00:00We have reached an all-time high here in the state of California.
00:16There are over 50,000 correctional employees, 165,000 men and women incarcerated in our
00:24prisons.
00:25The number, at no time, is going down.
00:27When I started in the prisons business, there was 30,000 people inside of our state prisons.
00:32There were 12 state prisons.
00:34Today, we have 33 state prisons.
00:37But I think if you were to talk to any public defender, they would be able to identify numerous
00:44cases in which the sympathy of everyone involved in the case, from the police to the jurors,
00:52the prosecutors, the judges, would have been entirely different, and the interpretation
00:58of events would have been entirely different if the defendant had been white rather than
01:02black.
01:03And so it's not, as some people might suggest, that there are more African Americans using
01:10drugs and therefore they're more likely to be arrested.
01:14It's just the opposite.
01:15There are fewer African Americans using illegal drugs, yet they're arrested at three times
01:21the rate of whites.
01:24We know there is no more drug abuse happening in the inner city than in the suburbs.
01:31If you really want to catch a bunch of drug abusers, don't go on a housing project, go
01:36on a frat house.
01:37You'll get all the drugs you want and all the arrests you want.
01:41But the system knows that if any police department sent its drug unit onto Harvard's campus and
01:49arrested the sons and daughters of privileged, the police chief would lose his job by Monday
01:53morning.
01:55And we now in the United States have an incarceration rate that's the highest in the world, and
02:01we have an incarceration rate that's worse than South Africa at the height of apartheid.
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