn and longing. 25 00:02:11,730 --> 00:02:16,590 That's a phrase from Richard Hogg, its famous book, The Uses of Literacy. 26 00:02:17,370 --> 00:02:24,630 You helped me to survive Katrina as a waiver between scorn and longing scorn at the university's inhospitable reception of outsiders. 27 00:02:24,810 --> 00:02:32,460 I was from the North, I was from another country, from Manchester, and also longing to become a member of the club. 28 00:02:33,270 --> 00:02:39,030 That's the longing part. And now here I am, entering the club through the front door. 29 00:02:39,210 --> 00:02:44,600 All right, so it's a big surprise to me. In 1960, 30 00:02:44,600 --> 00:02:49,159 I was a typical 18 year old who did not think ahead and by default fell into 31 00:02:49,160 --> 00:02:54,050 a course in jurisprudence here at Oxford that mostly bored and alienated me. 32 00:02:54,410 --> 00:03:01,550 I'm sure those of you taking courses here come with a lot more consciousness and determination and clarity about what you're doing than I was. 33 00:03:02,510 --> 00:03:09,559 Aside from criminal and international law, I plodded through my studies and I chafed for three years against my tutors. 34 00:03:09,560 --> 00:03:15,560 Reaction Review. That law with a capital L is a defence against anarchy with a capital H. 35 00:03:16,220 --> 00:03:24,590 David Yardley was my tutor for three years. He regarded British legal institutions as the vanguard of a civilisation that would erase 36 00:03:24,590 --> 00:03:31,130 all remnants of what he called jungle law and doing his best to hold back the 1960s. 37 00:03:31,490 --> 00:03:40,730 He supported measures to keep hardened criminals, as he put it, permanently in detention and anticipating the proliferation of today's refugee camps. 38 00:03:41,120 --> 00:03:45,829 He thought that detention communities might be a way to keep the criminalised family 39 00:03:45,830 --> 00:03:50,300 together and that bringing back the stocks might even be cheaper than prisons. 40 00:03:51,530 --> 00:03:54,440 I can send you the documentation and his book is interesting. 41 00:03:56,690 --> 00:04:02,899 He also was begrudgingly against the legalisation or decriminalisation of homosexuality on the grounds that, 42 00:04:02,900 --> 00:04:06,530 quote, it might encourage many homosexuals to seek medical treatment. 43 00:04:07,250 --> 00:04:10,580 So that was my intellectual experience at the university. 44 00:04:12,140 --> 00:04:16,670 Aside from sports, arthouse films at The Phoenix, which still exists. 45 00:04:16,670 --> 00:04:21,140 Right. You know, Bergman got a big, big impact on me. 46 00:04:21,560 --> 00:04:28,459 Aside from that and jazz learning to become a marijuana user and going to ban the bomb demonstrations, 47 00:04:28,460 --> 00:04:32,510 one of my few educational pleasures was going to a lecture by Richard Hoggett, 48 00:04:32,540 --> 00:04:40,700 who was considered to be the founder of British Cultural Studies, who taught me the importance of what later would be known as history from below. 49 00:04:41,600 --> 00:04:48,890 While my tutor was worrying that the eight hour day might temp workers to while away their time off by, quote, 50 00:04:49,010 --> 00:04:57,680 doing harm to others, Richard Hoggart was describing law as an arena of class conflict of us against them, of them, against us. 51 00:04:58,310 --> 00:05:02,720 And from the perspective of working class communities, in his 1957 book, 52 00:05:03,170 --> 00:05:12,440 he briefly reported that the police and criminal courts were part of the vast apparatus of authority which somehow got hold of them, 53 00:05:12,440 --> 00:05:18,140 got hold of working class people, vast apparatus of authority which somehow got hold of them. 54 00:05:18,500 --> 00:05:20,090 In that book, he didn't explain this. 55 00:05:20,090 --> 00:05:28,160 Somehow I moved to the United States in 1963 for what I thought would be a temporary stay for a master's degree in criminology at Berkeley. 56 00:05:28,850 --> 00:05:34,340 And after a postdoc in Chicago, I returned in 1968 to teach criminology back at Berkeley. 57 00:05:34,940 --> 00:05:40,040 It was then that I started to think about the issues in this book that I finally got to write. 58 00:05:40,670 --> 00:05:47,540 Recently, I thought I started thinking about them in the seventies because that was an era of American society when, 59 00:05:47,840 --> 00:05:53,620 in the words of Alice Walker, the writer of the social movements, called us to life and put us to work. 60 00:05:53,630 --> 00:05:57,230 It was a very enlightening time to be an intellectual activist. 61 00:05:57,860 --> 00:06:04,700 And when the movement in universities was powerful enough to attract police informants to our classes in Berkeley School of Criminology. 62 00:06:05,660 --> 00:06:11,570 So when I got my FBI file, I read that I was very anti police, I was a dangerous individual, 63 00:06:12,230 --> 00:06:16,580 and that I was, quote, one of the first people in the United States to wear my hair long. 64 00:06:19,670 --> 00:06:21,590 Curious what you find in your FBI file. 65 00:06:22,700 --> 00:06:29,510 So I started thinking about the issues in this book of this book in the seventies, and I finished it in the gloom of Trump's dystopia. 66 00:06:29,990 --> 00:06:34,910 I like to think that its seed was planted in Hogarth's insight about the class nature of policing, 67 00:06:35,420 --> 00:06:38,810 that this is where I began to grapple with explaining the somehow, 68 00:06:39,080 --> 00:06:46,700 as in the vast apparatus of authority which somehow got hold of them, that Hoggart briefly referenced in his 1957 book. 69 00:06:47,240 --> 00:06:54,800 I know it was Hoggart successor, Stuart Hall, who helped me to fill in the gaps despite Trump's dystopia. 70 00:06:55,490 --> 00:07:05,660 As you can see from the book's cover here, which I pass around, there's a sliver of thin sliver of blue sky on the cover. 71 00:07:05,690 --> 00:07:10,880 You know, we had debates with the publisher about how big that little strip of blue sky should be, 72 00:07:11,330 --> 00:07:21,350 but it's there enough to be, you know, to give a ray of hope. I was recently on a panel at a bookseller in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bay Area, 73 00:07:21,350 --> 00:07:26,540 with a man named Albert Woodfox, who has a new book out, which I strongly recommend called Solitary. 74 00:07:28,070 --> 00:07:33,950 There's been a lot of great memoirs of life in prison that have been written really since the 19th century. 75 00:07:33,950 --> 00:07:40,159 And some of the most famous ones, including Malcolm X's autobiography, Claude Browne's autobiography, period. 76 00:07:40,160 --> 00:07:46,240 Thomas. There are a few stand out ones. But I put this one by Albert Woodfox to be up to that level. 77 00:07:47,050 --> 00:07:54,080 He spent over 40 years, I think it was 42 years. And he knows exactly months and days and hours that he spent in solitary. 78 00:07:54,100 --> 00:08:00,730 23 hours a day in the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana for a crime he never committed, 79 00:08:00,850 --> 00:08:06,700 which was he was set up and charged and convicted of killing a guard in the prison, which he didn't do. 80 00:08:07,090 --> 00:08:11,889 And it took about ten years of activism by lawyers and political organisations and 81 00:08:11,890 --> 00:08:17,470 nonprofits and people helping him to get a new trial and to get an acquittal and to get out. 82 00:08:18,760 --> 00:08:27,580 In this book, Solitary, he writes as follows He says, I'd bear the scars of beatings, loneliness, isolation and persecution. 83 00:08:27,880 --> 00:08:34,590 I'm also marked by every kindness. And in this book, he says, I have hope for humankind. 84 00:08:34,630 --> 00:08:37,810 This is after during the 42 years in solitary. 85 00:08:38,590 --> 00:08:42,690 So if Albert Woodfox can have hope for humankind, I certainly can, too. 86 00:08:44,020 --> 00:08:52,600 So today I want to address three issues. What in the past gives life and vitality to Trump's vision of law and order? 87 00:08:53,320 --> 00:08:56,170 What is new and dangerously different about his vision? 88 00:08:56,620 --> 00:09:02,380 And what are the chances for a revitalisation of the progressive and radical visions of social justice and the United States? 89 00:09:02,920 --> 00:09:06,360 Three big issues, and I'll try to go through them fairly quickly here. 90 00:09:08,200 --> 00:09:12,970 So first of all, what's familiar? Trump's law and order is fierce and uncompromising. 91 00:09:13,270 --> 00:09:15,339 But much of it, I think, and I argue in the book, 92 00:09:15,340 --> 00:09:22,180 is recycled for all that has been said about his mercurial and narcissistic temperament, his impetuosity, 93 00:09:22,180 --> 00:09:31,810 his grandstanding, his wild policy swings, his views about crime, police, prisons, welfare and race are remarkably consistent and longstanding. 94 00:09:32,320 --> 00:09:40,600 In many ways, Trump's version of Law and Order has deep roots and a bipartisan political foundation from the Democrats, as well as the Republicans. 95 00:09:41,410 --> 00:09:44,830 Trump honed his particular version of Law and Order in the 1980s. 96 00:09:45,430 --> 00:09:52,030 His favourite crime expert, to use his words, was the right wing political scientist James Cooper Wilson, 97 00:09:52,510 --> 00:09:59,410 whose 1977 book Thinking about crime influenced hardline policies in the 1980s and Far Beyond. 98 00:10:00,160 --> 00:10:07,000 And his notorious essay on Broken Windows, co-authored with George Kelling and published in The Atlantic in 1982, 99 00:10:07,390 --> 00:10:12,340 legitimated a repressive role for policing in impoverished communities that influence 100 00:10:12,340 --> 00:10:15,760 policing in the United States and in many other countries around the world. 101 00:10:16,390 --> 00:10:21,640 For people not familiar with this policy proposal that became widespread. 102 00:10:23,050 --> 00:10:28,570 Wilson argued that if you allowed sort of petty crimes to go on impoverished communities, 103 00:10:28,900 --> 00:10:34,030 that they would aggravate and become serious crimes and that broken windows, 104 00:10:34,030 --> 00:10:37,630 you know, peeing on the ground, getting drunk and disorderly and so on, 105 00:10:37,990 --> 00:10:41,500 that that needed a police presence, otherwise it would get out of hand and so on. 106 00:10:41,920 --> 00:10:47,469 And that justified an interventionist role for policing in the United States, 107 00:10:47,470 --> 00:10:51,440 sort of trying to legitimate the role of the police in impoverished communities. 108 00:10:51,460 --> 00:10:55,300 They didn't take that position about intervening in middle class communities. 109 00:10:55,750 --> 00:11:03,100 So it became a really a strategy of legitimation of policing, but I think had had wide influence. 110 00:11:04,030 --> 00:11:13,809 Most of the ideas in Trump's 2000 ghostwritten book called America The America We Deserve early on, he's he's he's got political ambitions. 111 00:11:13,810 --> 00:11:17,380 He's writing parents. He's writing books. He's putting out statements and so on. 112 00:11:17,950 --> 00:11:25,810 That book was cribbed from a briefing book co-authored by the right wing Heritage Foundation, which was written for right wing political candidates. 113 00:11:26,830 --> 00:11:30,160 He listed a lot of ideas, also from a man named Edwin Meese. 114 00:11:30,640 --> 00:11:34,270 Ed Meese had been on Trump's transition team. 115 00:11:34,780 --> 00:11:40,090 Before that, he'd been attorney general under Reagan until he went through a scandal and had to resign. 116 00:11:40,480 --> 00:11:46,210 And before that, he was Governor Reagan's right hand hatchet man in California, 117 00:11:47,080 --> 00:11:52,120 where he presided over the beating and arrests of damaged demonstrators around the state. 118 00:11:52,540 --> 00:11:57,850 And he also presided over dismantling Berkeley's School of Criminology, where I and other people were teaching. 119 00:11:58,870 --> 00:12:00,220 And so the wheel turns. 120 00:12:01,690 --> 00:12:09,400 While Trump draws upon old tropes for his ideology, he's always positioned himself, I think, in the extreme right wing of law and order politics. 121 00:12:09,790 --> 00:12:14,830 So, for example, in 1989, there was a major case in New York. 122 00:12:15,010 --> 00:12:16,270 Some of you may be familiar with it. 123 00:12:16,270 --> 00:12:23,680 It's called the Central Park five case, in which five young men, all men of colour, black and Puerto Rican, young man, juveniles, 124 00:12:24,250 --> 00:12:30,579 were charged and prosecuted and convicted of an extraordinary brutal rape on a white woman banker who was 125 00:12:30,580 --> 00:12:36,250 jogging through the park and barely lived and had very little had no memory of what had happened to her. 126 00:12:36,700 --> 00:12:42,250 And the five confessed and were convicted and spent many years in prison before somebody else confessed. 127 00:12:42,310 --> 00:12:47,260 To the crime, and they were all released after several years in prison. 128 00:12:47,560 --> 00:12:54,130 And then the city of New York settled with them for about $41 million for the false arrest and the other time in prison that they'd served. 129 00:12:54,730 --> 00:13:00,540 Trump then wrote an op ed and in one of the New York newspapers saying Settling doesn't mean innocence. 130 00:13:00,550 --> 00:13:06,310 And he basically argued that his contacts in the police department said that they didn't deserve to have been acquitted. 131 00:13:07,360 --> 00:13:12,490 The mugging of his mother in 1991 added personal animus to his political convictions. 132 00:13:12,850 --> 00:13:18,850 He and other members of the family lobbied the judge to make sure that the person that mugged his mother did a lot of time, 133 00:13:19,780 --> 00:13:24,040 and in one of his books, he said, The problem isn't that we have too many people locked up. 134 00:13:24,490 --> 00:13:31,780 The problem is that we don't have enough criminals locked up. So from very, very early on, he's staking out a right wing law and order position. 135 00:13:32,530 --> 00:13:35,049 I wouldn't say he was reading anything because the man is a read, 136 00:13:35,050 --> 00:13:40,240 but he's being influenced by a set of ideas that are in the extreme right of the Republican Party. 137 00:13:40,870 --> 00:13:48,489 And in 2000, when he was actively considering a campaign for national political office, already he praised a man named George Pataki, 138 00:13:48,490 --> 00:13:54,129 who was running for governor of New York for his efforts to restore the death penalty in New York, 139 00:13:54,130 --> 00:13:58,420 New York, and put the death penalty on the moratorium, Pataki said. 140 00:13:59,470 --> 00:14:04,990 And one of his book, one of these books said George Pataki is doing civilisation's heavy lifting. 141 00:14:05,440 --> 00:14:15,040 And I think that's an early sign of the coded language of the kind of right wing white nationalism that is now a staple of his worldview, 142 00:14:15,040 --> 00:14:24,549 this notion of of law and order being at the at the at the centre and under the leadership of establishing by civilisation. 143 00:14:24,550 --> 00:14:31,170 He's talking about a Christian white worldview and he's always, always been partial to fascist ideas. 144 00:14:31,180 --> 00:14:36,230 I'm not one of these people who argues now that the United States is that we now have a fascist regime. 145 00:14:36,820 --> 00:14:44,980 But Trump has always been interested in fascist ideas. So a long, long time ago he was describing the United States as the world's whipping boy, 146 00:14:45,190 --> 00:14:50,050 that's his words, and that the United States had become China's punching bag, 147 00:14:50,770 --> 00:14:57,459 thus launching his attack on China now and and and bringing the world close to a military conflict with China, 148 00:14:57,460 --> 00:15:02,890 which, of course, would be to be no more nice talks in this room if that happens. 149 00:15:04,390 --> 00:15:08,650 His politics of American First, America First, which is a big part of his political slogans, 150 00:15:09,100 --> 00:15:14,020 comes right out of right wing American nationalism that had its heyday during World War One, 151 00:15:14,470 --> 00:15:20,590 when the U.S. had to whip the population into supporting U.S. entry into that war. 152 00:15:21,070 --> 00:15:25,570 And when people that oppose the war were picked up and charged and sent to prison, 153 00:15:26,410 --> 00:15:30,730 the America first was the it was that was the slogan of that of that campaign for war, 154 00:15:31,540 --> 00:15:36,430 his preoccupation with Mexican inferiority, which influences them a great deal today. 155 00:15:37,300 --> 00:15:42,790 And Mexican dangerousness, echoes early 20th century moral panics about Mexicans and marijuana. 156 00:15:43,480 --> 00:15:47,530 It also echoes the 1940s campaign against so-called zoot suit. 157 00:15:47,800 --> 00:15:55,500 Zoot suit, as in California, and also echoes the demonisation by the FBI of Chicano political movements in the 1960. 158 00:15:56,170 --> 00:16:00,730 So there's a great deal of continuity between Trump's law and order agenda and previous administrations, 159 00:16:01,150 --> 00:16:06,640 and there are some significant changes as well. But first, let me go into more detail about what I think are the continuities. 160 00:16:08,530 --> 00:16:14,109 First, I don't think there's any change in militarised policing in the United States that is routinely indifferent to 161 00:16:14,110 --> 00:16:20,320 human rights in impoverished communities and reduces citizens and residents to objects of fear and loathing. 162 00:16:20,830 --> 00:16:26,500 The police routinely killed three people every day, which maybe doesn't seem like a lot, but it's a thousand a year. 163 00:16:27,160 --> 00:16:32,120 That's 100,000 in a century, and that happens during the everyday practice of policing. 164 00:16:32,140 --> 00:16:42,160 It doesn't happen during the extraordinary moments of state repression in the United States, which actually are not so and not so exceptional. 165 00:16:43,060 --> 00:16:47,500 And the people that get killed by the police on the streets are disproportionately African-American, 166 00:16:47,500 --> 00:16:51,550 Latino, Native American, and also a high percentage are also mentally ill. 167 00:16:52,450 --> 00:16:57,729 So this was true long before Trump. And it's true now. A deep history, for example, 168 00:16:57,730 --> 00:17:03,790 teaches us that the police and sheriffs were deeply implicated as participants and collaborators 169 00:17:03,790 --> 00:17:08,710 in lynching and doing their best to hold back the civil rights movement for decades. 170 00:17:09,400 --> 00:17:14,890 Go back to early descriptions and reports on policing in the late 19th century, 171 00:17:15,280 --> 00:17:21,850 right through to the 1960s, and then a new bout of of police repression in the 1960s. 172 00:17:22,060 --> 00:17:30,520 There isn't a decade that goes by where the police are not at the forefront of trying to repress civil rights struggles, so much so that in 1951, 173 00:17:30,760 --> 00:17:36,940 long before the current round of political protests about policing in the United States in 1951, 174 00:17:36,940 --> 00:17:41,920 the civil rights Congress petitioned the United Nations for relief for what it called, quote. 175 00:17:42,310 --> 00:17:48,010 The genocide against the Negro people. The Congress said once the classic method of lynching was the rope. 176 00:17:48,340 --> 00:17:53,350 Now it's the policeman's bullet. That was 1951 or in the 1960s. 177 00:17:53,350 --> 00:18:00,010 James Forman, who was one of my favourite writers and I think one of the most perceptive writers on issues of crime and race and policing. 178 00:18:00,460 --> 00:18:06,910 His essays, I think, particularly from The New Yorker, are well worth a revisit if you've never read them. 179 00:18:07,510 --> 00:18:13,569 So in the 1960s, he said he hardly knew anybody in Harlem from the most circumspect church member to the 180 00:18:13,570 --> 00:18:19,540 most shiftless adolescent who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, 181 00:18:19,540 --> 00:18:22,930 injustice or brutality. That's Baldwin in the early sixties. 182 00:18:23,350 --> 00:18:28,600 These are exactly the same issues that Black Lives Matter has been raising in the last decade in the United States. 183 00:18:29,440 --> 00:18:34,659 So one of the things I argue in the book is that there never were never good old days when the friendly 184 00:18:34,660 --> 00:18:40,510 urban police walked local neighbourhoods that they knew personally and made crime reduction a priority. 185 00:18:40,540 --> 00:18:45,370 I don't think there's any evidence that that American policing was ever about that. 186 00:18:45,940 --> 00:18:51,669 So I'm not making a case for some nostalgia to go back to an earlier professionalisation. 187 00:18:51,670 --> 00:18:58,420 I don't think that ever existed. Policing in the United States, I argue, has always been militarised, combative and undemocratic. 188 00:18:59,020 --> 00:19:05,020 Long before SWAT teams, long before the transfer of Iraqi war surplus to the police. 189 00:19:05,500 --> 00:19:08,560 The police always imagined themselves at war at home, 190 00:19:09,280 --> 00:19:15,370 and they were often inspired in the notion of being at war at home by U.S. military ventures around the world. 191 00:19:17,380 --> 00:19:24,910 Michel Foucault somewhere talks about this is the boomerang effect that military ventures abroad are then brought back in a variety of different ways. 192 00:19:25,480 --> 00:19:27,340 So I'll give you two examples. 193 00:19:27,340 --> 00:19:35,860 In the United States, for example, now in Baltimore, the police use surveillance techniques that were developed in the war in Iraq. 194 00:19:36,520 --> 00:19:43,599 Or I think a more important example would be the way in which policing in other countries develops notions 195 00:19:43,600 --> 00:19:50,380 about dangerous populations and who needs to be targeted by military and and counterinsurgency operations. 196 00:19:50,770 --> 00:19:53,829 So if you go back to the United States first military venture, 197 00:19:53,830 --> 00:20:01,660 which was in the Philippines in the 1900s after the war with Spain and the defeat of Spain, the United States then stayed in the Philippines for, 198 00:20:01,690 --> 00:20:07,450 I don't know, ten, 20 years trying to subdue a nationalist movement that wanted independence, 199 00:20:07,450 --> 00:20:11,380 that won independence from Spain, and now they wanted independence from the United States. 200 00:20:11,890 --> 00:20:18,640 So it was there that the United States first developed what they called concentration camps that were influenced by, I think, 201 00:20:18,640 --> 00:20:25,870 by reservations in the United States that brought together political activists and political dissidents and put them in prison like conditions. 202 00:20:26,470 --> 00:20:31,900 And also, there were people working on counterinsurgency in this war in the Philippines who then came back and 203 00:20:31,900 --> 00:20:38,200 were very influential as leadership in the early days of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation. 204 00:20:40,420 --> 00:20:44,500 I don't think the police have ever been effective at reducing social harm either. 205 00:20:46,000 --> 00:20:53,620 How many people here in England rely on the police for advice about how to protect yourself from social harm? 206 00:20:53,620 --> 00:20:57,940 Or call the police when you're in any kind of trouble and witness crimes or whatever? 207 00:20:58,210 --> 00:21:04,120 Please raise your hands. Oh, it's usually one or two people. 208 00:21:04,540 --> 00:21:12,609 So what are they good for? So law enforcement, in my view, and crime control are not what the police do. 209 00:21:12,610 --> 00:21:16,479 Well, and we're told in the United States and you're probably told here as well, 210 00:21:16,480 --> 00:21:21,940 that the best way to reduce our chance of being victimised by crime is to learn techniques of target hardening. 211 00:21:21,970 --> 00:21:26,799 Is that term used here? Yes. Target hardening make ourselves into a harder target. 212 00:21:26,800 --> 00:21:32,830 Okay. And if you can afford it, buy an insurance policy and create a whole defensible space around your home. 213 00:21:33,190 --> 00:21:39,670 Burglar alarms, high tech surveillance systems, bolted doors, guard dogs, razor wire, gated walls. 214 00:21:39,910 --> 00:21:41,200 Depends on what you can afford. 215 00:21:41,920 --> 00:21:49,530 The police even acknowledge their impotence when they advise us to organise neighbourhood watches, look out for suspicious folks. 216 00:21:49,540 --> 00:21:54,280 And if you're a woman, carry a whistle and mace. Take martial arts classes. 217 00:21:54,370 --> 00:22:00,070 Stay off the streets after dark. In other words, take personal responsibility and good luck. 218 00:22:01,210 --> 00:22:07,000 So no wonder that most people do not and have never not and have never reported most crime to the police. 219 00:22:08,830 --> 00:22:13,330 A deep history also teaches us that the federal government and federal agencies from the 220 00:22:13,330 --> 00:22:19,899 federal from the FBI under Edgar Hoover to Homeland Security today in the United States, 221 00:22:19,900 --> 00:22:26,350 constantly send out messages about who is on the dangerousness watch and who are the suspect populations. 222 00:22:26,980 --> 00:22:34,210 So there's often a sense in the United States for particularly amongst political activists dealing with police issues, 223 00:22:34,510 --> 00:22:38,050 that the problems of policing is a local issue and that it's not a national issue. 224 00:22:38,380 --> 00:22:41,680 And therefore, you can it's more easy to organise against. 225 00:22:42,080 --> 00:22:45,080 Undemocratic police practices because it's local. 226 00:22:45,470 --> 00:22:48,770 I think there's a problem with seeing policing as a local problem. 227 00:22:49,550 --> 00:22:57,590 If you look at the history of the United States, we understand that the police get their ideas and marching orders from Washington, D.C., 228 00:22:57,590 --> 00:23:02,480 from the national government and from national agencies about which populations are criminal genic, 229 00:23:02,810 --> 00:23:11,570 which populations are a threat to national security. So, for example, after World War One, Edgar Hoover, in a public piece that he wrote, 230 00:23:11,930 --> 00:23:20,480 blame the African-American press for promoting what he called defiantly assertive ideas about the Negroes fitness for self-government. 231 00:23:20,690 --> 00:23:25,340 This was after World War One. They're moving too fast. They want democracy too quickly. 232 00:23:25,880 --> 00:23:29,060 A position he took for decades while cutting the FBI. 233 00:23:29,480 --> 00:23:38,150 And some 50 years later, Hoover authorised these agents to send anonymous messages to Martin Luther King to encourage them to commit suicide. 234 00:23:38,450 --> 00:23:44,450 Otherwise, they were going to spread the news that he was having affairs and keeping them from the public. 235 00:23:45,650 --> 00:23:50,840 In the 1960s, an FBI agent proudly reported to his boss in Washington, D.C., 236 00:23:51,080 --> 00:23:58,910 that every single African-American student at Swarthmore College, a liberal arts college, a private college, was under police surveillance. 237 00:24:00,260 --> 00:24:05,150 So no wonder cops on the local level equate blackness with dangerousness. 238 00:24:06,230 --> 00:24:12,410 So I argue in the book that the problem of police violence is endemic and systemic, national as well as local. 239 00:24:12,770 --> 00:24:15,170 That was true long before Trump, and it's true now. 240 00:24:16,670 --> 00:24:22,370 There's also nothing new today about the astonishing cruelties that characterise day to day life in jails and prisons, 241 00:24:22,850 --> 00:24:28,610 including widespread use of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, sometimes for decades. 242 00:24:28,610 --> 00:24:39,150 Like Albert Woodfox, the author of Solitary. There are many people that I personally met who've done five, ten, 15, 20, 30 years in solitary. 243 00:24:39,170 --> 00:24:48,440 I know one person who did more than that. The UN standards on Human Rights and prisons argue that put out that anything more than 244 00:24:48,440 --> 00:24:53,330 14 days in a solitary confinement puts you at risk for mental harm and health issues. 245 00:24:55,550 --> 00:25:00,230 So we also have in the United States has about 2.2 million people incarcerated every day. 246 00:25:00,230 --> 00:25:05,020 And of those, 200,000 are lifers. That is, they have no chance of getting out for the whole of their life. 247 00:25:05,030 --> 00:25:09,900 And I think most places in in Europe, in the West put limits on. 248 00:25:10,280 --> 00:25:16,189 I know you have lifers, right. But it's very, very limited. 200,000 out of 2.2 million. 249 00:25:16,190 --> 00:25:21,770 It's a sizeable number of people. It's good news, for example, that in California, the new incoming governor of California, 250 00:25:21,980 --> 00:25:25,160 Gavin Newsom, has just put a moratorium on the death penalty. 251 00:25:25,730 --> 00:25:30,350 And that will last as long as he's governor for four years unless the legislature makes it permanent. 252 00:25:30,890 --> 00:25:35,270 But he did dismantle the death cell where they do the executions. 253 00:25:35,270 --> 00:25:39,170 He ordered that totally dismantled. So there's a good chance that that's going to happen. 254 00:25:39,560 --> 00:25:43,490 But there were eight. There's 840 people on death row in San Quentin. 255 00:25:44,780 --> 00:25:47,780 They were waiting, execution. And now that they're for life. 256 00:25:48,200 --> 00:25:54,530 So now the larger issue is what does it mean to have people really have death sentences by being in prison all their lives? 257 00:25:56,150 --> 00:26:01,940 So on a daily basis in the United States, as close to 7 million people are in jail, in prison or on probation or parole. 258 00:26:03,080 --> 00:26:11,990 One in every 28 children now has an incarcerated parent whose families built as much as $25 for a 15 minute in-state call. 259 00:26:12,530 --> 00:26:16,520 And 30% of the world's incarcerated women are now in the United States. 260 00:26:19,400 --> 00:26:25,430 You know, the data and the argument about the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world, 261 00:26:26,150 --> 00:26:33,110 I don't think the evidence is persuasive about whether the United States has a higher incarceration rate rate than China or Russia. 262 00:26:33,770 --> 00:26:37,159 I think sometimes it's a hyperbolic rhetoric about that. 263 00:26:37,160 --> 00:26:44,120 But nevertheless, the United States does have a higher incarceration rate than, for example, Turkmenistan, you know, 264 00:26:44,120 --> 00:26:51,080 a Central American, Central Asian country that, according to Human Rights Watch, is having one of the world's most repressive regimes. 265 00:26:51,710 --> 00:26:55,250 So this rate of imprisonment, this level of imprisonment was true before Trump. 266 00:26:55,460 --> 00:27:02,390 It's true now. It takes close to 5 million workers in the United States to do the job of policing and guarding. 267 00:27:03,140 --> 00:27:06,590 We really don't know the costs of what I try to figure out the costs, 268 00:27:06,590 --> 00:27:11,090 and there's an appendix in the book about that, but not easy to try to figure it out. 269 00:27:11,570 --> 00:27:16,250 Those numbers by themselves don't mean anything, but I think the numbers I'm going to give you now are more meaningful. 270 00:27:17,300 --> 00:27:20,420 The United States has more criminal justice employees than teachers. 271 00:27:21,200 --> 00:27:26,840 The United States has more guards than doctors. Police outnumber social workers by 5 to 1. 272 00:27:27,410 --> 00:27:33,770 So that's more important, I think, than the numbers or actually the costs. It just shows you the the political social priorities of the country. 273 00:27:34,310 --> 00:27:41,330 And in 1980, the United States invested three times more in welfare and food stamps than it did on. 274 00:27:41,760 --> 00:27:46,980 Policing and prisons. And by 1996, this is before Trump becomes president. 275 00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:50,280 That had been reversed. That 3 to 1 ratio had been reversed. 276 00:27:50,790 --> 00:27:57,540 And if you wonder what happened to the promise of a decent welfare state that the United States has never had, this is where I think it went. 277 00:27:58,140 --> 00:28:05,070 This is true before Trump. I think it's true now. So what do we get for this extraordinary investment of people, money and resources? 278 00:28:05,490 --> 00:28:08,700 We don't get crime control and we certainly don't get justice. 279 00:28:09,300 --> 00:28:13,950 A more accurate term for the criminal justice system might be the criminal injustice, chaos. 280 00:28:15,150 --> 00:28:18,540 The so-called criminal justice system certainly has nothing to do with justice. 281 00:28:18,930 --> 00:28:22,770 It's injustices, I think operate both internally and externally. 282 00:28:23,160 --> 00:28:28,260 And a lot is written and said and known about the internal injustices, less so about the external one. 283 00:28:28,740 --> 00:28:34,440 Internally, it means that if you have money and resources in the United States and you get arrested for the most part, 284 00:28:34,440 --> 00:28:41,640 you can get out on bail and if you wait trial out of jail waiting for your trial and you have enough money for good lawyers, 285 00:28:42,030 --> 00:28:46,650 your chances of getting an acquittal or having a jury trial, which is very rare, 286 00:28:47,040 --> 00:28:52,769 is much more likely than the overwhelming majority of people who go through the criminal justice system. 287 00:28:52,770 --> 00:28:59,129 And are there something like 60% of people who are arrested and do time in jail have not even been convicted. 288 00:28:59,130 --> 00:29:06,630 They don't have money to get out on bail. When you look at the occupations that work in the criminal and criminal justice agencies, 289 00:29:07,020 --> 00:29:14,700 about 95% of people work on the side of prosecution prosecutors, police, private police, guards and so on. 290 00:29:15,150 --> 00:29:23,130 And only 5% in any kind of nominal sense work on the other side, which would be defence lawyers, probation officers, parole officers. 291 00:29:24,060 --> 00:29:28,430 So justice serves best those who can afford the best lawyers while the poor get overwhelmed. 292 00:29:28,470 --> 00:29:30,510 Public defenders, for example, 293 00:29:30,510 --> 00:29:38,580 there's a recent report out of Louisiana that says that a public defender who works there has a caseload of 194 felony cases. 294 00:29:39,480 --> 00:29:46,890 So for those lawyers in the room here, you probably know that if you had a caseload of 3000 new cases to work on that that would be a lot of work. 295 00:29:48,420 --> 00:29:52,530 More importantly, injustice works externally, and it works this way. 296 00:29:52,770 --> 00:29:59,070 Baggy pants and a barbecue in the front yard can get you jail time if you live in a place like Ferguson, Missouri. 297 00:29:59,610 --> 00:30:05,099 While laundering profits for a mexican cartel that was implicated in thousands and thousands of 298 00:30:05,100 --> 00:30:11,850 murders gets you a fine equivalent to four weeks of profits if you are the global bank HSBC. 299 00:30:12,660 --> 00:30:17,220 And you might remember James Comey, the FBI director who got fired famously by Trump, 300 00:30:17,760 --> 00:30:24,630 who spent all his life moving between the attorney general's office and prosecutor jobs and then the FBI and so on, 301 00:30:25,020 --> 00:30:30,270 and wrote a rather self-serving memoir in which he left out that important time, 302 00:30:30,960 --> 00:30:34,020 that important time in his career when he worked in the private sector. 303 00:30:34,380 --> 00:30:41,100 And one of the things he did in the private sector was to help HSBC recover its reputation for that from this case. 304 00:30:42,420 --> 00:30:45,540 Similarly, buying selling drugs on the street can get you a lot of time. 305 00:30:45,540 --> 00:30:50,430 And if Trump has his way, according to a recent speech he gave, it can get you the death penalty, 306 00:30:50,820 --> 00:30:54,840 but it only gets you probation if you're the executives of Purdue Pharma, 307 00:30:55,410 --> 00:31:00,569 the company that triggered the opioid crisis by misinforming doctors and patients about 308 00:31:00,570 --> 00:31:05,730 the dangers of a drug that contributes to the death of about 145 people every day. 309 00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:08,350 And that company, Purdue Pharma. 310 00:31:08,350 --> 00:31:14,549 It's very much in the news now because through the Sackler Foundation, it's giving money everywhere, a lot of places in London. 311 00:31:14,550 --> 00:31:19,920 Right. And all these all these art museums and universities and now trying to figure out what 312 00:31:19,920 --> 00:31:25,379 to do with this blood soaked money that they got from the really the Purdue Pharma, 313 00:31:25,380 --> 00:31:28,110 which channelled the money through the foundation. 314 00:31:29,310 --> 00:31:37,530 So the person who helped Purdue Pharma with its public relations crisis was Rudy Giuliani, Trump's current rather creepy mouthpiece. 315 00:31:40,830 --> 00:31:47,400 It's so rare to see a rich or famous person incarcerated in the United States that when it happens, it receives massive media attention. 316 00:31:47,880 --> 00:31:53,760 So if the American criminal justice system doesn't control crime and doesn't dispense justice, then what does it do? 317 00:31:54,120 --> 00:32:00,149 So this is a big part of the book. The injustices of the U.S. criminal justice system are longstanding and by 318 00:32:00,150 --> 00:32:04,110 no means unique to the Trump administration or even his recent predecessors. 319 00:32:04,560 --> 00:32:10,560 There hasn't been a time, for example, in American history when there wasn't taken for granted institutionalised racism 320 00:32:10,560 --> 00:32:15,450 and class repression that confirms the widespread prejudice that people of colour, 321 00:32:15,450 --> 00:32:22,800 immigrants and the poor are the most criminal, the most dangerous and the most deserving of ostracism and distrust. 322 00:32:23,220 --> 00:32:24,270 A few examples. 323 00:32:24,720 --> 00:32:33,630 Probably the best known example is what happened in in the South after the defeat of reconstruction in from the 1970s on 1879, I'm sorry, 324 00:32:34,140 --> 00:32:41,070 when millions of former slaves who had been freed during during the Civil War were criminalised by what we call the black codes. 325 00:32:41,400 --> 00:32:50,700 And the black codes basically said that any any person on the streets who didn't have a job or a permanent place of lodging could be arrested. 326 00:32:51,840 --> 00:32:58,559 And that affected hundreds of thousands and possibly thousands, millions of African-Americans who were in the South. 327 00:32:58,560 --> 00:33:02,610 This was long before the Great Migration to the north. Long before people flee. 328 00:33:02,910 --> 00:33:06,000 Long before the big campaigns of lynching that start taking place. 329 00:33:06,480 --> 00:33:09,560 And then there were two systems by which they were criminalised. 330 00:33:09,570 --> 00:33:14,940 One is that they were passed through the courts and then leased out to private operations, 331 00:33:15,090 --> 00:33:19,170 ranches, mines, agricultural operations that had used slave labour. 332 00:33:19,770 --> 00:33:22,020 And then after that was reformed and changed. 333 00:33:22,030 --> 00:33:31,049 They were then they were they worked for the state on the convict lease system or the chain gang system in which they went out and built roads and 334 00:33:31,050 --> 00:33:39,360 built the infrastructure of the South and played a very important role in the economic reconstruction of the South after the defeat of reconstruction. 335 00:33:40,740 --> 00:33:47,760 So that that's, you know, that's the best known example. And so when people today sort of hyperbolically talk in the United States about the 336 00:33:47,760 --> 00:33:52,169 United States has never had as much racist racism in the criminal justice system, 337 00:33:52,170 --> 00:33:58,260 it's you know, it's more racist now than ever before. People have either a very short memory or don't know that history. 338 00:33:58,290 --> 00:34:05,129 I mean, they're you're talking about and there's good studies of this people on convict systems or on chain 339 00:34:05,130 --> 00:34:11,820 gangs that they had death rates of up to 20 or 25 and sometimes 30% of the of the prisoners. 340 00:34:11,820 --> 00:34:15,720 And these systems died on the in the job and the criminalised work. 341 00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:22,979 So, yes, they weren't in a prison because the South had very few prisons actually until the early 20th century. 342 00:34:22,980 --> 00:34:28,920 But before that, people were just in a sense, the prison was sent out into the into the workplace. 343 00:34:30,360 --> 00:34:34,490 What's less known is that in the West, the same the same process took place. 344 00:34:34,500 --> 00:34:43,079 You could call it the red codes that native peoples, indigenous peoples who'd gone through [INAUDIBLE] to survive the genocide on the West Coast were 345 00:34:43,080 --> 00:34:48,030 then treated in the same way people could be rounded up and criminalised and then often sold. 346 00:34:48,030 --> 00:34:52,110 Children were sold all over the state as a labour force. 347 00:34:53,130 --> 00:34:56,580 Men were less likely to be captured and sold. 348 00:34:56,580 --> 00:34:58,860 They were more likely to be killed on site, 349 00:34:59,340 --> 00:35:06,330 and women were then ended up in domestic service and also ended up being raped in households throughout the state. 350 00:35:07,500 --> 00:35:12,030 The children and grandchildren of that surviving population were sent to the Indian boarding schools. 351 00:35:12,540 --> 00:35:21,869 You're probably familiar with the big campaigns going on in Canada about restoration and and and repayment and apologies and so on. 352 00:35:21,870 --> 00:35:23,729 In the United States, we've never really had that. 353 00:35:23,730 --> 00:35:28,860 But the Indian boarding schools, I think, are an important part of the early prison history of the United States. 354 00:35:28,860 --> 00:35:35,220 They tend to get separated out from prison history. But the reservation on the boarding school, in my mind, was a cultural institution. 355 00:35:36,000 --> 00:35:39,600 And the criminalisation of free African-Americans and the roundup and criminalisation 356 00:35:39,600 --> 00:35:44,460 of Native Americans recalls what happened here in England between 1688 and 1820, 357 00:35:45,270 --> 00:35:52,470 when the rising capitalist class criminalised all kinds of new offences against property, creating one of the most vicious criminal codes in Europe. 358 00:35:53,160 --> 00:35:57,150 It's what Thompson called a plain enough case of class robbery. 359 00:35:57,870 --> 00:36:03,179 He had a really great way with words. And back in the United States, in the wake of the gold rush, 360 00:36:03,180 --> 00:36:10,440 Mexicans were lynched at a rate comparable to the rate of lynching of African Americans, something that's not widely known. 361 00:36:11,130 --> 00:36:18,180 While Chinese immigrants were herded into ghettos and sent to, many of them were sent to San Quentin as, quote, dope scenes. 362 00:36:18,600 --> 00:36:24,719 So today, if you walked into San Quentin, probably the best known major prison in California and you looked around, 363 00:36:24,720 --> 00:36:28,350 you would immediately notice the black prisoners, the brown prisoners. 364 00:36:28,350 --> 00:36:31,620 There would be a disproportionate number of the people that you would see there. 365 00:36:32,070 --> 00:36:36,240 But if you'd gone into San Quentin in the 1880s and looked around, you'd have seen Chinese prisoners. 366 00:36:36,240 --> 00:36:43,930 Maybe one in five or one in four. In the 1900s it was the Philippines, as I said, with the US military rounding up without trial, 367 00:36:44,230 --> 00:36:49,000 hundreds of thousands of Filipinos holding them in concentration camps. 368 00:36:49,720 --> 00:36:53,770 And this is where they first tested the effectiveness of waterboarding is torture. 369 00:36:54,100 --> 00:37:00,600 I have a picture in the book never been published before of the US military using waterboarding for the first time. 370 00:37:00,610 --> 00:37:03,640 So it's practised a long time before the Iraq war. 371 00:37:06,010 --> 00:37:10,840 In the 1920s it was Mexicans who were targeted again as dolphins during World War Two. 372 00:37:10,870 --> 00:37:19,480 Of course, you many people know that 120,000 persons, persons of Japanese descent were imprisoned without trial for crimes they did not commit. 373 00:37:19,990 --> 00:37:27,070 And after 911, in the name of fighting terrorism, the US government rounded up and registered thousands of Muslim men in the United States, 374 00:37:27,460 --> 00:37:32,380 despite the fact that about three quarters of all violent acts and killings done for political reasons, 375 00:37:32,920 --> 00:37:36,550 committed by white right wing extremists who are not required to register. 376 00:37:37,210 --> 00:37:40,660 And from Obama to Trump, the government has detained and deported millions. 377 00:37:41,560 --> 00:37:45,520 And long before African-Americans were singled out for, quote, mass incarceration, 378 00:37:45,700 --> 00:37:50,380 a term that I'm not particularly favourable to, though I understand its political uses. 379 00:37:50,830 --> 00:37:55,150 Long before they were singled out for mass incarceration and the prison boom in the 1980s, 380 00:37:55,540 --> 00:37:58,720 they were already a majority of prisoners in several states. 381 00:37:59,950 --> 00:38:04,780 And when Donald Trump conjures up images of wolf attacks to describe young men of colour as he's done, 382 00:38:05,080 --> 00:38:08,110 he draws upon the long tradition of biological eugenics. 383 00:38:08,590 --> 00:38:12,190 Indeed it is, as James Baldwin says, a long tale to tell. 384 00:38:13,570 --> 00:38:19,300 To sum up, Trump's ideas and policies about crime and the carceral state have a deep bipartisan pedigree. 385 00:38:20,350 --> 00:38:27,130 But to make sense, I think of this long history of punishment through policing and an imprisonment in the name of criminal justice. 386 00:38:27,460 --> 00:38:31,000 I think it requires a wide lens as well as a deep history. 387 00:38:32,830 --> 00:38:39,700 I'm not sure that population control is the best term to define what the criminal justice system does. 388 00:38:40,300 --> 00:38:44,400 But I think it's closer to what the criminal justice system in the United States does. 389 00:38:44,800 --> 00:38:52,120 It's more accurate than criminal justice system. Population control, I think, captures is closer to what actually goes on. 390 00:38:52,990 --> 00:38:59,020 So Albert Woodfox didn't what the guy that did more than 40 years in solitary and then go to prison in Louisiana. 391 00:38:59,320 --> 00:39:03,010 He writes in his book, he says, We were there in solitary, not because of what we did. 392 00:39:03,400 --> 00:39:08,140 We were there because of who we were. I think this insight has broader implications. 393 00:39:10,180 --> 00:39:13,660 It is not only a long tale to tell of urban police, jails and prisons. 394 00:39:14,050 --> 00:39:19,000 They have played and continue to play a critical role in maintaining inequality and continue to 395 00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:25,180 play a critical role in trying to enforce injustice in the United States and on public order. 396 00:39:25,600 --> 00:39:30,970 But police and prisons, I argue in the book, are part of what Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice, 397 00:39:31,450 --> 00:39:38,310 and a remarkable dissent in the case a few years ago called the carceral state to get to be precise about it. 398 00:39:38,320 --> 00:39:44,200 She said the police, and I'm quoting her now, treat countless people as though they are not members of a democracy, 399 00:39:44,530 --> 00:39:47,950 but subjects of the carceral state just waiting to be catalogued. 400 00:39:48,520 --> 00:39:52,270 It's a very brilliant dissent, but also she makes it a very personal dissent, 401 00:39:52,600 --> 00:39:56,290 talking about her own attitudes and relationship, about the history of racism. 402 00:39:57,700 --> 00:40:02,589 So the term that I use in the book is Castle State. A number of other people are beginning to use this term as well. 403 00:40:02,590 --> 00:40:08,320 It's not my invention as a way to try to get away from the limits of using the term criminal justice system. 404 00:40:08,800 --> 00:40:14,260 And the Castle State, when you look at its history, I think is prolific and promiscuous in its scope and its operations. 405 00:40:14,740 --> 00:40:16,140 And here we find that the courts, 406 00:40:16,150 --> 00:40:23,560 the work of the Castle State is carried out by a wide variety of agencies and organisations beyond the police and prisons. 407 00:40:24,160 --> 00:40:28,149 Consider the following examples. So it was the military, 408 00:40:28,150 --> 00:40:32,530 National Guard and private security forces that repressed the labour movement and 409 00:40:32,530 --> 00:40:36,760 tried to stop workers from joining unions in the late 19th and early 20th century. 410 00:40:37,150 --> 00:40:42,459 The earliest model for the professionalisation of policing in the United States came from the private companies, 411 00:40:42,460 --> 00:40:46,600 and they were basically hired by businesses to go after the labour movement. 412 00:40:47,110 --> 00:40:51,010 When professionalisation of policing begins in the late 19th and early 20th century. 413 00:40:51,550 --> 00:40:52,240 One model, 414 00:40:52,240 --> 00:41:00,760 one important model for that professionalisation of policing the private other private police operations that really work is vigilante operations, 415 00:41:00,760 --> 00:41:03,850 you know, like taking out a Pinkertons, which still exists. 416 00:41:03,860 --> 00:41:12,340 It has another name now and Burns and it was US officials in the military in the Philippines in the 1900s who tortured civilian prisoners. 417 00:41:12,790 --> 00:41:20,619 And it was teachers during World War One who collaborated with the government in enforcing what was now the required Pledge 418 00:41:20,620 --> 00:41:26,650 of Allegiance that schoolchildren had to get up every morning and pledge their allegiance to the United States of America. 419 00:41:26,680 --> 00:41:32,500 This is one of the early examples of the nationalist movement successes in the United States, 420 00:41:32,920 --> 00:41:39,130 and it was also a way of trying to stop people from expressing opposition to World War One or to have. 421 00:41:39,290 --> 00:41:47,659 The United States joined World War One. So at one religious organisation that was would not allow their kids to say the pledge was the Jehovah's 422 00:41:47,660 --> 00:41:54,740 Witnesses who their religious beliefs has a religion that's taking a priority over civil government. 423 00:41:55,190 --> 00:42:02,120 So they told their children not to pledge allegiance. As a result, teachers and schools forced those children out of the schools. 424 00:42:02,510 --> 00:42:10,250 And many Jehovah's Witnesses, I don't know the exact number, but were then prosecuted and sent to prison for telling their kids to do that. 425 00:42:11,900 --> 00:42:18,080 In the 20th century it was social workers, professional organisations and middle class reformers who led the child saving movement. 426 00:42:18,200 --> 00:42:27,559 Thank you for your plug. Before, who led the child saving movement from the Progressive Era to the 1960s that resulted prior to World War Two in the 427 00:42:27,560 --> 00:42:35,180 trial and the conviction really without trial and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of children of immigrants. 428 00:42:35,780 --> 00:42:44,269 And after World War Two targeted predominantly kids of families of colour, black kids in particular, who ended up filling the filling? 429 00:42:44,270 --> 00:42:52,310 The reformatory is that reformatory that operated very much like prisons, even though they were justified as being benevolent and saving children. 430 00:42:53,210 --> 00:43:00,770 And it was public health work and social workers and government agencies that led campaigns during World War One to incarcerate without trial. 431 00:43:01,040 --> 00:43:06,290 Some 30,000 women accused of sexual independence and infecting troops with venereal 432 00:43:06,290 --> 00:43:11,390 disease while the men got treatment and entertainment and in the in the war camps. 433 00:43:12,500 --> 00:43:15,710 And it was the same agencies that in the name of eugenics, 434 00:43:16,220 --> 00:43:25,040 led the campaigns to sterilise without consent some 60,000 mostly white working class women before World War Two and after World War Two. 435 00:43:25,050 --> 00:43:30,590 Hundreds of thousands, maybe more women of colour, women, mostly women of colour, 436 00:43:30,800 --> 00:43:34,400 Puerto Rican, Native American and African-American for the most part. 437 00:43:35,480 --> 00:43:42,770 And it was local, state and federal government agencies that implemented the purging of gay men from government jobs in the 1950s, 438 00:43:43,340 --> 00:43:47,150 with one in three man reporting and studies that were done in the early sixties. 439 00:43:47,690 --> 00:43:52,460 One in three gay men reporting incidents of repression, harassment, imprisonment, 440 00:43:52,850 --> 00:43:57,200 which is comparable to the experience today of young African American men with the police. 441 00:43:57,830 --> 00:44:02,819 And again, it was social workers during the Clinton administration who enforced the purging of 3 442 00:44:02,820 --> 00:44:07,940 million impoverished families from public welfare and subject to then and to this day, 443 00:44:07,940 --> 00:44:12,560 subjected women on welfare to surveillance practices and daily humiliations, 444 00:44:12,860 --> 00:44:19,310 treating them in the same way that police and jails treat poor young men as inherently criminal and not to be trusted. 445 00:44:19,910 --> 00:44:26,780 And it was national security agencies of agencies that since 911 have made Muslims into suspects and made 446 00:44:26,780 --> 00:44:32,690 Mexicans into criminals and deportees and local governments that have legislated so-called civility codes, 447 00:44:32,810 --> 00:44:38,060 you know, clearing people off the streets, that transformed beggars on the homeless into criminals. 448 00:44:39,440 --> 00:44:45,409 So I argue that the causal state involves a whole set of institutions that plays a critical role in preserving 449 00:44:45,410 --> 00:44:51,790 and reproducing inequality and enforcing injustices in a society of enormous wealth and extraordinary quality. 450 00:44:51,800 --> 00:44:56,030 You can take to Paris, you can try to reduce that inequality and injustice, 451 00:44:56,450 --> 00:45:02,150 or you can beef up a muscular system of social control to keep things as they are in the United States. 452 00:45:02,180 --> 00:45:04,190 They've consistently taken the second choice. 453 00:45:05,180 --> 00:45:12,380 So these examples confirm that the causal state is routinely mobilised against whole populations on the basis of who they are, 454 00:45:12,650 --> 00:45:18,979 not on what they did or do. It operates as though the United States has a fixed quota of exclusion and 455 00:45:18,980 --> 00:45:23,510 repression that it must meet in order to maintain a sense of national identity. 456 00:45:24,590 --> 00:45:34,810 So that's the continuity. So what's new? There's also, I think, some significant, dangerous and ominous new developments in the United States. 457 00:45:34,820 --> 00:45:41,120 I don't think of Trumpism. Trump's version of law and order is not limited to the United States, as we well know. 458 00:45:41,570 --> 00:45:48,260 And I don't think it's simply a reversion to the past, some kind of nostalgic return to a previous era of the United States. 459 00:45:48,740 --> 00:45:52,220 And I certainly don't think it to be a revival of 1930s fascism. 460 00:45:53,270 --> 00:45:56,360 A lot of people in the United States have not studied 1930s fascism, 461 00:45:56,360 --> 00:46:05,120 and I think use that language of equating Trump's interest in fascism and spouting of fascist ideas as though we were living in that kind of system. 462 00:46:05,390 --> 00:46:09,920 Not that it couldn't happen, but it's I think it's a really premature way of assessing what's happening. 463 00:46:10,730 --> 00:46:16,370 But what I do think is what is happening is that Trump's exercise of power is much more ruthless and direct, 464 00:46:17,030 --> 00:46:25,070 much less preoccupied with issues of legitimation and winning hearts and minds, or serving as a model of freedom and democracy. 465 00:46:25,760 --> 00:46:29,930 From the Lyndon Johnson pregnancy, the pregnancy, the presidency. 466 00:46:31,700 --> 00:46:37,580 From the Lyndon Johnson presidency to Barack Obama, Republicans and Democrats alike. 467 00:46:37,850 --> 00:46:44,299 There's been a great deal of. The occupation about the use of the criminal justice system as not just an instrument of force, 468 00:46:44,300 --> 00:46:49,070 but also as an instrument of legitimation in the gramscian sense of that. 469 00:46:50,180 --> 00:46:56,690 And they've constantly tried out different gambits for trying to make the police more accepted in communities in which they work, 470 00:46:56,690 --> 00:46:59,810 to make them more professional, to make them more likeable. 471 00:47:00,530 --> 00:47:08,600 So in the 1950s, I think the priority was like getting testing the police to try to weed out authoritarian personalities. 472 00:47:08,960 --> 00:47:14,660 That was the way that it was tried to be done then and then it was increasing levels of education, of recruiting cops, 473 00:47:14,660 --> 00:47:19,910 of colour, recruiting women cops, putting the cops through multicultural training in the United States. 474 00:47:20,840 --> 00:47:24,580 The latest fad is getting the police to recognise their unconscious racism. 475 00:47:24,590 --> 00:47:31,729 I don't know if that's become something here in the U.K. And again, James Baldwin, I think, 476 00:47:31,730 --> 00:47:37,910 is brilliant on this and brilliant on the police, because he says, you know, there's no way that you can humanistic police the ghetto. 477 00:47:38,090 --> 00:47:44,600 I mean, once you decide to segregate populations, treat them as inferior and dangerous and send the cops in, 478 00:47:45,020 --> 00:47:50,060 asking them to be nice and likeable is totally contradicts, contradicts what they're there to do. 479 00:47:51,440 --> 00:47:55,009 And none of these things worked. But that's but it wasn't for lack of trying. 480 00:47:55,010 --> 00:47:59,550 So Obama set up taskforces and commissions to try to figure out ways of doing that. 481 00:47:59,570 --> 00:48:03,410 He tried to reduce the amount of military equipment that went to police departments. 482 00:48:03,890 --> 00:48:05,959 He had the police to start wearing cameras, 483 00:48:05,960 --> 00:48:12,560 which became a nice little contract for one of the I think it was maybe the Taser company that got the camera contracts and so on. 484 00:48:14,090 --> 00:48:17,870 And so there's been a real long time preoccupation with that. 485 00:48:18,140 --> 00:48:22,550 But Trump has made a break with that, and I think that's a significant break. 486 00:48:23,300 --> 00:48:30,140 He's now seeking a military budget of $750 billion, which is more than the spending of the next seven countries combined. 487 00:48:30,620 --> 00:48:36,860 At home, we've seen ruthless tax cuts and gutting of environmental regulations. 488 00:48:37,430 --> 00:48:42,860 There's a toughness and resolve in putting the logic of law and order into practice that we haven't seen in a long time. 489 00:48:43,370 --> 00:48:47,930 And as David Bromwich writing I think in the London Review of Books recently noted, 490 00:48:48,410 --> 00:48:54,980 he said Trump's narcissism and recklessness are wholly compatible with the cunning that we tend to underestimate. 491 00:48:56,120 --> 00:49:02,060 So let me now give a few brief examples of how the new hard line is taking form. 492 00:49:03,290 --> 00:49:09,830 So when Trump came to power, it was very difficult for him to be tougher on immigration than Obama. 493 00:49:11,330 --> 00:49:14,870 Obama tried to do a deal. He was always trying to do deals. 494 00:49:14,870 --> 00:49:21,230 He had, you know, a belief that you could sort of negotiate a deal between the centre and the right, all of which failed. 495 00:49:21,710 --> 00:49:23,750 But the deal around immigration went like this, 496 00:49:23,750 --> 00:49:33,770 that if Congress would pass legislation giving a path to citizenship for the 800,000 plus people who came to the United States as children, 497 00:49:33,770 --> 00:49:40,249 undocumented with their parents, grandparents and family members, and it wasn't like a soft path to citizenship. 498 00:49:40,250 --> 00:49:40,549 You know, 499 00:49:40,550 --> 00:49:48,390 it would actually weed out a lot of people because you have to either have a job or be in the military or be in a university and not have a record. 500 00:49:48,410 --> 00:49:54,020 I mean, if you're impoverished in the United States and been living there a long time, it's pretty hard not to have a record. 501 00:49:54,380 --> 00:50:01,340 So it wasn't like this was like, you know, grant amnesty and give them citizenship overnight and they had to prove that, etc., etc. 502 00:50:01,790 --> 00:50:06,110 And in exchange for that, Obama said, we'll be very tough on the border. 503 00:50:06,320 --> 00:50:10,370 We'll be very tough on cracking down on people who are here as immigrants have committed crimes. 504 00:50:10,910 --> 00:50:17,300 And so Obama then detained in prison and deported more people than every previous president combined. 505 00:50:17,870 --> 00:50:24,259 I mean, he really he really got tough setting up courts on the border so you could speed up the processing of people if they 506 00:50:24,260 --> 00:50:29,749 got across the border and either send them to prison or send them back across the border if they tried a second time, 507 00:50:29,750 --> 00:50:32,570 then they went to prison in the United States to federal prisons. 508 00:50:33,680 --> 00:50:41,870 So I think the wall the symbolism of the wall that Trump has emphasised is partly his way of trying to find some symbolic, 509 00:50:41,870 --> 00:50:45,440 cultural way of promoting a policy that's tougher than Obama. 510 00:50:45,590 --> 00:50:47,360 It's been very difficult for him to find that. 511 00:50:47,960 --> 00:50:55,640 But the one place also where we're now beginning to see an increase in in arrests and detentions and deportations, 512 00:50:55,970 --> 00:51:00,440 where the numbers are beginning to go up to be comparable with what happened under Obama. 513 00:51:00,950 --> 00:51:01,969 But more significantly, 514 00:51:01,970 --> 00:51:12,320 what's taking place is research and reports are coming in that a lot of a lot of people are internalising the causal state by limiting where they go. 515 00:51:12,800 --> 00:51:20,090 So we see a reduction in the number of families and people of Mexican origin, for example, going to church on Sunday. 516 00:51:20,780 --> 00:51:25,250 We see people limiting the family occasions and celebrations that they go to. 517 00:51:25,970 --> 00:51:31,580 We see people going to hospitals only if there's a major emergency and dropping off the person that has the 518 00:51:31,580 --> 00:51:37,010 illness or the severe illness and then leaving that person in the hospital as opposed to staying with the person, 519 00:51:37,280 --> 00:51:44,490 which they usually do. So in a sense, you could see the you know, the cultural imagination is now affected a lot of people. 520 00:51:45,630 --> 00:51:51,090 It's estimated that something like 80% of all agricultural workers in California, for example, are undocumented. 521 00:51:52,710 --> 00:51:54,000 So that's that's one change. 522 00:51:54,030 --> 00:52:02,999 The second change change is that that through the Department of Justice, through his attorney generals and through, in particular, 523 00:52:03,000 --> 00:52:12,630 the work of Vice President Pence, we see a lot of tough measures quickly going into place around criminal justice issues or control issues. 524 00:52:13,320 --> 00:52:21,780 For those of you who've wished for the impeachment and removal of Trump, you might want to be careful about what you wish for. 525 00:52:22,470 --> 00:52:32,010 If we had President Pence in power, you would have a much more disciplined, white, right wing, evangelical, Christian, 526 00:52:32,430 --> 00:52:41,370 anti-feminist, anti-gay, people hating president who has been that throughout his political career when he was in Congress. 527 00:52:41,850 --> 00:52:43,589 I don't know if you know this, but when he was in Congress, 528 00:52:43,590 --> 00:52:54,659 he he actually petitioned for a bill that had gone through that would have denied birth control through doctors or through pharmacies to women, 529 00:52:54,660 --> 00:52:59,370 except to married women, that women who weren't married would not have been able to get birth control. 530 00:52:59,430 --> 00:53:02,220 I mean, that sort of gives you a sense of where its politics are. 531 00:53:02,730 --> 00:53:09,180 So he's been really the he's been the hands on practice man in a couple of areas that are really important. 532 00:53:09,930 --> 00:53:14,510 For example, there is some talk about prison reform, and I'll come to that in a minute. 533 00:53:14,520 --> 00:53:16,350 But there's no talk of police reform. 534 00:53:16,380 --> 00:53:24,150 I mean, you can do a, you know, a Google search for police reform from the White House or Congress and so on, which was very big under Obama. 535 00:53:24,150 --> 00:53:28,020 Obama put a lot of energy into that, failed to put a lot of political energy into it. 536 00:53:28,320 --> 00:53:31,560 That's disappeared. Ideas of reforming the police. 537 00:53:31,920 --> 00:53:37,590 And in fact, Trump has been going to police conventions and giving them a green light for roughing up people. 538 00:53:37,590 --> 00:53:40,740 Or, as he puts it, you don't have to be nice to people when you arrest them. 539 00:53:42,060 --> 00:53:48,780 Also, Trump undid Obama's executive order, which reduced the amount of military hardware that can go to police. 540 00:53:49,740 --> 00:53:55,649 And then in the judicial level, we see now a stacking of the Supreme Court in the in the federal appellate courts that we've 541 00:53:55,650 --> 00:54:01,150 not seen since the Nixon administration and will no doubt exceed what Nixon was able to do. 542 00:54:01,170 --> 00:54:10,170 There's a massive stacking of federal appellate courts and below that of not just conservative jurists, but right wing conservative jurists. 543 00:54:11,340 --> 00:54:16,260 And they're going to take one more appointment of the Supreme Court to swing the Supreme Court for ten, 20 years. 544 00:54:17,850 --> 00:54:22,770 So the other thing that Pence is very involved in and which people tend to not pay enough attention to, 545 00:54:22,770 --> 00:54:28,979 the we're paying attention now because of what's happening in Alabama is that there's a lot of activism, 546 00:54:28,980 --> 00:54:36,209 right wing activism going on at the state level. So we see many legislatures are passing anti-abortion bills. 547 00:54:36,210 --> 00:54:39,660 The most severe one was passed this week in Alabama, 548 00:54:39,660 --> 00:54:49,350 where 25 white male Republican members of the Senate of Alabama made abortion the sign of a foetal heartbeat, 549 00:54:50,460 --> 00:54:58,080 a crime with the doctors who perform abortions going to prison and not excluding women who have been raped or subject to incest. 550 00:54:58,920 --> 00:55:00,930 It's the most extreme version we've seen right now. 551 00:55:01,500 --> 00:55:07,560 But since 2010, at the state level, there've been about 420 anti-abortion pieces of legislation passed, 552 00:55:08,010 --> 00:55:12,450 and they're preparing the groundwork to go up to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe versus Wade. 553 00:55:12,960 --> 00:55:18,050 Roe versus Wade is very limited as well. It doesn't give women automatically the right to abortion. 554 00:55:18,060 --> 00:55:22,590 It gives women the right to abortion if their doctors agree with the decision. 555 00:55:22,920 --> 00:55:26,880 And if there are abortion clinics available that you can go to and it can afford to go to, 556 00:55:27,300 --> 00:55:32,700 and that's not available in many parts of the United States. So five more minutes. 557 00:55:32,700 --> 00:55:39,450 Okay. So prison reform, maybe we'll come back to the last thing that I'd emphasise then about the one thing I 558 00:55:39,450 --> 00:55:43,020 said about prison reform is being co-opted and taken over by the libertarian right. 559 00:55:43,380 --> 00:55:46,710 And if you want to talk about that, we can come back and discuss it. 560 00:55:47,640 --> 00:55:52,590 The final thing that I think is important to look at in terms of Trump administration that is provided political space, 561 00:55:52,590 --> 00:56:01,440 encouragement to neofascist groups. So there's often been relationships in the United States between government and an extreme right wing groups. 562 00:56:01,770 --> 00:56:06,750 We saw it during World War One, during the the nationalist movement to go to war. 563 00:56:07,590 --> 00:56:11,100 We saw it, for example, in the 1950s in the Los Angeles Police Department, 564 00:56:11,100 --> 00:56:16,800 when a thousand or more police officers belonged to the right wing John Birch Society and did so openly. 565 00:56:18,060 --> 00:56:25,050 But in the last 10 to 20 years of of political government in the United States, that relationship has been covert. 566 00:56:25,080 --> 00:56:31,350 It's not been publicly recognised and encouraged. So under Trump, it's become much more respectable to be a white nationalist, 567 00:56:31,350 --> 00:56:36,000 to be homophobic, to be patriarchal, to express hatred of Muslims and so on. 568 00:56:36,540 --> 00:56:38,610 And that's been facilitated by an important. 569 00:56:38,680 --> 00:56:46,089 Part of Trump's political coalition, which is the leadership of police, sheriffs, border patrol organisations, 570 00:56:46,090 --> 00:56:52,060 jail organisations and so on, where the leadership there and the extreme right wing of politics. 571 00:56:52,480 --> 00:56:55,630 Rank and file cops and sheriffs are all over the political spectrum. 572 00:56:55,750 --> 00:57:00,430 They're conservative, but we're talking about right wing ideologues at the leadership level. 573 00:57:01,030 --> 00:57:04,900 So having said all that, I'll conclude with what's to be done. 574 00:57:05,080 --> 00:57:17,350 Okay. Oh, my time is up. I'm sorry. So fascist ideas and tendencies are always present, even inside democracies, as we've learned from Paul Gilroy. 575 00:57:18,220 --> 00:57:24,940 But I think it's premature to call the current moment fascism. I call the current moment one of authoritarian disorder. 576 00:57:25,660 --> 00:57:31,450 I think there are so many cracks in the system and there are many fissures and many openings for doing all kinds of political work. 577 00:57:32,050 --> 00:57:35,200 The causal state is by no means a coordinated system. 578 00:57:35,620 --> 00:57:40,030 It functions, in my mind, more like something out of Kafka than out of George Orwell. 579 00:57:41,710 --> 00:57:46,900 So I think one of the things that we have to do in this current moment, 580 00:57:46,900 --> 00:57:52,630 and this is what I've been trying to do in the book as a as a way for the activist movement to hopefully to use it, 581 00:57:53,020 --> 00:57:57,600 is to do what Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights activist, called bring this thing out into the light. 582 00:57:57,610 --> 00:58:01,660 That is look coldly and clearly what's going on and what we're up against. 583 00:58:01,810 --> 00:58:05,640 And I think this is a very difficult, challenging time. 584 00:58:06,040 --> 00:58:10,600 And for those of us who work in the United States or in England as intellectuals, 585 00:58:11,050 --> 00:58:13,960 I think there's some very hard, challenging intellectual work to be done. 586 00:58:14,050 --> 00:58:18,640 It's not clear, you know, exactly how things are unfolding that's unfolding very quickly. 587 00:58:18,970 --> 00:58:25,840 And I think the challenges for serious intellectual work are major, but it's sort of a core to what we need to do in this times. 588 00:58:26,380 --> 00:58:32,140 And for those of us who work in criminology, sociology, law and society and related fields in the United States, 589 00:58:32,590 --> 00:58:39,940 we need to both understand the complicity of our discipline in building and legitimating the causal state and in challenging its current, 590 00:58:39,940 --> 00:58:43,660 current wilful myopia, lack of morality and timidity. 591 00:58:43,900 --> 00:58:45,549 Maybe we'll have some argument about that, 592 00:58:45,550 --> 00:58:54,220 but I'm sort of shocked by how the most of what goes on in the name of criminology continues in the face of like this moral, 593 00:58:54,220 --> 00:59:00,820 political, cultural, political crisis that we're facing for activists today. 594 00:59:00,820 --> 00:59:07,750 And there are many of us, I think we need to join efforts to alleviate human misery and provide services that are not provided by the government. 595 00:59:08,380 --> 00:59:13,930 We need to join efforts to implement important reforms in the coastal state and some examples from the 596 00:59:13,930 --> 00:59:18,069 US that have been around for a long time that would make a difference if they went into practice. 597 00:59:18,070 --> 00:59:21,610 Our restoration of voting rights to the formerly incarcerated. 598 00:59:22,030 --> 00:59:25,570 Elimination of cash bail. Civilian review of police. 599 00:59:25,960 --> 00:59:28,930 Restorative justice. Policies that are now a big thing here. 600 00:59:29,350 --> 00:59:35,110 And drastic reduction of the prison population to bring this in line with the United Nations and human rights standards. 601 00:59:35,140 --> 00:59:40,600 All of those ideas are, you know, sensible proposals that would make a significant difference. 602 00:59:41,590 --> 00:59:44,830 And that being on the left being thought of as ideas for a long, long time. 603 00:59:45,130 --> 00:59:49,120 But we're a long, long way from seeing them become a possibility in the United States. 604 00:59:49,570 --> 00:59:55,570 In addition to that, we're engaged in the work of defence and resistance that is trying to stop things getting worse, 605 00:59:55,690 --> 01:00:03,880 not just improve things, but trying to stop things getting worse, such as efforts to reverse Roe versus Wade, to expand incarceration via technology, 606 01:00:04,240 --> 01:00:09,850 to give the cops more firepower and greater impunity, to build new jails, which is a big thing going on right now. 607 01:00:10,570 --> 01:00:13,060 So all of these efforts are important and should be supported. 608 01:00:13,540 --> 01:00:20,440 At the same time, we should note they're not the same as substantial changes that challenge structures of inequality and injustice. 609 01:00:21,190 --> 01:00:25,450 And we can't blame only the coastal state and now the Trump administration for our problems. 610 01:00:25,870 --> 01:00:29,410 Splintering and divisions within our movements also profoundly weakens us. 611 01:00:29,950 --> 01:00:37,600 We too often find that we too often fail to find unity on the basis of what James Baldwin called the sorrow of the disconnected. 612 01:00:38,350 --> 01:00:44,140 Our challenge, I think, is to rebuild a social and political movement that will bridge the enormous divide 613 01:00:44,530 --> 01:00:47,680 between all the different activist movements currently in the United States. 614 01:00:48,220 --> 01:00:55,270 And I don't think we should give up on big ideas and structural reforms that would substantially make a difference in people's everyday lives 615 01:00:55,270 --> 01:01:03,910 and substantially alter relations of power and create new centres of democratic power such as democratising and demilitarising policing. 616 01:01:04,450 --> 01:01:06,880 Or asking the question What are the police good for? 617 01:01:06,910 --> 01:01:13,090 There's a whole beginning of a movement in the United States to think about taking away a lot of the things that the police do 618 01:01:13,090 --> 01:01:19,660 and putting that that work into communities and other agencies or to develop a humanistic welfare system that we've never had. 619 01:01:20,380 --> 01:01:24,910 And we never know when a spark will later would light a fire and energise a movement. 620 01:01:24,970 --> 01:01:30,610 Let's remember that it was protests against the police killing in a small place like Ferguson that led to 621 01:01:30,610 --> 01:01:35,740 the Black Lives Matter movement becoming a national movement that compelled a meeting with the president. 622 01:01:36,190 --> 01:01:39,909 And it was a high school protest. For gun reform in Florida. 623 01:01:39,910 --> 01:01:46,060 That prompted a former Supreme Court justice in The New York Times, no less, to call for the abolition of the Second Amendment. 624 01:01:46,960 --> 01:01:47,590 And finally, 625 01:01:47,590 --> 01:01:55,150 I think we need to learn from the right's effectiveness in promoting a dystopian vision of the future that anchors and propels law and order policies. 626 01:01:55,600 --> 01:02:05,860 We need a comparable progressive vision. We keep saying this in this moment of resistance and defence, in this era of a long and unstable interregnum. 627 01:02:06,310 --> 01:02:10,810 To articulate a vision of social justice might seem like pie in the sky and a waste of energy. 628 01:02:11,440 --> 01:02:17,200 But I think to get support for progressive policies, however modest, would require widespread endorsement. 629 01:02:17,590 --> 01:02:25,749 And this will only happen if we speak to people's anxieties and aspirations without a movement and long term vision that engages people good policies. 630 01:02:25,750 --> 01:02:30,430 Whether I think it will take an unprecedented project of coalition building, 631 01:02:30,730 --> 01:02:35,650 a revitalised imagination and reckoning with a historical legacy that bleeds into the 632 01:02:35,650 --> 01:02:41,180 present to make the criminalised human again and to end the tragedy of the punitive state. 633 01:02:41,590 --> 01:02:45,460 Beyond these walls. Walls that contain millions of our brothers and sisters. 634 01:02:45,880 --> 01:02:49,180 Walls that divide us. Walls that partition our ideas. 635 01:02:49,180 --> 01:02:53,680 And walls that cut us off from the past. Sweet freedom still faintly calls. 636 01:02:54,130 --> 01:02:54,520 Thank you.