INBOUND Bold Talks: Adam Foss "Solution in Prosecution"

Good morning, everyone. So I prepared this whole speech to give to you all today, and I can't in good conscious give the speech that I was going to give. But that is not to say that I'm going to go off the rails and start freaking out up here. So don't worry. HubSpot how many of you in the last couple weeks have thought about the criminal justice system and how it's working and who it's affecting? And in that thought process, or in those conversations that you were having, how many of you came to the conclusion that it's working effectively and that it's fair to everyone? When I look around this room, I see a microcosm of sort of what happened last night. The people who really cared and wanted to say something came out, but they didn't come out in the numbers that we thought. And the people that said they cared went somewhere else to watch something that was easier to talk about, something that was easier to sort of mull over because it doesn't really affect them. And for those of you who have thought about the criminal justice system and came to the conclusion that it's not working effectively and it's not fair, it's probably safe to say that system does not affect you directly, or at least it doesn't. You don't think it does. But I'm here to tell you that even if you've never met a person in jail, even if you've never met a person in prison or on probation, the criminal justice system affects your everyday. And as a result, not coming to these talks, not listening to the people who are trying to reform the system, is just like what happened last night. And we all woke up and we have to deal with this reality this morning. And my reality is that the work that I've been doing is made much, much harder by the person who won last night because of his rhetoric. And that's what it was. It was rhetoric. People were duped into believing that this person was going to change the system, and he did so with just language. No numbers, no facts, no data. And that's sort of how the criminal justice system has been working for a really long time. People who vote, people who pay money, think that it's working because they hear rhetoric, they hear bs, they hear facts that aren't true or aren't accurate, and they're spun. And that has created the biggest civil rights crisis, the biggest human rights crisis of our time. In the last few months, we've all seen the media make much ado of athletes protesting the national anthem, citing its disrespect for the armed service members who have gone to war. And that's their anthem. And the irony is that those soldiers, including my father, go to war and they fight and they die for freedom with unabashed conviction that this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. And that's just not true. We represent 5% of the world's population. We represent 25% of its incarcerated. There are 2.3 million people, 2.3 million people, sitting in jails and prisons right now. There are over 7 million people on probation or parole that supervisors Release, which means one misstep and they're going to jail. One in four Americans has a criminal record. 70% of the people who are coming out of jails and prisons are recidivating and going back in within the first year. One in three African American males will spend some time in prison in their lifetime. There are more black men on probation and parole and in prison right now than there were slaves in the United states in the 1850s. And we've known this for a long time. But the justice system keeps operating in the same old way, without any innovation, any reform, any rebooting. And we all sit by and say it's okay despite these horrible outcomes. We can talk about the problem all we want, but if we don't offer solutions, then it's just that it's just talk. And we're no better than the individual who is now our president. It's time for a new civil rights movement. And this isn't news. This shouldn't be news to any of you. It's certainly not news to me, and it's certainly not news to the communities that the criminal justice system actually affects. We've been saying it for decades, but we're still here. And a lot of the inertia is blamed on the lack of leadership in my community. We're waiting for the new Martin Luther King. We're waiting for the new Rosa Parks. We're waiting for the new Malcolm X. We're waiting for someone, anyone, to lift us up and take us to the promised land. Fuck waiting. The leaders of the new civil rights movement are sitting in this room right now. In 2008, a young man, a young African American man, was arrested in Boston for the intent to distribute crack cocaine. He had a minimal record of no violent offenses. And on the day that I met him, I was a new prosecutor. And as a new prosecutor, I sort of just did what I was told. I looked at the police report. I Looked at the criminal record, and then I made a bunch of decisions about this person knowing nothing about them. I made a decision whether or not he would go home on bail. I didn't ask for bail. He went home. Next case came up. Over the course of the next 18 months, that young man came back to court 14 times just to get a new court date, making education or employment impossible. And we weren't doing anything to address the issues that brought him to court in the first place. On his 15th court date, I leveraged him into a guilty plea with a year of probation. And because I asked, the judge ordered him to get a job, get an education, get housing, stay away from the area that he was arrested in, and stop smoking weed. And I did that because I was told to, not because I had any information that any of these interventions would work. But in fact, I didn't know what it meant for him to go get a job. I didn't know what it meant for him to go get housing. I didn't know what it meant for him to go get treatment. But I was just doing what I was told. I went over to the young man thinking I had done him a favor by not putting him in jail. I gave him a pep talk, black man to black man. I pat him on the back, and he went out the door. And neither one of us knew how much worse things were going to get for him, because like the other 70% of people who come through the system, he recidivated within a month and he was back in court. Same city, same court, same crime, different prosecutor. That prosecutor saw that young man as a threat, as a criminal, and asked for him to be held on high bail. And he was. He went into a jail, where he sat for months and months and months as the case languished along like it had the first time around. Only this time, he stopped fighting. He pled out, and he did two years in prison. While he was in prison, he met men that were like him, that he felt loyalty to, and he used them for protection. And that was a gang. And when he came out, that gang membership followed him. And he started hanging out with them in the streets, and he started committing their crimes, started robbing and stealing and picking up guns, and he kept cycling through the system, each time worse than the last. And his already fragile life completely deteriorated. So that when he got out after his last prison sentence for carrying a gun, he was walking down the street, and in a hail of bullets, he died on a sidewalk. His story isn't rare. It's not even unique. It's. It happens all the time, every day. And we sit around and we're okay with it because it doesn't affect us. It's the other. But I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it does. It affects all of us. That's our economy. That's our education. That's our mental health treatment. That's our medicine. Everything as a collective affects us. Even though that young man you probably have never met, and in looking back, I don't assume to take all the responsibility for this young man's murder, but I think to myself, what could I have done differently up front to prevent this from happening? The short answer is everything. Standing there that first day that I met him, I didn't know that what I was doing had nothing to do with safety. I was standing there asking for bail, not knowing what bail even was or what it represented. I was asked to intervene in this man's life, but I didn't know what interventions were available to him because I didn't have the technology in front of me to tell me. I didn't know about trauma and what trauma does to a person. And so the interventions that I was using on him were ineffective. I didn't know anything about his community. Even though I was being asked as a prosecutor to protect his community, I lacked the technology. And even if I had the technology and the information, I lacked the training to use it. And even if I had the access and the training, we didn't collect any data to tell us whether or not what we were doing was effective in the first place. And this is a crisis. But in crisis, there is opportunity. And that's why you, you are the leaders of the new civil rights movement. Because the information that I lacked was available, the interventions this young man needed were available. The information for all the naysayers, for all the haters, saying, no, you need to lock him up. He's a drug dealer. He's going to be a problem in the community. It was available. But because the criminal justice system has operated since the way it has since the signing of the Magna Carta, we got the same result as we have been getting. I think about the athletes protesting the national anthem. I think about the Black Lives Matter movement and these people protesting and marching and fighting, and it's great. That's how we did it the first time around. But like the civil rights movement, our criminal justice system needs a reboot. I think about Amy Bach, who for the last 10 years, has just been aggregating data in the state of Wisconsin and With that data, she took it to police departments and DA's offices and said, look at this portal that I've created that tells you everything you need to know about what you're doing. And guess what? The numbers are real bad. I'm not attacking you. I'm trying to inform you so you can change your practices. And they are. I'm thinking about Matthew Siegel, who started a digital media online short form video content that just does stuff about criminal justice. And they're getting millions of views a week, bringing the story in short form into households that it never would have been in. I think about Cherise Fano Burden at Pretrial Justice Institute, who's working to create an app so that people standing in a courtroom can access pretrial services without having to look into a binder, get on a telephone and call someone to make an appointment. Those are the leaders, those are the pioneers. And if criminal justice isn't your thing, prenatal care, nutrition, education, housing, economy, mental health, substance abuse, all of these things are available and out there. And there are thousands of other ways as people and tech and data, you can be involved in changing this problem. Whether it's hardware or software or content or virtual reality or artificial intelligence, none of this exists in the criminal justice system. And that's what we need to get to a place to help that young man. So it's really simple. We can sit here in this room today, the day after what happened, happened, and we can go out from here and just pretend like we're doing okay. And in 50 years from now, when people look back at this time and they'd say, 2.3 million people in jail. You elected who? The president. You allowed this to happen on your watch. You can say, yeah, I didn't. I didn't do anything about it. Or 50 years from now, when you're sitting thinking about this time and the embarrassment that we all should be feeling about the civil rights movement, the civil rights crisis we're letting happen on our watch, you can say I thought about things differently. I tried something different. I did something different. I contributed to the conversation. I contributed my skill and my effort, and I did something in the new civil rights movement. It's up to you. Let's get to work. Thank you.