Transcriber: Delia Cohen Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
You know, I want you to think for a moment
that you're going into an automobile dealership to buy a car.
And the salesperson comes to you and she tells you
that this car that you're looking at is likely to fail 70% of the time.
How many of you would buy that car?
But yet, we do this everyday in our justice system.
We have a system that has been socially broken for at least three decades.
We have broken down communities; we have broken down families,
we have broken down people,
and now we have a system that is economically broken.
We can no longer afford to incarcerate people
at the levels that we have.
We have a system where the definition of winning,
for the prosecutor, is to see how long can I lock you up,
regardless of whether that is going to fix the problem.
We have a system
where the defense bar defines winning
as how quickly can I get you out of this thing,
regardless of what that will do to the victim, the community,
or even their client.
I would say that we have to hack our justice system.
And the first hack is that we have to turn our court system upside down.
We can no longer afford to have lawyers talk, judges rule,
and no one listens to the victim, no one listens to the community,
and certainly no one listens to the offender.
We need to be sure to have an aggressive system
when we're dealing with people that are very dangerous.
But guess what?
The majority of the people that the criminal system deals with
are not dangerous.
In fact, the majority have substance abuse problems,
they may have mental health problems,
they're broken down in many ways.
And yet, we want to fix that problem by incarcerating those people.
We need a problem-solving court
where the prosecution, the defense, and the courts come together
to identify not what laws were broken,
but what was the harm,
who's responsible for causing the harm,
and how do we fix the problem?
Hack number two:
We need to bring the community back into our justice system.
You know, indigenous people had it right.
They took the village to deal with the problem,
and the village dealt with the problem.
But we - because we're so smart - we moved away from the village.
In San Francisco, we have created a very different reality for many.
We have a thing called "neighborhood courts"
where we have community members looking at the offender,
looking at the victim, and looking for a different solution.
And we do it at a fraction of the cost without creating criminal records.
(Applause)
Hack number three:
We have to end the war on drugs.
(Applause)
We can no longer incarcerate our young
because they're using drugs.
We can no longer incarcerate our young
because they may be selling drugs for subsistence.
And we certainly cannot continue to incarcerate our young
because they have a substance abuse problem.
It is unconscionable, it is immoral, it is unethical.
But yet, we continue to do that.
I have chosen to work to end that.
I don't know how many of you will walk up to an airline counter
and jump on an airplane where the airliner tells you
that they have a 70% probability of crash landing.
You probably wouldn't do that, right?
But we do that with the criminal justice system
And see, we're not buying cars when we're talking about
the criminal justice system; we're dealing with lives.
We're in the airline,
and we want to make sure that the airline lands safely.
We have an opportunity to make a difference,
and I hope that you all join me, this November,
to turn the war on drugs around,
and for the first time look at reducing penalties,
and putting money into education for k-12,
and putting money in substance abuse programs,
and putting money into mental health issues.
Thank you so much; I am very honored.
(Applause)