Novel Justice | Mass Incarceration Nation with Jeffrey Bellin

BRANDON GARRETT: So thank you all. Thank you for joining us for our lunch with Jeff Bellin. He's here to give a book talk about his book, Mass Incarceration Nation. Some of you may know Professor Bellin from William and Mary because I and others who teach evidence here at Duke use Jeff Bellin's evidence case book now. But we're here to learn more about Professor Bellin's most recent one of his six books called Mass Incarceration Nation. And I'm especially excited because I had read earlier draft

s of this and saw the project as it was taking shape. It reflects some of the very best qualities of Professor Bellin's work. Professor Bellin is balanced, careful, understands the system from the ground, was a former prosecutor in AUSA in Washington, DC, teaches evidence, which is a close to the ground class as well as other criminal procedure classes. In a big picture, the book is a response to single problem, single solution theories of mass incarceration and points the way to the complexity

of the problem. I kind of think mass incarceration would not be as mass and big as it is if there are simple solutions. And in general, first of all, I think we have some slides here. We have the cover of the book. And he's going to introduce some of the main findings and themes. But think of questions you want to ask. We're going to stop halfway for Q&A to talk more about this, and thank you all for being here. Let's welcome Professor Bellin. [APPLAUSE] JEFF BELLIN: Great. Thank you, Brandon. I

t's a real treat to present the book here because you can see two of my favorite academic legal academics are here with us. Both have been tremendously supportive throughout my career. And then thanks in addition for inviting me down here, Brandon, for your wonderful Center. So I'll give you a warning at the outset. So Brandon said I have a lot of books, but this is my only book that has an actual publisher, and even that was a challenge. When I was writing the book, I thought I saw it as-- the

goal was to reach kind of a broad audience and not just an academic audience. And so I tried to sell it to popular press editors. And the response-- this is why this is a warning-- that I got from them was, like, it's not entertaining enough. There's not enough of a hook to your explanation of mass incarceration. Because my explanation was, it's complicated. It's more complicated. And so some of the things that editors-- you have to get an agent to get a popular press. Some of the thing that age

nts would say to me were-- they have seared into my brain because I was so frustrated. But one of the agents said to me that nuance doesn't sell. And so that's true, but I can't just take out-- and they were very open to, I could change the book. So there's a chapter at the end that's like, we should basically do away with the entire federal law enforcement apparatus or most of it. It says abolish most of that, right? So this agent was like, you know what we could do? Make that your book. Just d

o that as your book. And I was like, but that's not the story mass incarceration. That's just like one tiny piece. He's like, but that will sell. That will sell. So what happened was I had to give up on the popular press to write the book that was more true to what's actually happening in terms of mass incarceration. And I'll tell you that story so that you'll see there will be less entertainment value, but more actual reality, more of what's actually going on. But I also think there's interesti

ng-- and I've toyed with the idea. And I think, again, no one will publish this-- writing something up about how hard it is to share with a broad audience any kind of complex explanation for events. And I think as you look at books that are out there-- and this is what happens when I see them. You can see the pressure that was put on the author to simplify and jazz up the theme. Make it more-- I guess, to make it sell. And so in a way, what that does to the public discussion. But anyway, you all

are here, so you're the last people I need to tell you this. You came anyway. And so I'll just walk through where I see mass incarceration, what I think is different about my approach to what happened and what people are missing and things like that. And I think one of the ways to read kind of my take on this is that my background is kind of unusual in that I was a prosecutor, but not really a federal prosecutor. So in Washington, DC, where everything is state, and so basically like a state lev

el prosecutor. But then I worked with the California Courts of Appeal and did a lot of criminal cases there as well. And then I worked in as a Professor when I first started in Dallas at SMU, then moving to William and Mary where I started teaching a seminar in mass incarceration. And I think having this perspective of having seen the way the system works in all these different places-- it's different in each state. One of the key things that I talk about in the book is how the different systems

are that give us mass incarceration. And then it's different at each place you are. So you see it at the trial level. You see it at the appeals court level, and then obviously, you see it in California. You see it in Texas. You see it in Virginia. It's different everywhere, and so that's where I come from in terms of-- well, there's a lot of nuance here. It's very hard to say, this is the thing that causes mass incarceration because the thing is different not just each state, but even within th

e state and within each office in the state and things like that. So I think being able to have both having taught it as a seminar as like a big picture perspective but also having been in the trenches kind of seeing what's actually happening gives me a unique perspective to tell the story, but one that no one is interested in except for you guys. All right. So let's talk through where I went. Oh, the other thing I try to do-- I think if you're speaking-- and you guys appreciate this. If you're

speaking about criminal justice in America today, I think unless you have numbers, you're not going to change anyone's mind. That's the only thing left that will actually change someone's mind. So if it's just like rhetoric or powerful words, that'll impress the people that already agree with you and just have no effect or probably push away people that don't. All right. This is, like I said, where we are-- really, where we were in 2019. And this is the stats that people have heard. Well, we wer

e the highest rate of incarceration and also the highest number. And then you can see there's some other countries, right, that-- it was just really remarkable that the United States had more people incarcerated than any other country in the world. And this was for a long time up until 2019. And I think rate is probably the fairest way to assess this, so 689 per 100,000 people in the general population. You'll see different rates, and people use different numbers. So they'll be like per adults b

ecause mostly adults are the ones-- but this is per 100,000 people if you've seen other rates. And then the other thing one of the key things I try to point out in the book is there's a temptation to be like, well, this is a Southern problem or it's like a problem in red states or something. But the truth is it's an everywhere problem. And so I illustrate that by showing that change between the '70s, which is kind of before we started on mass incarceration, and 2019 and the percent change. And s

o one big change was the federal system-- almost 500% change increase-- Texas, obviously. But California, right? So California is supposed to be a progressive state. And so it kind of defeats the narrative that it's just kind of one location-- certainly not in the South, Ohio. And then even if you just say, so these are the top ones-- and New York, by the way, kind of started early on reducing. So if you picked a different day, 2018, 2017, you could make that number higher, too. But, see, this i

s why it's an academic press book and not a popular press book, because even though I know that I can make these numbers better by just looking at another date, I didn't do it, because I was like, well, that's the right date, even if the New York number doesn't jump out at you. And then all the others-- that's all I'm going to say-- high as well. And then so here's what happened. Around-- in the '70s, we started to change things that I'm going to talk about. And that sent us up to 2.3 people inc

arcerated. So it's higher than 2019 because we started going down around 2008. And I'll talk about this in a second. That trend has continued. But what's really significant is not the kind of slight decrease at the end but the ramping up from 1980 to 2008. And I describe it as now like we're just kind of on a plateau. It's not like suddenly we're coming down the other end. We just kind of went up really high. And while there's some decrease now, we're basically stuck at this plateau of mass inca

rceration, all right? But there is change, right? So one of the interesting things is change. If you look at the 2020-- there's always a lag. So I don't have-- there's no numbers more than 2020. But if you look at the 2020 numbers, now the rate-- we're not at the highest rate of incarceration in the world. There are some smaller countries that are past us. And I actually think while the China number, the number is lower, they actually don't reveal a lot of information. So there's actually tons o

f people in China that are also incarcerated that aren't captured here. Also, they execute lots of people. So even the number-- I think we probably fairly aren't number one anymore. But still, this is still way too high. And one of the ways I talk about that is historically, our number wasn't anywhere like that. And if you look at peer countries like the UK, where-- I think, 137 per 100,000. So while there has been progress, and I think just the same point-- I'm not going to pretend there's no p

rogress to make the book seem more important. There has been some progress. But the way I think of it is we jumped to this high point and went down a little bit. And now we're kind of stuck with that at that still very high incarceration number. The other good kind of thing that's improved is that racially disproportionate incarceration has gotten a lot better since the peak of mass incarceration. So that's another thing that's improving over time. And so that's-- interesting to see if that tren

d continues. But that's worth noting. And then, finally, I joke about this. So I have Twitter, and I tweet things like this. More people will see this tweet now than when I tweeted it on Twitter. Just putting it on my presentation is the best way to get my Twitter out there. So I increased that. But here's the point. So I said, we've gone down a little bit in the last couple of years. But then last one that came out, we've gone up. So this is what I'm saying. I don't think it's like, oh, there w

as mass incarceration, and now it's over, and now we're going down. I think what happened is we went up really high. There was some awareness and some slight changes in policies. But also, the crime went way down. And so that also put pressure to reduce incarceration. And now the things you start to see-- so there was a huge change with COVID. And so that's kind of gone away. Law enforcement is back to normal. And then, also, there's this kind of backlash already to the modest reforms we've had.

And so I wouldn't be surprised if we just kind of go back up, or mostly probably just stay around where we are. But it's certainly not a problem that's ended. And so then the rest of the talk is going to be primarily on how this happened. And you might say, well, this is just history. But the way I frame this in the book is I think it's important if we can understand what happened. That's important to figure out how we get back to where we were. So if, as I talk about, these are changes we can

actually see, we can diagnose what happened with mass incarceration and, even if it's really complicated, see what changed. And then a way to get back to where we were is to just change those things back, right? So that's kind of how we frame why is the history important, because we're going to have to see what we did that caused the problem. And that would at least be part of our way of solving it, of stopping doing those thing, especially because think how hard it is to change things that aren

't in our control. So you're trying to solve the problem of climate change or, say, the pandemic. These are really hard problems to solve, because we don't control all the variables. But if you can show, like, here's how we went from-- because in the '70s, we had incarceration rates that were same as European countries, way lower than what we've got now, you see. We can go back to that. We've done that before. So, basically, all the changes-- we changed what we were doing policy-wise. We can kin

d of undo those changes. We can go back to what we were for as far as we keep records. Before the '60s, the incarceration rate was down. It's just there slightly over-- it was between 100 and 200, say, per 100,000. OK, so how did we get there? You can see that-- so the way I describe this in the book-- the one thing that seems like you can say, this is the starting point, was there was a crime surge in the '70s. And you can see it. I don't believe in crime data, basically, that period, except fo

r homicides. I think that's reliably captured. And I possibly will believe in car theft stats because people are forced to report car thefts, either for their insurance or because they start getting tickets, and they're like, well, that wasn't me. So I will reluctantly now tell you that my car was stolen. So I think those stats are good. And so I'm very skeptical of crime data generally. But I do believe in homicide data because everyone reports homicides. And police can't really fudge that peop

le are dead. And you can actually verify them with CDC numbers, too. So you don't have to just rely on the police. And so it looks like there was a real crime spike in the '70s. It's reflected in the homicide numbers, and a very significant jump. And I know that's not the cause of mass incarceration. What it is the cause of is a change in our policies. And so there was this sense of there's a lot of crime, and there's a lot of things that went into that. But one of the things was actually there

being a lot of crime. It was like New York City-- there were thousands of murders in New York City. So now we're finding values of crime go up in New York City [INAUDIBLE] down because it went, like, from 400 to 420. But in the early '90s, there were, like, 3,000 homicides in New York. So there was a very real change. And what did that mean? It meant that politicians could come out with, like, let's be tough on crime. And that was popular in Congress. If you weren't tough on crime, it was unpopu

lar. And the key thing, if you understand-- and this audience will-- to understand how policy works in the United States is it's kind of hard for anything big to change as long as one party is against it, right, because then it won't go everywhere because the states that are in control of the one party won't do it. And it will change over time because it's like, well, if it's Republican, it'll happen. But then, once it's a Democrat, it changes back. But the thing that happened in this country in

the '70s was the Republicans started with they were going to be super tough on crime with Nixon and all this. But the Democrats kind of-- while they initially were like, well, maybe let's think about that, decided at some point, no, let's go. We'll just match the Republicans. We'll also be tough on crime. And you can find it's kind of interesting because Biden has stuck around. But certainly, before Biden, Bill Clinton was the example. As I talked about in the book, as governor of Arkansas, he

had pardoned too much people in his first term and then lost the second term. Part of why he lost, possibly, was he was hit with these ads about he was soft on crime. And then you could see when he got re-elected as Arkansas governor, he pardoned basically no one. And then, when he became president, he was kind of a tough-on-crime Democrat, this new Democrat. And then you can see that also with Joe Biden. But you see it all throughout the spectrum. I talk about Ted Kennedy in the book, who was a

prominent liberal and made this kind of one of his big issues-- I'm going to make tough on crime one of my issues. And so what matters about that is if you have both the Democrats and the Republicans saying we're going to be tough on crime, there's no one left to be like, no, let's not do that, right? In the United States, it's just two parties. And if both parties agree on something, that's what's going to happen, right? So the other thing-- this is just a thought I have. There are a lot of ti

mes the parties get excited about something, and they kind of pass symbolic legislation. It doesn't really change anything. And I think, in a way, it matters. If you look at what they changed, it was very sophisticated. And I think-- why? Because a lot of the people that were legislators had also been prosecutors or at least lawyers. And so they did a lot of clever things to make sure that they didn't just pass a law that said, like, the sentence goes up. But they-- I'll show you some of the sli

des on this. They thought through all the different ways that might not impact someone, so the ways that someone might commit a crime and then not end up with a long sentence. And they tried to close all those doors. And they did it effectively. So it wasn't just rhetorically passing laws that were tough on crime but actually making sure people were serving longer sentences. And that's what happened. And so in that sense, it's really hard to puzzle out with the data, again. But because it's so i

mportant, people have done a lot of sophisticated analysis of sentence lengths. The reason it's hard to figure out is because the way the system used to be was you could get a long-sounding sentence. So you could get-- if you committed a robbery in California in 1970, you could get a sentence for, like, one year to 40 or something like that, these kind of long, indeterminate sentences. And so then, if you compare that sentence to, like, someone getting 10 years in 2010, you might say, like, oh,

well, that's actually less serious because it was one year to 40. But what really matters is how long did the person serve. And so what was happening is you'd get the one to 40 in California in 1970, but you'd serve one or less, right? And then now you'd get it and serve five years. So the actual time served increases. So you can't just look at what the judges were saying. So when you do all that, and you figure out what was happening, we see that the sentence lengths changed. And this is what I

said. This is so significant. You had to do so many things to make this happen. So you have to-- one thing is change the judges you're appointing because they have some discretion in sentences. Change who the prosecutors are. Change the laws to increase the sentence lengths. They did a lot of things to make it easier to get convictions, and that pushes things off in plea-bargaining and stuff like that. And then here's the last piece of this. The other thing they did was they made it really hard

to get parole, right? And this is the sophistication I was talking about. They could have just said, let's have higher sentences, and the judges would have been imposing higher sentences. And then you could have a parole board-- which is the way the system was in the '70s. The real decider of sentencing in the '70s was the parole boards. And so whatever your sentence was, they were kind of placeholder sentences. And then, depending on how you did in incarceration, plus whatever other variables

the parole board was considering, they would decide how long you were in. And it used to be-- say, in 1990 in Texas-- Texas, right? 78% of people are getting out on parole early. And then these changes start happening, and now we're down to 20% or something. That was below the radar. You don't hear a lot of people talking about parole as what's going on with mass incarceration. But this is a huge factor in why are more people in prison for longer. It's not just prosecutors and judges. It's parol

e boards. Now, when the parole application comes up, they're just saying no. And they're saying no more often and longer. And this is Texas, where they kept parole-- it's actually interesting. In Texas, parole is in the constitution, constitutional rights of parole. And so they had to keep parole. But keeping parole can mean different things, right? So they can-- and this is what they did. They appoint different people to the parole board. It used to be, like, who wanted to be on the parole boar

d was, like, criminologists, sociologists, people like us, who are just interested in data and stuff. And then it became a political thing. And one of the things that's interesting-- I had to drag this out of Texas. They have a good open records thing. But one of the interesting things they were doing in their parole board reports was they would publish the rate for each person on their votes. And so you could see, was this parole or person letting people out or not? And the politics at the time

were the less people you let out, the more likely you could ever be appointed or appointed to a parole board and stuff like that. So this is just the complexity, right? It's all these things happening at once. So in some states, they were just are getting rid of parole entirely. So there were just no one getting out on parole that they didn't have to worry about this. In other states, they kept parole, but they made it so many fewer people were getting out on parole. And they changed the people

on the parole board so that when people came up, no one was getting out. So I talk about in the book California is a great example of these working together. In California, they got rid of parole for mostly all crimes, but except for life. If you get a life sentence in California, you could be eligible for parole. And so those were still coming up. But then the people that were deciding those weren't letting anyone out. And so there's two things happening once-- one, the law making no one eligi

ble for parole, almost, and then the other being the people that were still eligible for parole, that parole board is not letting them out. And so you have these crazy numbers-- if you look at the California numbers, like, 25% approval for parole release over this period. And so it's those things working together. So what's going on is not just a parole. But it's different pieces of the parole equation are happening differently. And then California is even worse than that, if you can believe. So

they got rid of early release on parole. But then they had an idea. They're like, well, we'll still have parole. It will just be like, you serve your whole sentence, and then we'll give you something called parole. In the federal system, this was supervised release. Federal also got rid of parole. But they added on supervision at the end. And that's important because people are getting sent back on parole violations, even if they weren't being released early. So the idea of parole is supposed t

o be you get out early, but you're under supervision. So you're kind of still in prison, but you're out. And so that's why they're watching you closely. But in California and the federal system, they actually stopped letting you out early and still added on supervision at the end. And the supervision meant that you would now be failing your drug test or not showing up. And they could revoke you on parole or, in the federal system, supervised release. And what's the point of that? This is somethi

ng I'm going to talk about. It just makes it easy to send someone to prison on parole violations, on supervised release violations. Now, one of the things that happened is that as crime goes down-- I talked about this crime spike, but then crime goes down. But we're still sending about the same number of people to prison. And how is that happening? What happens is the resources shift just to where they're easiest, and so where it's easiest to put people in prison. And one of the easiest things t

o do, versus putting someone-- going through a trial, it's much easier to use parole revocations than to go through the process of even plea-bargaining and stuff like that. And it's just fascinating. And I know too much because there's just too many sides. But California, when they passed what I was saying, to make the parole on the end, the parole officers were like, hey, guess what's great about us? We bypass all of the process. We can put people in prison without any process. And so in the Ca

lifornia system, the judge is nobody. It's just like the parole person, the parole officer is like, you go to prison. And that's like the process you had [INAUDIBLE].. But, basically, that's what it's like. And that's how it was sold. It wasn't hidden. And so when I found this, I was like, oh, this is the coolest piece of information ever, but because I'm jaded, right? So it's really kind of dark and sad. So that's the sentence part of it, the sentence length. But also important is the amount of

people being convicted. And this is to illustrate the relation between all the parts of the system. Like Brandon said at the beginning, my thing is it's all the pieces of the system working together. If you want to understand any phenomenon here, you have to understand how all the pieces work together. Otherwise, you're going to miss what's really going on. And so it's not just arrests, and it's not just charges, and it's not just judges convicting people and the sentences. It's actually all th

e things working together. And one way you can see that is if you look at arrests versus convictions. And so here-- and this is the point of this is to show how police arrests matter. It's not just the prosecutors. It's not just the judges. And so you can see kind of these tracked for certain offenses. For homicides, it makes perfect sense, right? As homicide arrests go up-- and that's the spike that I was talking about-- the prosecutions go up. And then, when they go down, the prosecutions go d

own. And so that's why there's more or less convictions over time. And that makes sense, right? If police arrest someone for homicide, it makes sense that the prosecutors can charge that person for homicide. And there's a gap, right? Some of those are cases the prosecutors are going to run into evidence or acquittals and things like that. But there's going to be this track. If you're arrested for homicide, your case is going to court because that's serious. And people aren't going to just drop t

hat. And then so that tracks. But let's talk about drugs next. It didn't have to be true for drugs. So one of the key changes that happened in the what I said-- there was two things that happened. One is crime goes up, and so there's more enforcement of that. But also, the resources-- once crime goes down, the resources shift to, like, what can we do when there's not a burglary, when there's not a robbery to go investigate? It's drug things and stuff like that. So that's what police start doing.

And so there's tons more drug arrests. More than any other change in terms of arrests is drug arrests. Tons more drug arrests are coming into the system. And you can see that in the bottom graph here. And the convictions just track the arrests. That didn't have to happen. Prosecutors could have said, well, we're not really here for drug cases. That's not why we're doing this. And the judges could have said, well, I'm not going to sentence people severely for drug cases, or just-- and that would

trickle down to the police and stuff like that. But, no, this isn't just absorbed things. So as the police arrested more people for drug offenses, the prosecutors charged a higher number of drug cases. And that resulted in a higher number of convictions. And so it just tracked as well. The other interesting things are two things fence-wise that really changed between the '70s and the 2000s-- one is drugs. The other is assaults. And assaults is kind of more interesting and something people don't

talk about because it's difficult to talk about. And there you can see there's less matching. But it does match. And arrests go way up for assaults. And these are aggravated assaults, felony assaults, and convictions kind of go up as well. But notice there's a huge, huge gap there. And what's that? That's because it's kind of harder to get convictions in cases like that. And that's something I'll touch on also because if you think about a typical drugs arrest and conviction, it's like a police

officer sees someone sell drugs and goes and testifies about that. As a former prosecutor, it's just easy to do that case-- easy to get a conviction. The aggravated assault, that's like someone with domestic violence or someone who hurts someone in a bar or something like that. Those are difficult cases to prosecute and to succeed because the civilian witnesses, not the police officer, may not want to go forward. There's some story. Sometimes you can't figure out, is this really the person that

did it, all that. And so that tracks why you have this huge gap between arrest and convictions. But the more arrests is pulling the convictions up. But there's still a lot of kind of chaos in the actual processing of the cases. All right. Let's see what we have next. All right. So this is the point I was thinking about this shift between-- at first what happens is like, oh, no, there's more crime. Both parties want to be tough on crime. They pass more severe laws. They funnel resources. More pol

ice officers are hired, more prosecutors. The people that are doing these jobs now are being vetted to make sure they're tough-on-crime judges, all that stuff. And so that's the first thing that happens. And at first, what you see is-- so, like, rape prosecutions are going up, and people are getting longer sentences. Homicide prosecutions are going up. People are getting longer sentences. And then, at some point, crime starts going down. You see that one of the interesting things here-- the top

right chart. So we can actually figure out how many aggravated assaults are actually are because there's a huge survey of just people, like, have you been victimized by crime? And they ask them what crimes. And so from that, you can see that over this period, while aggravated assaults had gotten really high, they're just plummeting. So crime is going down throughout this period up until 2010. But arrests are still going up for these felony aggravated assaults. And so what's going on? It's that t

he police are treating them more seriously. It's like tough-on-crime things happening among the police officers. And so the thing that's neat about the data you can see is that the tough-on-crime policy stays even as the crime goes away. So the crime goes down that generated the tough-on-crime policy. But all these officers and the, like, we're going to prosecute everything, that's still going on. And so they turn to what's around because they're not going to-- you can't just generate rape arres

t. But you can generate-- or homicide cases. But you can generate assaults. Why? Because this is the police department. Police are sitting there, and then people are calling. There's someone assaulting someone in the bar. So those are the cases that the police are getting. And so the attention that the police have as tough-on-crime attention just shifts to-- it's hard to stop burglaries. It's hard to stop car thefts. But we're getting calls from people every moment about assaults. And so it just

shifts to that. And it's more difficult. You see why people don't talk about assaults too much because it's not easy like with drugs. They're like, oh, drug crimes, possession, we shouldn't have been serious on that. There's good reasons the system became more serious about assault cases. And I think that's one of the key lessons of the book is if you just assume that the reason we have frustration is just that people are bad and disingenuous and try and put people in prison just to put them in

prison, you're missing a lot of-- there are people like that. So you can find stories like that. But a lot of what's going on is not like that. Some of what's going on in the assault story is people starting to care about domestic violence. And they didn't used to. And so there's nothing wrong with that policy perspective, right? And so you can find all sorts of stuff about police are being reinstructed. Before the '70s, they actually provided police manuals that said, like, when you encounter

a domestic violence situation, your job is to mediate. Figure out a way to do it without a formal arrest. So that's training. The police are getting that training. And then the training changes. And the training is now-- sometimes it's not just training. Sometimes there's laws that say you must arrest for a domestic violence situation. So it totally changed. And what has happened? So arrests go way up for domestic violence, and not just domestic but all kinds of arrests-- all kinds of assaults.

And that's reflected in the data, and so important to see that it's not just drugs. And we'll talk about this later, but it's not just any one of these things. And some of the things, you can understand why they're being more severe about this stuff. But this is all to make the point that the kind of mix of cases is changing over this time. And so there used to be just tons of arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. And that's this bottom left graph. And that's mostly what police did. My

take on what's going on is police would get called to something. And they wouldn't bother-- there wasn't going to be a case, a court case. So they just arrested the person to diffuse the situation. So they would arrest you for drunkenness, or they'd arrest you for disorderly conduct. And that case would never get to the prosecutor, because they didn't bring that to the prosecutor. So that used to be a lot of police did. And those just are dropping off a cliff. Those kind of arrests that are in

the data are going away. And what's taking their place is drug arrests and assault arrests, and those are becoming court cases. And so there's this huge shift in what was going on. You can see it up at the top where it used to be that these kind of-- what I call court criminal justice offenses, like rape and murder, or burglary and robbery, stuff like that is mostly what is going through the court system. And over time, those are going down, mostly because those crimes are going down. So those c

ases are going away. But the overall case numbers are the same because they're being replaced with drug cases and assault cases. And that's also replacing gambling and stuff like prostitution arrests and stuff like that. And what's important about these new cases that are coming into the system, these assaults and drug cases, they're resulting in people going to prison and going to jail. And that is a change. It wasn't happening with drunkenness cases and disorderly conduct cases. And it wasn't

even happening with gambling and prostitution cases. It was this shift to what police can find easily. It used to be they could find easily drunkenness and disorderly conduct. But now they can find usually assault cases and drug cases. Other things like DWI are all part of the story that they didn't use to take seriously or didn't use to turn into cases-- are now becoming cases. And all of that together-- and you see that at the bottom right graph. So while things like burglary are just going do

wn, robberies down and just staying constant in terms of arrests, drugs goes off the charts. And aggravated assault went high and then stayed high. And so that's a new mix of cases. But what's so important about this is the new mix of cases are easy to prove. And they're easy to find, easy to prove, and easy to win convictions on, especially drug cases. You can find drug cases anywhere you want. Police just go out and start buying drugs, and now they've got someone for sale of drugs, which is tr

eated very seriously. But also assault cases, you can find those all now because people are calling the police. I think mostly what police are doing is reacting to people calling about assaults. And so that's another thing that the police are just constantly being shown. And then they're going, and now, instead of just trying to deal with it informally, they're bringing that to the prosecutors. BRANDON GARRETT: Jeff? JEFF BELLIN: Yeah? BRANDON GARRETT: Can I-- are the jurisdictions here where th

ere are places-- were these places where the prosecutors had discretion about whether or not to indict someone if the police arrested them? Do you know? JEFF BELLIN: Yes. No, yes, again, that was the norm. There's always kind of each inflection point. So one, are the police arresting people? Two, then, did the police bring the cases to the prosecutor? And both those combined data on these have gone up. And then, three, are the prosecutors charging the case? And that's another inflection point, a

ssuming they have discretion, which, yes, they do. And you can find that data also. And I'll show some of this from California, which has good data on this. But the prosecutors-- basically, my take on what happened is the prosecutors just were doing the same thing they always did. No matter what kind of case the police brought them, they would just treat it the same. And, in a way, that was problematic because the cases weren't as serious. Fine if it's a homicide case. The prosecutor's office ju

st decides, is there enough evidence to proceed? But if it's a drug case, maybe the prosecutor should have thought not just, can we prove this case-- is there enough evidence that this person is guilty? But maybe they should have thought, is it worthwhile to put the resources into this that we have to for a case? And their answer was basically yes. And so the percentage of-- the changes that happens. You don't see a change in prosecutors deciding to prosecute cases. You do see the change in over

all convictions. And what I think is it's everyone together becoming more severe, not like some one actor shifting out of tandem with the others. But I have some data on that also. But also, just before I get to that, the other thing to just show is if you think of, basically, what are people in the state prison for, it's not a lot of different things. There's basically these, what is it, six things-- for a second, I was worried that I misspelled "burglary." And this is right from the book. And

kudos to me, because it's a hard word to spell. But now it's right. But you can see the change over time. So take robbery, for example. In 1980, 25% of people in state prison are in there for robbery. By 2019, it's 12. That's a huge change. So these are the kind of things, right? It's not like robbery is responsible for mass incarceration, this is the biggest change in the world. But there's a million of these things, and all of them matter. Yeah? AUDIENCE: So what do you say to people who look

at this data and say, like, great. Tough on crime worked. Look, these criminal offenses went down. What do you say to that? JEFF BELLIN: Yeah, well, so there's not evidence of that, right? So what you can see-- but it's a great question because this is the question I get from-- sophisticated people that aren't demagogues will say, well, I'm sympathetic to your argument that we should have less people in prison. But maybe if we do that, we're going to end up with a lot of more crime. And the reas

on I fear that-- this is the person talking-- the reason I hear that is because it does seem like we started putting everyone in prison, and then crime went down. So there is data on this. This is an important question. And so I have this-- I talk about this in the book. This is another thing. If you were writing a popular press book, you would just ignore that because that's awkward. How do you deal with it? But I have to talk about it. So that's why my book is boring and doesn't have any sales

. But I think it's the right thing to talk about right if you actually want to convince someone. And so there are studies on this. And what they say is, again, it doesn't fit any narrative is that, actually, it did decrease crime somewhat to have lots of people in prison, which makes sense, right? The more people you put in prison-- and you can think of it this way-- it decreased crime outside of the prison by having just more people locked up. But the study suggests a couple of percentage point

s. Maybe, like, 5% of the crime decrease is from that. And then all the rest is from all the other factors. And that's the real answer to this is like there's some point where, if you have no one in prison, and you're just always letting people out-- if you go from that to putting what I think of-- the people that are committing, over and over, really serious crimes-- you start catching those people. And maybe you catch some for drugs, or who knows what you catch them for? But you start kind of

warehousing that person, crime does go down a little bit. And so that would explain having some people incarcerated and so maybe the first steps of mass incarceration. You go back to the graph. But it doesn't justify all the rest of it. And-- and this is one of the key things I try to say in the book is there's two systems going on. And it's exactly to address this kind of discussion. There's what I call the criminal justice system and then something called the criminal legal system. And the cri

minal justice system is what I think of is for cases that are, like, justicey, right, like homicides and sexual assaults. I don't say "justicey" in the book. That's just weird-- but things where you can say the person-- what's the government doing? And I don't say this has to be how do you think of it, but you can think of it this way. You can make any of these cases, like the Tennessee shooting or something. The government comes as a formal response to someone on behalf of a victim to get justi

ce, right? And we want the government to do that instead of letting people just figure out how to do justice by themselves because for these kind of cases, I think, in our society we currently have, if you just did nothing when someone murdered your family member, people would just be like, oh, well, I guess nothing's going to happen. I think there'd be a response. And why would there be a response, some kind of informal response? Because people feel like justice requires that there be a respons

e. So we can have a government that does that, tries to bring that in so we don't have chaotic vigilante responses. And that is the criminal justice system. So when I talk about homicides, sexual assaults, things like that, we can have a justice system for that. And for those, you can make this kind of argument that we need to have something. And those are the crimes we really were about as we have to have some kind of system that's addressing those. And so for me, I don't think it has to be pri

son. But if you wanted to defend prison, that's the place that you could do it most effectively. But then there's this whole other part, which is the criminal legal system. And this is what I talk about, the drug cases and the DWIs and gun possession and all this stuff. And what's going on there. It's not the government saying, like, we're coming here to get justice. It's the government saying, we're going to use the system to stop people from doing things, like a policy. This is the best-case s

cenario. What's the best argument the government can have? It's like, this is how we deter people from carrying guns. We can arrest them, and if they catch them-- discover you from DWI and stuff like that. And the answer in that space is now there's no evidence of this actually working. And this is where I can call on my-- oh, here's the criminal system. But I can go ahead for this answer. I can call on my experience in the trenches. This is the trenches part of this. What I know that people don

't seem to realize is we actually catch very few people and prosecute even fewer. This is the best example of this. So this is data from a city. For every 100 robberies in a typical US city, 50 of them will be reported. 15 will result in an arrest. There will be nine actually charged. Five people will be convicted of a felony, and not all those people will go to prison, right? And so if you're thinking about committing a robbery-- and don't tell anyone this. But your worry is not, I'm going to g

o to prison. That's not what you're worried about. You probably should be more worried about you're going to get shot by the store owner or something like that. And so-- this is even in the criminal justice phase. This is why it's not the case that we make things more harsh, we stop crime, because we're just so bad at catching everyone. And we've always been bad at it. It's going to be impossible if you have any kind of individual freedom. And people are like, oh, is this the technicalities I've

heard about? And it's not the technicalities. What it is is you can, in America-- and it should be this way. The rule is you only can be put in prison for something that you actually did. And so we have a whole system that's supposed to do that. It doesn't work perfectly. AUDIENCE: I'm sorry, where? JEFF BELLIN: Yeah. It's the principle. That's the principle. So that's the point of the process. We're supposed to be trying to figure it out if people actually did it. And it's imperfect, right? Al

ong the way, all these cases are falling out of the system because we can actually prove that someone did it, right? And that's this, right, so all this, and then not just that, but not even reported. And so it's like the worst possible thing. The worst possible way to try to decrease like robbery and things like that is this system because of what-- I have a chapter in the book called "The Futility of Stopping Crime"-- fighting crime with criminal law, something like that. It's a cool thing. Ye

ah, I have to find out what the title is, but something along those lines. And that's this last point, and that's what's so complicated, which is if you want to defend the system, and you move to this, like, well, we're using this to stop people from committing robbery, but you're not. You're not actually stopping them. You're just catching a few unlucky people, the worst robbers, the people are worst at it. And you're throwing them in prison for a long time. But it's just not an effective way t

o-- because guess who knows about this best? The robbers who are successful, right? They know better than anyone that they can get away with robbery because they're doing it. And by the time they get caught, then it's too late. They've already committed a whole bunch of robberies and things like that. And so there are ways to try to reduce crime, and I talk about those in the book-- putting people in prison, not especially good. Let's see where we are. Last thing, because I feel like I want to l

eave time for more questions-- this is what I was saying about the California data being really good. And so you can see here's some really interesting stuff I found in their data about conviction percentage. So if you look on the right, the conviction percentage-- and look at 1975. So 48% of felony arrests are leading to conviction. And by 1995, it's 70%. That's a huge change that no one talks about. And so what's going on? And so then I have to kind of theorize. But my suspicion of what's goin

g on is what I talk about, the change in the mix of cases. It's very hard. So 1975, mostly, what's being processed through courts-- robbery cases, sexual assault, stuff like that. Those are hard cases to prove and win, right? And then, in 1995, now it's those cases. But those cases have gone down a lot. But mostly, what's in there now is drug cases, assault cases. And you say, like, well, some cases might be hard. But, actually, solving an assault is actually pretty easy because it's like a bar

fight, and you see the person right there. In domestic violence, you see who it is. So they're easier than stranger cases like these other cases. And so this kind of did. And this is what I'd say. You want to convince someone of any of this stuff, you're going to have to have data like this, because no one's just going to believe me if I say, oh, conviction percentage is harder now than it used to be because of these theories. But if you have data, then maybe someone will listen to you. And the

federal system is the same. But I feel like I'm going too far. Oh, this is my last thing. This is cool. Yeah, it's everything. What's the reason for mass incarceration? All these things together. All right. And then, if you have questions, I'm here for questions. BRANDON GARRETT: Yeah. [APPLAUSE] [INAUDIBLE] AUDIENCE: Thank you guys so much. That was an interesting talk. And I especially liked the smart slide deck in there. So my name is Ian Hitchcock. I'm a MPP from across the street studying p

ublic policy, so wanting to dig a little bit more into some of those policy solutions you're talking about. I certainly always thought that it seemed rather intuitive to me that crime is a product of many things other than bad human behavior, but economic circumstances and a sense of not being connected to a community. So I've often wondered about, can we say that we're tough on crime by investing in communities as opposed to locking people up? JEFF BELLIN: Yeah, great point. By the way, when I

was doing the talk earlier, I try to remember, when I say "tough on crime," I put quotes up. And I noticed and I forgot. So I feel bad, and I'm glad you gave me this chance. Yeah, and it's not actually tough on crime, for the reason I said at the end. This is a way to be tough on a few people that you catch. And when I talk about it, it's almost like a lottery, or a reverse lottery, where, especially if you start talking about less severe crimes, like drug cases, who's getting arrested for selli

ng drugs or using drugs? It's such a small percentage of the people that are actually doing these things that it's like losing the lottery and only one person [INAUDIBLE].. And so what we did by taking, well, if you lose the lottery, what changed was it used to be nothing happened to you. For decades, it's nothing concerned with prison. And then, suddenly, yeah, now you're going to go to prison for a long time. So we change it for that one person. But just how we feel-- you change the lottery am

ount, most of us still won't even buy a ticket. We don't care if we think we're not going to-- it's not going to hit for us. And so that's right. It's not really tough on crime, this stuff. And if you really want to be tough on crime, you would figure out what you're doing. So don't tell the law students there. But you'd not be focused on law, and you'd look somewhere else and stuff like that. But the challenge is it's so hard to figure out how do we actually get rid of that stuff. And so the wa

y I think of it is most of it is not law-related. So it's not like the penalty is too low in New Jersey because they have more crime. It's stuff like you're talking about. But if you guys say, like, which thing is it? It's really complicated. And the most I can add-- and so what I try to do is not just have, like, here's my opinion in the book. So I look at studies, and there's not a lot of good stuff. This is like, this works. But there is some stuff that suggests that more policing is helpful.

But I know that makes people cringe. But one of the things that this is-- with [INAUDIBLE],, I talk about it. And one of the ways I think about it that makes sense is it's just having someone trying, right? So it could be-- it doesn't have to be police. But someone has to have the job of how do we stop this crime from happening. This is a problem. If you think of like any problem, if it's a disease or if it was an environmental problem, you'd say, we need some person whose job it is to try to m

ake it happen less. And so right now, it's police. But it doesn't have to be. It could be anybody. So that's the way I try to deal with it in the book is while there are some studies that say, like I said, more police kind of decrease the amount of crime, it doesn't have to be police. And it certainly doesn't have to be armed police. And then it doesn't [INAUDIBLE] at all. It could be anyone just working on this problem. And then you can come up with other solutions, and I talk about some of the

stuff that seems to be promising, like these violence interrupter things. But, again, the data on that is a little squishy. So I don't go on it. And so that's the right way to think about it is, if it's not harder laws, then the next question-- what is it? And I talk about that in the book. You can't succeed in the reform space by just being like, don't worry about that. Let's just let people out, because then people are going to be like, well, no. We care about crime. And some of these crimes,

we really should care about, or maybe all of them, right? And so I always stress. I'm not saying, don't put people in prison for heroin dealing because I think heroin's great and we should all be on heroin. I'm saying, this is not effective. And I have a thing about the price of heroin has actually dropped throughout all this period. So we're putting all these resources, supposedly making it harder to get heroin. And it's actually easier to get heroin than it ever was. And so it's just not work

ing. So let's do something else. And that's where I would go. But the something else would be really helpful. So get on it and figure out. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: Can you add to that-- what the legal prescriptive stuff is? One obvious thing is the parole revocation. JEFF BELLIN: Oh. AUDIENCE: But what the book wants is to cure us of our addiction. JEFF BELLIN: Oh, yeah. Sure, sure. So you're saying for-- that part I can do. So what I can't do is necessarily solve from-- AUDIENCE: You can't fix that

. BRANDON GARRETT: Yeah. AUDIENCE: We're not [INAUDIBLE]. BRANDON GARRETT: And that's what I talk about in the book. So what we can do-- and this, again-- essentially, it's the right question. Well, what can I do that people can generally buy into? And so the way I talk about that is we can stop doing things that we started doing in the '70s that led to more incarceration that don't have any of these beneficial effects. And so we have parole revocation and pretrial detention, all of which I see

as shortcuts to putting people in jail or prison, right? That's the easiest place to look. And so pretrial detention, where you're not even found guilty yet, parole revocation, where we're not actually going through the process, or you're being put in prison not even for a crime, for violating some rules. And I talk about this, what I call the criminal legal system. It's like if you said to the prosecutor or the judge about why is this person in prison, they would say, they broke the law. We're

enforcing the law. And if that's all you got to why someone's in prison, then I would say that needs to go away. So I would be, I think, fine with, we'll abolish the entire criminal legal system. Maybe I should've done that for the book page. And that would get rid of-- and I think that would get rid of drug stuff. And I think-- so this makes people uncomfortable when I go past it-- but weapons possession and all these things where all we're doing is saying, we're going to make people go to pris

on for DWI. And it's not a ton, but, actually, DWI, there's so many people that are getting caught for DWI, and they don't go to prison immediately. But they get on probation, and then they cycle through. So there's actually a real impact of DWI prosecutions on the incarcerated population. And so all these places where we're saying, what we're doing here is we're putting people in prison to stop everyone from driving drunk, I think all those places-- unless you can show me some data, I don't bel

ieve you. I think it's not working, and we could try other solutions. But one of the things I have in the book-- I don't want to make it so no one wants to buy it-- is there is this cool study on drunk drivers. And they actually did a focus group with them. And they said-- these are people that actually had been caught in New York. And they said, well, what-- are you not going to go drunk drive because now you know you've been caught? And they're like, are you kidding me? I drunk drove, like, th

ousands of times before I got caught. There's no chance I'm going to get caught again. And this is like-- we're deluding ourselves. We think these people don't understand, and we're like, you're going to go to prison if you do this thing. And they understand. The people that are drunk driving know better than everyone that they're not going to prison when they're drunk driving. And this is not an effective way to stop people from doing it. And so even like-- my colleague, Adam Gershowitz, he's h

uge on drunk drivers have to go to prison and it's the worst thing ever. And so I'm fine with that. I understand where that's coming from. But the insight I try to communicate to audiences is there is an argument like that for every crime. Maybe you guys think drug crimes are fine. But I was dealing with one presentation, and then the person's lighting into me about fentanyl and this. And, yes, there's good arguments about why all these things are bad. So if you're going to say, like, we're goin

g to let people out of prison because we're just going to let out the people that aren't doing anything bad, that's, like, seven people. If you really want to actually solve mass incarceration, you got to say, even if people are doing things that we don't like, we're just not going to use prison as a solution. We're going to try to address these serious problems-- fentanyl, drunk driving, all that stuff, with some other approach, not using jail and prison. And that, to me, is the only way forwar

d. And those kind of saying, oh, it's just this one thing, and we'll just solve that, people are just kidding themselves. Yeah? AUDIENCE: Do you offer ideas in the book for sort of increasing the political viability of those changes? Because I think the legal answer-- so much of it is stop doing the things that we started doing since the '70s. But how-- I think, so often, Democrats sort of lose the battle just in the way the marketing of the issue is framed, right? So no one wants to be soft on

crime. That's not a position you can take. But so how do you shift the dialogue and the framing around what the issues are? Do you have suggestions for that? JEFF BELLIN: Well, so I think that's-- again, you guys, this is the locus of the really good questions. That's a super challenge, right? And you can see that already, right? I think there was a little movement in the Democratic Party to be more sensitive about mass incarceration. And that is almost evaporating before our eyes. In New York,

people are backtracking. And so I think that's an important question. What is it? And one of the things I think I try to stress in the book is to me, at least, it's not obvious that it's just politicians that are doing this to us. What I see when I talk to people is Americans kind of buy into this. And so you talk to someone who's very progressive, but they'll say, but on this crime, people need to go to prison. And so there's something about the American psyche which is like, we accept this ide

a that if we really care about something, we send people to prison when they do that. And I think that has to change. Otherwise, the political problem is always going to persist if you have a choice between the person who's tougher, and you just see yourself as like, well, I'm not going to commit the one crime I care about, but I want to make sure people go to prison, the tough person seems better to you if you really care about that thing. And so it creates this political advantage, which is wh

y the Democrats, who are not fools, made that change. I don't mean that generally. But in the time when they were deciding this, they were not making this change just to make the change. They were doing polling and figuring out the change, and it happened. And then, to your question-- and this may be naive. But my thought is the only way to do this is to break this link between the question about is it tough on crime to put people in prison, to get in between that. So, yeah, we're tough on crime

, but we're doing it in a way that's not sending people to prison. That's the weak spot. And how to get that message through, one would be-- well, this [INAUDIBLE] I'm very conscious that I'm not a political expert. But one thing is to have books like this that say, well, this is not an effective way to solve these crimes and to talk about all the cases we're not actually catching and all that stuff and just have that kind of start saturating the world because that's-- I think it's actually not

just politicians. It's the voters who think these things. And so we have to kind of slowly get this message out. And so what I would say is the solution is to convince people to buy and read this book, right? That's the first step [INAUDIBLE].. But I also think-- that's why I said it's important to just be honest about the complexity of it and how hard it's going to be to start changing, I think, people's minds generally. And then that hopefully will cause the politicians-- because I have no fai

th that if it's popular people that politicians would just say like, well, no-- there's a few people-- Cory Booker is an example. He seems to say things that really-- I'm sure his consultants say, like, don't say this. It hurts your chances. But he stands out because he's the only one that's saying them. Yeah, [INAUDIBLE]? BRANDON GARRETT: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].. AUDIENCE: Thanks for being here, Professor. I'm a big fan of your evidence textbooks. I [INAUDIBLE] last year. I had a question about what

you were talking about with deterrence. And I'm very inclined to agree with what you're saying [INAUDIBLE] a lot of people who say that that initial 100 robberies, if people didn't know about the penalty, that that initial number-- there's another 100 people that are deterred from doing the robbery at all. JEFF BELLIN: Yeah. Well, so this is what I saying. I mean, there is some evidence that some severity and some toughness deters some crime. And that makes sense. That has to be true. There has

to be some amount. If it's at all possible that you could go to prison for something, you're probably like, just generally, across the population, there's going to be less people doing. I think that's right. And so all we're really saying is once it's clearly illegal to commit a robbery, and if you're caught doing it, it will be inconvenient-- you won't make your next appointment. You'll have to get arrested. You'll be booked through and stuff like that. And so the real question for me is, well

, does adding some prison term do anything helpful for that? And I think, to me, that's the question that I have to answer. And I don't see the evidence of that. So you can think of it this way. You could be like, if the robbery suspect has to serve, like, a month basically going through the process, and before-- because that's just like pretrial and going through-- that deterrent stops most people. That's enough deterrent for most robberies because it's not that good a career to commit robberie

s and all that stuff. And so beyond that, I don't think there's any value in it. So I think you're right. And this is why I wouldn't say make robbery legal. And I don't even know that for any of these things, you have to do that. Heroin sales and stuff-- you could still severely regulate all these things so that if you got caught doing these things, you wouldn't be able to get a job and all that stuff. Things would happen to you because it's illegal. And so I think you're right, that there is so

me value in things being illegal, and some [INAUDIBLE] value in things being illegal. All I'm saying is the value of putting people in prison, especially for any extended period of time, is not there. That's the part that is weakest. Oh, another one. Thank you. BRANDON GARRETT: Yeah. So I guess one of the things I think about a lot is we're not actually determining guilt all that often because nobody's going to trial, because you can get charged in such a way that it just doesn't make any ration

al sense to go to trial. JEFF BELLIN: Yeah. BRANDON GARRETT: So to what extent does, no, you're not allowed to plead guilty, or, not practically, but in terms of reducing mass incarceration? JEFF BELLIN: Oh. So that's your suggestion of a reform would be no more guilty pleas-- BRANDON GARRETT: Yeah. JEFF BELLIN: --no plea bargain. Yeah, I'm actually-- BRANDON GARRETT: I'm hearing this different planet than the one we live on now. JEFF BELLIN: Yeah, no, I like this question because I had written

a separate article about plea-bargaining. I'll send it to you. And I actually think that would-- so people think this is a real thing. And I should be fair and say most people doing this presentation would be like, great idea. That will cause the system to come to a halt, and no one will go to prison. I think what we'll have is the system would adjust. The system is cleverer than we think. And the system would adjust. And, basically, if you got rid of plea-bargaining, there would be people just

pleading guilty straight to the indictments and things that would make up a lot of that. So you'd end up with severe-- they would just be like, please, Judge, go easy on me because I pled guilty. And, obviously, depending on jurisdiction, there's things where you wouldn't plead guilty because of mandatory sentences. The judge couldn't go hard on you. But I think that kind of-- these solutions that are just like, we'll do something that will cause the system to crash, and that will be [INAUDIBLE]

. BRANDON GARRETT: Oh, no. I'm saying you can't plead guilty, period. JEFF BELLIN: Fine. So then what happens? Everyone just-- so they would just-- so whatever jurisdiction you're in, they would send judges, and they would figure out these very short trials or something. They would do something, and that would solve the problem. And the reason I think this is because, basically, these types of solutions are designed to avoid-- so the legislature won't do this. So we'll force them to do it by kin

d of messing up their system in other ways. And I think if you can't get the legislature on board in the first place, then they'll figure out a way to defeat you. And you're right. That's pretty strong. So if you say you can't be guilty at all, therefore everyone has to go to trial, in theory you can have the prosecutors dismiss lots of cases. And so you'd have [INAUDIBLE]. But I think they would still go forward on all the severe cases. Those cases would be getting hammered even harder. And the

n one of the things I say about this-- and I did put in the book-- is that it would be unpredictable which cases would end up surviving and which would be getting dismissed. And you might get-- this is one of the insights in the book-- the easiest cases would survive. And so that would be the drug cases and the cases against the most vulnerable people. And the case against Trump, that would go away, because that's going to take tons of effort and stuff like that. But, yeah, there's people that s

uggested stuff like that. BRANDON GARRETT: No, and I admit this is not-- I just was wondering what you-- JEFF BELLIN: A good question would be, like, how much is plea-bargaining responsible for mass incarceration? I certainly think it's something that's making mass incarceration work. But I think, if you took it away, mass incarceration could figure out a workaround. BRANDON GARRETT: We're over time, but come on up if you want to ask more questions. And thank you so much. JEFF BELLIN: Yeah, this

was delightful. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]