Transcriber: Ellen Maloney Reviewer: Denise RQ
I've been thinking about criminal justice reform,
and I think you should be too.
I'm Dan Satterberg,
I'm the Prosecuting Attorney for King County, Washington,
I've been a prosecutor for 30 years, and this is what I've learned:
the criminal justice system doesn't sit on an island all by itself.
In fact, I see the criminal justice system as a big machine,
right in the middle of the spectrum of the community that we live in.
In the criminal justice system,
we receive some of the society's most complicated problems;
addiction, mental health issues, domestic violence.
We receive issues that are complicated by poverty and by institutional racism.
We receive young men who are under-educated and under-appreciated,
who don't believe there's any hope for themselves.
They all show up at our door.
And as a prosecutor for 30 years,
I also know that we have limitations about what we can do,
that not all of society's most complicated issues
can be solved in a courtroom or with a prison cell.
So when we think about criminal justice reform,
I think about it in three different steps.
First, the input.
What is it that causes people to become involved with crime
and become involved with the criminal justice system?
We think then about the process;
what happens when a person is charged and they find themselves in court?
That process that we know so well, that process that we have funded so well?
And third, what is the output?
What should we expect to be the result of somebody who goes to prison?
What should society expect of them, and what should we expect of society
when we receive people who've come from prison?
This is a good time for criminal justice reform
for three reasons.
First of all, we've never been safer.
In the United States, our crime rate is back to 1965 levels.
But second, we have build such a large criminal justice system
that the mass imprisonment in our country has become a major social issue,
and it has become a major fiscal issue.
It's no longer sustainable for state governments
to continue to build and fill prisons;
we have to do something else.
And maybe most important is the bill has come due,
and is felt most harshly by the communities most impacted by crime.
There is a deep divide of mistrust in our community and in our country
between the communities that are feeling the brunt as victims of crime,
and feeling the brunt as inmates,
and as defendants, and as part of the criminal justice system.
They no longer trust the intentions of those of us who are running the system,
but who are also working in the name of the People.
This deep divide compels us to do something, and to do something now.
It compels us to listen to the voices of the people who don't trust the system,
and to build a community that serves us all.
The amazing thing that we know right now of why this is such a good time
[is that] serious crimes in the state of Washington are down 43% since 1980.
That's not a headline that you see in the newspaper,
but it's been a steady decline, and it continues today;
we've never been safer.
At the same time, we've invested vast sums of public money,
- the average taxpayer burden -
in the infrastructure of criminal justice which includes police, prosecutors,
defense attorneys, courts, and prisons like this one.
That's gone up tremendously; the average taxpayer burden.
And so, what are we going to do at this point?
I think we have to stop and acknowledge first of all
that the state of Washington has done some things
that make us different from the rest of the United States.
That's good news, and it's also bad news.
We've done some of the easy things
that they're just waking up to in Louisiana and Texas.
We've already done them.
Our incarceration rate in the state of Washington
is among the ten lowest in the United States.
We incarcerate 269 people per 100,000, that's a meaningless statistic.
Unless you look south at Oregon where they incarcerate more.
If you want to see anything that's wrong
with any part of government anywhere, just look past Oregon to California
where they've managed to incarcerate so many people,
that the US supreme court has said,
"You have to release 30,000 inmates right now
because you've failed to provide mental health treatment for them."
As bad as California is as an example where they have had 500% increase
in the rate of incarcerations since 1980,
they can't hold a candle to the rest of the United States.
The United States continues to be the world's jailer.
What about Washington state?
Well, we have 18,000 people in prison.
Does gender matter?
I don't know, it's a guy thing; 93% are men.
But what Washington has done
is use the prisons for people who have been convicted of violent crimes,
about 70% of people who are serving time in state prisons
are there for a violent offense.
Only 8% are there serving time primarily [for] a drug offense;
about 19% property crimes, about 20% sex offenders.
What has happened though, as we have built a system,
even though we have not used incarceration as much as other states,
we do have a racial dis-proportionality in our system that's absolutely undeniable.
That people of color,
although they represent about 16% of the state population,
they represent more than 30% of the inmate population.
And we are at 100% capacity right now.
As little as we think we've used incarceration,
the inn is full, the bill has come due,
and the legislature has no interest in building another prison.
The message is very strong to those of us in the criminal justice system;
live within your means.
Figure it out, let's do something to reduce our reliance on incarceration.
When I think about criminal justice reform,
I have to step over here and start thinking about the power of education,
and what it can do to keep people from getting involved
in the criminal justice system.
We know that today,
three out of four inmates in state prison dropped out of high school.
And we know nationally that if you drop out of high school,
you're five times more likely to go to prison during your lifetime
than if you stay and get a high school diploma.
And if you go to college, any amount of college,
the chance of being involved
in the criminal justice system is minuscule.
One of the sad things we've been talking about lately
is something called the "school-to-prison pipeline".
When I first heard of it, I thought, "School isn't to send people to prison,
school is to get people ready for college and for life."
But the truth is that all of those complicated social issues
that come to the doorstep of the criminal justice system,
also come to the schoolhouse.
And schools have been using exclusionary disciplinary practices;
kicking kids out of school for being defiant, for being troublemakers.
Kicking them away from the peers, kicking them to the sidelines
while the educational process continues without them.
School-to-prison pipeline is a real thing,
and it's about how schools handle discipline.
The smart school districts today are starting to handle
the school disciplinary problems in school; to give a separate classroom
where the kid who's getting kicked out of school can learn,
can catch up with their peers.
Or where they can identify what the problem is,
why they can't behave.
Well, maybe they never learned to behave in the norms of the classroom at home,
so we've got to teach it to them at school.
But we just can't throw away these kids.
I don't mean to criticize teachers; they have a tough job.
Kids today, they're disrespectful, profane, and they're music's terrible.
They're just like we were!
(Laughter)
Exactly like we were, except adults in my life didn't give up on me,
and we shouldn't give up on them.
What about the mental health system?
I hesitate to even call it a system, I think it's an air-quote "system".
You saw the robust funding that we've had for the criminal justice system
that has come at the expense of providing help for people who are mentally ill.
We know the situation in our country; we have lost 95%
of our state's psychiatric bed inpatient capacity since the 50s.
The 50s were not a time that we want to go back to.
We warehoused people, we experimented on them with medicines,
and with procedures that were inhumane; not something we want to replicate.
But when we de-institutionalized the mental health system,
the promise was, "You'll be able to get help on the outside."
And we never kept that promise.
We need to do more in the mental health system.
What about the criminal justice system?
I don't mean as a prosecutor to just be pointing my fingers at others
and say, "You do your job better!"
We have to do our job better too.
The first thing we have to do is to make sure we exercise quality control.
Like I say, not every complicated issue in the world's going to get fixed
in that courtroom or in that prison cell.
We should be diverting cases to a caring community ready to help,
whether it's a mental health court,
whether it's a drug program like we have in Seattle called "LEAD"
where we, upon arrest,
a person with an addiction can be brought right to a treatment facility.
We do that with young people on their first brush with the law;
instead of going to see some judge or some prosecutor,
they go see people who grew up in their community,
who can help them with the difficulties of growing up.
In my office, we decided to no longer file "driving while license suspended";
that was driving while poor,
those are people who could not pay their speeding ticket,
got their license revoked,
and having never committed a crime other than a speeding ticket,
find themselves in this endless spiral downward,
where they could get arrested, spend time in jail, and lose their job,
all because of that.
That was not fair, and so we have things that we have to do within the system
to divert people back to the community and out of that courtroom.
In the system, we have constitutional promises to keep,
and that's something we must continue to do.
Make sure there's adequate representation,
that there's fair trials, that there's due process.
And yes, we have more to do in sentencing reform.
But my point is
if all we do is think about criminal justice reform
as what happens after a person's been charged
until that person's sentenced,
we're never going to do anything about mass incarceration,
we're never going to do anything about racial disproportionality.
This is a system built by lawyers for lawyers,
it is going to be things we can do at the margin to make it more fair.
I support Three Strikes Reform,
I support ability to review people who have been given long sentences
when they were young who are not young anymore,
I think there's a lot we can do to make our system more fair,
but we have to think about it more broadly.
And the first thing we should think about is what happens when you get in prison.
I don't mean to criticize DoC because I'm in your house today,
but I think, since 1980,
that the Department of Corrections has been doing everything they can do
just to build enough beds to maintain the flow of inmates.
We went from 9,000 to 18,000 in 20 years.
And in an effort to focus on the quantity necessary of prisons,
I think we forgot to focus on the quality.
What is the experience that we expect this captive audience to undergo?
How are we going to prepare them?
I will say as a prosecutor that there's people we send to prison
that I think deserve to be in prison,
I think the community's better when they are in prison,
there's some people who've done heinous acts,
or have such criminal psychopathy
that it would be foolish to advocate for their freedom.
But how big a percentage is that?
Because we know that most people are going to get out.
We know the average sentence is 40 months, means you are going to do 24 months.
Most the people we send to prison are coming right back out,
and what have we done to prepare them,
and prepare the community for their return?
There's a couple little things we can do in DoC right now.
We can start by, when people are at the gate, about to be released,
we can start by giving them an identification card that says,
"State of Washington; Welcome back to the state."
Instead of "Department of Corrections; we'll see you next time."
I think so much of what we do here is we anticipate recidivism,
we build for recidivism, and it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We should lift this ridiculous ban on using state money
to pay for higher education in prison when we know that a little bit of college
can help mature the mind and help keep a person away
from the criminal justice system upon release.
But right now, all of the good work that's being done
is being done by private non-profits.
The state of Washington has a ban, it's illegal,
to spend a dime of state money on higher education.
With what we know
about online legal education right now, and what a privilege that would be,
and how that could be used in the system,
I think that's a very foolish policy.
Beyond those little symbolic things which are super important,
clearly, we need more education or vocational opportunities in prison.
Re-entry begins on your first day;
we all say that, we believe that,
but we don't provide the opportunities for people to change,
until the very end of their sentence, if at all.
And clearly, we need to do a better job of assessing trauma,
of assessing mental health issues,
of helping people who end up in our system get better.
That was clear in the Supreme Court case in California
that said, "If the government is going to lock you up,
then the government has a moral and legal obligation to provide,
not just for your biological health but for your mental health."
And it's good for the community as well.
What happens when people come out of the system right now?
Well, we hope, the whole point of sending you to prison is one and done,
and you will become a taxpayer someday.
The road to being a taxpayer,
because that is what we all want to be; contributors to society.
We have a long way to go.
The standard re-entry program for a lot of people getting out of prison today
is still that 40 dollars gate money,
I think you get a clean set of clothes, you get that prison ID.
You get a ticket back to the county you were convicted from,
whether you want to go there or not.
At the gate, those of you who've been at the gate,
people are highly motivated to never come back.
Yet, we know in the state of Washington,
that within three years of being released, 28% of people are back in prison.
And if you know our legal system that means not just being arrested.
But you have to be arrested and convicted of a crime
with a seriousness level high enough to go to prison and not jail.
And 28% of the people do that within three years.
So what happens to that highly motivated person at the gate who wants to get out,
when 28% are back within three years?
Well, we've made it difficult.
We've made it difficult by having things like collateral consequences.
Those are things that, it wasn't the judge who set these collateral consequences;
it was society, it was Congress, it was people saying,
"You can't have a place in public housing,
and you can't get a loan to go to college."
There are 90 different professional licenses in the state of Washington
you can't even apply for if you have a felony conviction.
We need to do something to identify why we have those collateral consequences,
and recognize that they are an enemy to the goal that we all share,
which is re-entry.
So when I think about criminal justice reform, I step back.
I step away from just the lawyers and just the system,
and I think about the community that we serve.
What would happen to the way we think if we no longer made this distinction
between criminal justice and social justice?
I hear people talk about social justice
as like the opposite end of the spectrum of criminal justice,
and the truth is it's just justice.
I mean, is it social justice or is it criminal justice to make sure
that every child in this state can go to school and can graduate?
And if they have these behavioral problems,
that we'll take care of them not kick them out to the street.
Is it social justice or criminal justice
to make sure that people having mental health problems
can get help in the community when they need it?
And not wait until they've been victimized or arrested.
Is it social justice or criminal justice
to welcome people back to the community after they've paid their debt to society?
I think it's just justice.
One other thing that I have learned in my 30 years as a prosecutor
is that we have the power to shape the system.
We have the power together to build a system that reflects our best values,
and our best aspirations for ourselves and for our children.
I look forward to working with you in thinking about criminal justice.
Thank you.
(Applause)