Valerie Jarrett: Thank you,
Stephanie, and good
morning, everyone.
Welcome to the White House.
We are delighted to have you
here for what we believe
will be a historic week,
focusing on reentry around
our country.
I want to begin by
recognizing our partners
here today, the Brennan
Center for Justice, who
you'll be hearing from more
lately, as well as the
American Enterprise
Institute, I think good
examples of how broad the
political spectrum is that's
focusing on this issue.
From the progressives to the
conservative, all around the
country people understand
the need generally for
criminal justice reform, and
specifically to make sure
that the 600,000 people each
year who return back to our
communities can do so in a
way that will allow them to
become law-abiding members
of society and eliminate the
enormous recidivism rate
that we're seeing around
the country.
The President this week in
his weekly address said it best.
He said, "We know that
simply locking people up
doesn't make
communities safer.
It doesn't deal with the
conditions that led people
to go into criminal activity
in the first place," and
obviously we know
that that's the case.
And to the private sector
folks who are here today,
you realize the impact that
our current criminal justice
system is having on our
economy, and we're going to
be able to drill down into
those numbers a bit in the
course of our conversation.
Throughout the week, the
administration is sponsoring
activities all
across the country.
The Department of Justice,
through the Bureau of
Prisons and the U.S.
Attorneys, is going to have
550 events, all throughout
the country, focusing on
what can we do to help
people, and to raise
awareness on the ground from
a whole range of
stakeholders, so that when
they are released they have
the skills they need, and
they are able to get a job
and again be law-abiding
members of our society.
You'll be -- we have
announcements that are
coming from the Department
of Housing and Urban
Development, the Department
of Health and Human
Services, the Department
of Veteran Affairs, the
Department of our -- right
here in the White House, as
you will hear from Jason
Furman from the Council of
Economic Advisors.
All of the agencies have
been focusing on what can we
do to this very important
issue of reentry.
Now, reentry, as we all
know, fits into the broader
picture of criminal justice
reform, and last summer, the
President gave a speech
where he focused on three
buckets: the community,
the courthouse, and
the cellblock.
So we have a collective
responsibility, and I know
many of the advocates who
are here, together with the
private sector, have been
focusing on improving our
communities, and it's
everything from early
childhood education
to breaking the
school-to-prison pipeline,
to breaking the sexual
assault-to-prison pipeline,
to ensuring that every child
gets that fair shot.
The President's My Brother's
Keeper initiative is another
way of helping young boys
and men of color get that
fair shot and follow a
life free from crime.
So we have to improve
our community.
We also have to improve the
courtroom, and as you've
been seeing, there is
bipartisan support right now
for federal legislation that
would reduce the mandatory
minimums for nonviolent
drug offenders, that would
reinvest back into our
system so while people are
incarcerated, they have
everything from job training
to counseling to substance
abuse counseling, whatever
they need to be able
to return to society.
We know that right now over
half of the folks who are
incarcerated have some sort
of mental illness, so the
best objective, of course,
is to treat them early, as
soon as it's diagnosed, but
certainly while they're
incarcerated, part of our
responsibility is to help
them, again, so that they
have whatever they need to
be able to reenter society.
We're also focusing on what
happens in the cellblock.
That's the reinvestment.
That's ensuring that job
opportunities are available.
A couple of weeks ago,
here at the White House we
announced our Fair Chance
Business Pledge that really
generated enormous support
from the business community.
Several months ago, when
we went around to business
leaders and said, "We know
that you're hiring people
who have been incarcerated;
would you be willing to come
forward and talk about it?"
and we were met with
a deafening silence.
And many companies did it,
they just simply didn't want
to talk about it.
But over the course of the
last few months, we've made
a lot of progress.
When we launched this
Fair Pledge, we have nine
companies, and many of them
big-name companies, who
agreed to come forward,
and it was everyone from
Pepsi-Cola to Coca-Cola to
Coke Industries, Facebook,
etc. But since that
time, we're now up to 90
companies, and so we're
asking people who are
interested, people who
employ folks all across our
country, recognizing that
they are better off if they
have a job as opposed to not
having a job, that will make
our communities safer, and
it'll improve our economy,
to go on the White House
website under Fair Chance
Hiring, and sign
up for this pledge.
It sends a very important
message about who we are as
a people.
Part of what has also been
extraordinary has been the
broad base of support
from faith leaders to the
business community, to
advocates, to think tanks
from all political
spectrums, recognizing that
if we reform our criminal
justice system, our
communities will be safer
and our economy will
be stronger.
We have -- we spend $80
billion a year on criminal
justice, on mass
incarceration.
We have five percent of the
world's population, yet 25
percent of the
world's prisoners.
What was a stark statistic
for me was to know that
since 1985 the number of
women who are incarcerated
has gone up by 400 percent,
and as you'll hear from
Jason later, that for
children who have a father
who's incarcerated, there's
a 40 percent chance, greater
chance, that they
are in poverty.
And so the statistics are
very clear, and what we
really need now is to just
continue to build on the
momentum, and not just at
the federal level, but the
state level as well.
We know that occupational
licenses, for example, are
mostly regulated at state
level, and that there are
many states that just have
blanket prohibitions against
anyone who's been
incarcerated, particularly
for a felony, to
get a license.
Forty percent of our jobs
require some sort
of a license.
And, again, great work that
Jason did earlier in the
year demonstrates the fact
that if we were to change
those state requirements
and tailor the occupational
license actually
appropriately by reviewing
it, then we would be able to
employ so many more people.
So, a good example is people
who are incarcerated are
often taught how
to be barbers.
Well, you need a
license to be a barber.
So asking our states to take
a hard look at how we are
licensing is another
important step.
Along the same lines today,
the Attorney General,
Loretta Lynch, will not only
be visiting a prison in
Philadelphia, but she'll
be sending a letter to our
nation's governors, asking
them to provide state IDs to
people when they are
released immediately,
because if you have a state
ID, that's a first step
towards being
able to get a job.
So there's so much that we
can do if we work together.
And I guess I want to just
close by saying that I do
feel we are at a unique
moment right now.
The nation is focusing on
this issue in a way that it
hasn't really before.
With the number of people
who -- 2.2 million people
who are incarcerated, and
the 70 million who have
interacted with our criminal
justice system, it touches
every community in America,
and it used to be a topic
that we just tried to brush
under the carpet and ignore.
From the data we've seen and
from the human toll that
we've observed,
that's unsustainable.
And so, with your help, we
actually believe we can make
great change.
For that, I thank you, and
I would like you to welcome
Arthur Brooks, who's the
president of AEI who's going
to come up and
give a few remarks.
Thank you very
much, everybody.
(applause)
Arthur Brooks: Thank
you so much, Valerie.
What an honor it is for me
and my colleagues from AEI
to be here and participate
in this event.
Thank you to the White House
for hosting, and to the
Brennan Center for being
part of this as well.
AEI, for those of you who
don't know, is a think tank
here in Washington.
My colleagues and I are
really dedicated, at the end
of the day, to two basic
values: human dignity and
human potential.
And there are relatively few
subjects that scream out for
these values more than
what's on hand here today.
There are going to be a lot
of facts that you're going
to be hearing
from our panel.
I'll ask you to
consider three.
The first is that only
a third of America's
incarcerated have any access
to vocational or educational
programs while in prison,
thus leaving them almost
entirely unprepared
for life after prison.
The second fact is
that about half of the
incarcerated are
functionally illiterate.
The third follows from the
first two facts, which is
that 60 to 70 percent of
all parolees end up back in
prison within the first
three years after
being released.
Now, as Jason Furman and
Doug Holtz-Eakin pointed out
in their op-ed in the New
York Times last week and
they're going to talk about
here today, our society pays
an enormous material
price for this.
It creates an enormous
amount of economic inefficiency.
Now, as much as it pains me
as an economist to admit it,
however, this really
isn't about the money.
This is about the lives
that we're throwing away.
I want to take a few minutes
here at the outset to remind
myself and all of us that
the economic case for reform
is really just a proxy for
something that's much deeper
that we're talking
about here today.
My colleagues and I at AEI
are working with the best
nonprofits in the country
that have a visionary notion
of how to use human lives,
how to integrate our society
better along all different
strata of where people are,
whether they're incarcerated
or free, whether they're
educated or not, and we've
been working lately with a
group in New York City
called the Doe Fund.
Some of you may
have heard of it.
It specializes in men who
have really all the strikes
against them: they're
homeless; they've been
incarcerated mostly; they've
been addicted to substances
in the main; they've
abandoned their families;
they're not working.
What does it do
with these guys?
It puts their -- helps
them put their lives back
together by helping them to
understand that our society
needs them, and
needs their work.
This is a subversive
and radical concept.
The first time I met men
from this organization, I
was in New York City and I
met a man by the name of
Richard who had been in
prison for 22 years, since
he was 18 years old, and he
was working for the
first time.
About a year after being
released, he was working for
a low wage, a job that some
people, some people here in
Washington, D.C., might
call a dead-end job.
He wouldn't have
considered it such.
He was working for an
exterminator agency.
And I asked him how his
life was going and he
demonstrated how it was
going by showing me an email
on his iPhone.
He took out his iPhone, the
first one he'd ever owned --
and you know, that's not
the secret to happiness,
although it's pretty cool
-- and he said, "Read this
email; it's from my boss."
It says, "Emergency bedbug
job, East 65th Street.
I need you now."
I said, "So?"
He said, "Read it again.
It says, 'I need you now.'
Nobody in my life has ever
said those words
to me before."
When we hear today about
the economic cost of mass
incarceration, remember
that that's a proxy for not
needing people.
What do we need to do?
Not throw away money?
No, we need to not
throw away people.
That's really what
we're all about.
What can we do to need even
the people who commit crimes
and who are in prison?
That's a question we're
dedicating to answering in
the coming year at the
American Enterprise
Institute as we work on
inmate education and
reentry programs.
That's a question that I
hope we will begin to
answer today.
And, by the way, one more
thing before I close.
You know, I think that we're
looking -- many of us are
looking for a way to bring
ideological opponents
together in this country.
There's a deep problem with
political polarization
that's troubling probably
every single person in
this room.
What better way to bring
people together than to look
at those at the periphery of
our society, and say, "What
can we do together
to need them?"
This today can be the
beginning of needing every
citizen in our society,
including those who've been
in prison, and to bring
ourselves together as a
result of it, no matter
where we sit on the
political spectrum.
Thank you for the
opportunity to change the
debate in this country, for
your hard work, for your
interest in this topic, and
it's an honor to be a part
of this effort.
(applause)
Michael Waldman:
Thank you so much.
I'm Michael Waldman.
I'm the president of the
Brennan Center for Justice
at NYU School of Law.
We are thrilled to be
part of this event, to be
co-hosting with the American
Enterprise Institute, and to
be here with all of you in
the White House, and to
learn from and understand
this significant new report,
and this significant new
dialogue about the economic
costs of this very
human problem.
First of all, I want to
thank and acknowledge Arthur
Brooks for his remarks, and
for the creativity that he
brings to public policy.
Those of us who read his
dialogues in the New York
Times and elsewhere are
always in line with him, and
we're really glad to be
doing this together.
I want to thank Valerie
Jarrett for her powerful
voice and passion that she
has brought to this issue
and that the entire
administration has brought
to this vexing issue,
something that, in a moment
of polarization and division
and dysfunction, has united
communities from across the
political spectrum, and
we're very grateful, again,
to be part of this discrete
aspect of it.
We want to thank and
acknowledge Jason Furman and
the Council of Economic
Advisors, who've done really
path-breaking work on this.
And I want to thank my
colleagues at the Brennan
Center for Justice,
including several board
members -- Tom Jorde and
Emily Spitzer -- and the
members of our economic
advisory board, some of whom
you'll be hearing
from shortly.
As we all know, and as
you've heard, this is a
singular moment in one of
the most challenging issues
facing our country and that
has faced our country for years.
This is a topic, of course,
that has been at the center
of American history, at the
center of our concerns, but
in so many ways the
magnitude of the problem has
been hiding in plain sight.
This is one of those
issues where the aggregate
statistics in some ways can
have a punch-in-the-gut
impact greater
than anything else.
The fact that we have five
percent of the world's
population and 25 percent
of the world's prison
population is not only
wrong, it is shocking.
We all know that there are
costs to that phenomenon,
social, moral,
racial, and economic.
We know as well that we're
having this conversation at
a time when crime is down
dramatically over where it
had been.
A fact that creates the
opening for us to have a
reasoned and creative
assessment of what we ought
to do, and we know that the
level of incarceration and
overcriminalization that we
have in our society simply
is not necessary to keep our
streets safe and keep our
communities safe.
One of the studies that the
Brennan Center of Justice
did last year assessed the
impact of mass incarceration
on public safety and found
that it had very little to
no impact on keeping our
streets safe at this moment
in time.
It's also a singular moment
because of the remarkable
coming together across
communities, across
ideological perspectives,
across partisan
perspectives, that we
see around this issue.
We'll be hearing from
business leaders, from some
of the top economic
thinkers, and a conversation
like this could be
replicated in rooms across
the country.
I can't think of any other
issue on which I've ever
worked where there's this
much of a genuine seeking of
common ground.
It's not merely that there
are two sides, and they kind
of each give up something,
and they find themselves,
perhaps to their own
astonishment, in the same
place, but people are coming
to this with similar views
and similar goals, each
because of their own
core aspirations.
It's striking to me that
AEI, which is renowned as a
free enterprise-oriented
institution and think tank,
has placed at the center of
its thinking about this the
very human -- the human
stories and the
human narratives.
I was struck also by the
concept of human dignity.
The Brennan Center for
Justice is 20 years old.
It was started by the clerks
and family of the late
Supreme Court Justice
William Brennan.
We're affiliated with NYU
School of Law, and while we
don't take our work from the
specifics of his opinions,
we take our values from his
notion that at the heart of
the law was, as he put
it, the concept of
human dignity.
And we have found, in
working on this issue of
mass incarceration, that
the rigor and the impact of
economic analysis
is matchless.
Three years ago, we focused
our criminal justice work
under the leadership of my
colleague Inimai Chettiar,
who you'll be hearing from
on mass incarceration, and
understanding that bringing
the tools of economics and
of the economics profession
was something we could
help with.
And we believe that there
are measurable costs
and benefits.
We believe that there
are tremendous and often
unexamined social negative
consequences from the
current system, and we
believe that the very
financial incentives built
into budgeting and the
entire governmental system
that steered us, often
unthinkingly, towards where
we are now can help steer
us, with better foresight,
away towards a wiser policy.
We have launched -- and this
is actually the first public
event to utilize their
generous services -- we've
launched an economic
advisory board of some of
the country's top
economists, including folks
you're hearing from today:
former Treasury secretary
Larry Summers, Professor
Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Laura
Tyson, Glenn Loury, and a
whole bunch of others from a
whole array of perspectives
helping us to understand and
kick the tires on our work
to make sure that it meets
the top rigorous standards
as we meld economic analysis
with core legal analysis.
Because of that focus, we're
thrilled to be able to be
part of this event.
This report you're about
to hear about is
really a landmark.
It is rock-solid.
It brings together the top
minds at the CEA around
something that is as
important as M1
and M2 or
anything they might be
focusing on, and I am
delighted to introduce to
you to talk about the new
report Dr. Jason Furman.
As you know, he is the chair
of the Council of Economic
Advisors, one of the leading
public economists
in the country.
Before this, I should note
he, among other things,
headed the Hamilton
Project at the Brookings
Institution, proving that he
was prescient beyond words
in understanding how cool
Alexander Hamilton could be
to a wide audience.
So, Dr. Jason Furman.
(applause)
Jason Furman: Thank you.
Thank you for that
introduction, Michael.
President Truman was
reported to have been
frustrated with his economic
team because every time he
asked them for advice on
something, rather than
telling him something clear
and direct, they would tell
him, "Well, on the one
hand..." and then they would
say, "On the other hand..."
And he said he wanted to get
himself a one-handed
economic adviser.
The topic we're discussing
today is one that really
lends itself to a one-handed
economic adviser, because as
our team, led by CEA member
Sandy Black with Nirupama
Rao, Emily Weisburst, and
Gabe Scheffler, put together
this report, the research
on this is really clear.
It's really consistent.
It goes across party lines,
as we heard a little bit in
the openings and as
we'll hear on the panel.
And the changes we've seen
in policy over the last
decades that led to the mass
incarceration, that led to
the increasing difficulty of
reincorporating people into
the workforce, wasn't
because of some, you know,
set of studies or research
or analysis done by
economists, lawyers, or
criminologists; it was for
other reasons.
And using that evidence,
that research, can help us
point in a better direction.
Now, we don't have all the
answers on this topic, like
many other topics, but we do
have a lot of them, and the
issue is to put them in
place at the federal level
and also encouraging a
conversation at the state
and local level.
We put out a 79-page report.
I'm going to take you
through some of the
highlights of it very
quickly, and, you know, my
goal in doing this is not
only to summarize the
report, but to take what was
really morally an uplifting
set of comments by Arthur
Brooks, and prove that
economists really are not,
for the most part, morally
uplifting and elevating,
but can show you lots
of numbers.
So, begin with the fact
that we've heard many times
before: the incarceration
rate grew more than 220
percent between
1980 and 2014.
It grew at the federal,
state, and local level.
Total spending on
incarceration is over $80
billion a year, and in fact,
there are 11 states that
spent more on corrections
than on higher education.
If you look at us in
comparison to other
countries, the United States
is second, as you'll see in
the next chart, in the world
in incarceration rates,
second to the Seychelles.
So every medium/large
country in the world has a
lower incarceration rate, on
average one-fourth what the
incarceration rate is
in the United States.
This big increase in
incarceration has happened,
as you can see in the next
slide, despite a substantial
decline in the crime rates,
with the violent crime rate
falling 39 percent and the
property crime rate falling
52 percent.
One of the exercises we go
through in the report is we
say what if criminal justice
policies had remained the
same, they hadn't changed,
and you just saw this
evolution in crime rates.
What would have happened
to the incarceration rate?
The answer at the state
level is the incarceration
rate would have actually
fallen by seven percent.
Instead, it rose by 125
percent, and at the federal
level, the incarceration
rate also rose much faster
than you would have
predicted given the decline
in crime.
So the question
is, what happened?
Just in immediately
accounting for the
incarceration, not delving
into the actual causes, but
just the pure
accounting exercise.
It's not that there's more
crimes, it's that there's
greater severity of
sentencing and
increased enforcement.
Between 1984 and 2004,
nearly all crimes
experienced a substantial
increase in time served and
time served for drugs
offenses in federal prisons
more than doubled over
the last two decades.
At the same time, arrests
have come down with the
decline in crime, but they
haven't come down as much.
The arrest rate has
risen and that has also
contributed to this increase
in incarceration, and once
again, drugs has played a
big role, with drug arrest
rates increasing by over 90
percent over this period.
The question, then, is what
caused this decline in crime.
There's lots of debate among
economists among exactly
what it was.
The one thing that pretty
much all the evidence agrees
on is what it wasn't, and
that is the increase
in incarceration.
First of all, the evidence
is that, like so much in
economics, there's declining
benefits to
additional incarceration.
You're getting increasingly
less violent, less dangerous
people as you expand
incarceration, so that has
less of an impact on crime,
and you're keeping people in
prison for longer after
the point, the ages, where
they're more likely to
commit further crimes.
When you look at studies,
they find that longer
sentence lengths, which is a
big cause of the increase in
incarceration, play -- has
little deterrent effect
on offenders.
One recent paper found that
a 10 percent increase in
sentence length corresponds
to somewhere between a zero
and 0.5 percent decrease
in juvenile arrest rates.
In fact, incarceration can
have the opposite effect,
which is that longer spells
of incarceration -- in this
case, the study finds
each additional year of
incarceration -- can lead
to an average increase in
future offending of four to
seven percentage points.
As I said, there isn't a
single agreed-upon cause of
the reduction in crime,
but demographic changes,
improving economic
conditions, and changes in
policing tactics are three
of the theories that
people have.
The impact of mass
incarceration is not spread
evenly across
the population.
Although blacks and
Hispanics represent
approximately 30 percent
of the population, they
comprise over 50 percent of
the incarcerated population.
The incarceration rate for
blacks dwarfs the rate of
other groups, 3.5 times
larger than that for whites.
A large body of research has
tried to look carefully at
the causal role that race
plays in this, and finds
that, for similar offenses,
blacks and Hispanics are
more likely to be stopped
and searched, arrested,
convicted, and sentenced
to harsher penalties.
For example, even
controlling for arrest,
offense, and defendant
characteristics, prosecutors
are 75 percent more likely
to charge black defendants
with offenses that carry
mandatory minimums.
Interactions with the
criminal justice system are
also disproportionately
concentrated among poor
individuals and individuals
with high rates of mental
illness and substance abuse.
This all has substantial
consequences that Arthur and
Valerie both spoke
to in their comments.
One piece of evidence is
just the interview callback
rate for people with
criminal records is lower
than without criminal
records, and it's much lower
for blacks with criminal
records than it is for
whites with
criminal records.
Criminal sanctions can also
have negative consequences
for a range of factors
like health, debt,
transportation, housing,
and food security, and the
statistic that Valerie
was so struck by, the
probability that a family
is in poverty increases by
nearly 40 percent while a
father is incarcerated.
The fact that tens of
millions of Americans have a
record means this is
applying to a larger and
larger fraction of our
population over time and
playing a role in a range of
the economic challenges we
face, including the
long-term decline in the
labor force
participation rate.
It's important to understand
it's not just the criminal
justice system
that has costs.
Crime also has a very
substantial cost.
It produces direct damages
to property and medical
costs, pain, suffering,
fear, reduced quality and
loss of life, and it
affects some of our poorest
communities
disproportionately.
Economists trying to
estimate the social cost of
crime have a range of
estimates, but a reasonable
estimate of the mean or the
median is about $300 billion
a year.
This is something that's
serious and important.
The question, though, is
what are we going to do to
reduce this?
What's the most
cost-effective?
What's the most absolutely
effective way to do it?
A range of studies that we
surveyed -- and we tried to
look at high quality
studies, most of these
peer-reviewed in Economics
or other journals -- find
that a minority of studies
have found that greater
incarceration and greater
sentencing passes a
cost-benefit test; that is,
in some of these studies,
just looking how much does
it cost to put someone in
jail -- does that reduce the
likelihood of crime through
deterrence or keeping
them in prison?
In some cases, the studies
go further and actually
factor in all the collateral
damage: the increase in
poverty for their family,
the impact that that has on
society from crime.
In contrast, measures that
strengthen our communities,
like education, have
uniformly been found to pass
a cost-benefit test.
An important part of the
strategy to reduce crime is
strengthening our economy
and raising wages, and we
may not, everyone on the
panel, agree on the strategy
to raise wages, but put one
up that this administration
supports, and just use it to
contrast to incarceration.
Based on estimates in the
literature, if you increase
spending on incarceration
by $10 billion -- that's 12
percent a year, so a huge
increase -- that would
reduce the crime rate
by one to four percent.
And if you take into account
the cost of it versus the
benefits, the net societal
benefit would be between -$8
billion and +$1 billion, and
that itself is probably a
generous estimate, because
it doesn't factor in all the
collateral consequences
of that incarceration.
So incarceration's likely to
both have a smaller effect
on crime and a larger net
societal cost than what's
shown here.
Contrast that to raising the
minimum wage to $12 an hour
in 2020 that, for the sake
of this example, assumes no
employment effects.
That would have an even
larger impact on crime than
that incarceration change,
would have a net societal
benefit just from the crime
reduction, and that would be
true even if you include
employment elasticities from
the range of the
economic literature.
I want to conclude
by talking about the
administration's approach
to dealing with criminal
justice reform.
As Valerie outlined, it's a
holistic approach that first
of all is focused on the
community, strengthening the
economy, raising wages,
investing in early childhood
education, community
policing, and
policing transparency.
Ban the box licensing
exclusions.
That's something
Valerie highlighted.
There are right now 46,000
federal, state, and local
laws regarding the ability
of ex-offenders to work in
certain -- start certain
businesses, work in certain
jobs, or be in
certain occupations.
Forty-six thousand.
Many of those give no regard
whatsoever to when the crime
was committed, what the
nature of the crime was, or
the relevance of it for
the particular occupation.
That's something that we've
been working together with
Coke Industries, among
others, to encourage states
to take a look at in this
area and more broadly.
The secondary is the
courtroom and there's
bipartisan support in both
the House and the Senate for
sentencing reform, building
on steps we've already taken
in some drug sentencing.
An issue brief the Council
of Economic Advisers issued
earlier this year
highlighted the very
regressive nature of fines,
fees, and bail, which can be
proportionately much larger
for low-income households,
can often be inefficient
and in many cases not even
collected, and can have very
large economic consequences
without -- with very
different deterrent effects
for a high-income person
that wouldn't notice it as
compared to the low-income
person where it would
represent a substantial
fraction of their income,
and that's something DOJ has
been encouraging states and
localities to
take a look at.
And then, finally, the
cellblock, including
education, rehabilitation,
job training, a set of
measures that are being
rolled out across the
country this week as part of
Reentry Week, and steps that
the President and the
Attorney General announced a
few months ago to address
solitary confinement,
including the solitary
confinement of minors.
So we're really happy you're
all having a chance to be
here today to discuss
what we think is a really
important issue.
It's an issue that has a
lot of really important
dimensions, moral, legal,
political, but we hope to
convince you that the
economic and business one is
one of those important
dimensions as well.
Thank you.
(applause)
