Former New York City Commissioner of Correction and Probation, Martin Horn has held every job imaginable in corrections: from debating the fairness of a state’s sentencing guidelines to fixing leaky water pipes in aging facilities. Horn tells Alec that his opinion toward inmates was formed from his early years as a parole officer: “every one of them was just a normal, ordinary guy … who had made bad judgments.” Though, nowadays Martin Horn has moved on: "It was a fascinating career. I am absolutely glad I’m done."
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. I went to Rahway Prison in New Jersey now called East Jersey State Prison to do research for a film. Over the course of two weeks, I interviewed several inmates who were incarcerated there. I met armed robbers, rapists, drug dealers, and murderers, and I'll never forget one minute of it. For over forty years, Martin Horn's career has focused on men like the ones I met and the prisons they live in. He's held every imaginable job in corrections, from debating the fairness of states sentencing guidelines to fixing leaky water pipes in aging facilities. In two thousand two, Mayor Bloomberg appointed Horn Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. A year later, in an unprecedented move, Bloomberg gave Horn an additional job, Commissioner of Corrections. Horn held both positions until he left in two thousand nine. Leaving public office has allowed Martin horn to be more vocal about his opinions on prisons, sentencing, and how to deal with our nation's drug problem. I would legalize drugs across the board. You would really legalize all of them, You would legalize old dress. Yes, that's a pretty well, well, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that while I worked for a governor or a mayor who was an elected definition. Why wouldn't you say that then? As opposed to know because I had a mortgage debate. Martin Horne's career in corrections started right out of college. My first job was as a New York State parole officer. And how did you What was it that led you down that path? Um? I graduated college, I was twenty one years old. I needed a job, and I took a civil service test. New York State at that time had a test called the Professional Careers Test, and it was sort of a generalist examination, and if you passed it, it qualified for a variety of positions. I grew up in Brooklyn, uh in Flappish, my father from fourth All right, well, so you took this, What did you want to be a police officer? Was that the first I wanted a job? The family and civil service and police and law enforce? Not not at all, I said. When I took the job, I didn't know there was such a thing as a parole officer. I had never thought of it. And then then so you took this testament to this test and I got fairly good grade. And so I started getting job offers from the State of New York. I got an offer to become a purchasing agent for what was then called the East Hudson Highway Authority. I got an offer to be a business office person at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. But then I I actually I took the job to become a paroleer. So I had I knew a guy who was doing it. He said it was a good job. They trained you, the pay was the training. Well, actually I was in a two year trainee ship. It was two years, and they it was on the job training. They started you with about six weeks of classroom training. The first thing they did was they assigned me to a unit they had then which they no longer have called the employment unit. In our job, we would get a paperwork on individuals who are coming home from New York State prisons who needed jobs. And we literally pounded the pavement in New York City, walked all over. Each had sort of a neighborhood. I had Long Island City and each day, I got five or ten guys names and their backgrounds on little five by eight cards, and I have to go out and find them jobs. Where was people's attitudes toward employing those people back then, Well, they actually we had a very sophisticated system. We knew employers who had previously hired employees and they were disposed, and they were disposed, and many of them said, look, I hired a guy from Clinton and he was the best guy I trusted up with. That was that was. So we did that for about six weeks. Then they actually sent me to Sing Sing for I think two months, where I had to meet with inmates who were becoming eligible for release on parole and helped them to prepare for their appearance before the border parole and write a report about them to the Board of Parole. Then they sent me to a unit. Back then, before a man or a woman could released from prison, they had to have an acceptable residence and a job, a real job. And so she were interacting and during this time with yes, but I wasn't supervising. I was. I was interacted with families. I was learning how to do investigations. So for the guy that took this test in nineteen sixty nine. Who didn't have an eye towards this kind of work. When you were interacting with these people, what did you take from it? It was fascinating. Where else do you see the varieties of human behavior? I was the drum. I had grown up in a middle class home in Brooklyn, on the edge of Brownsville. I was familiar with Brown's villain Ease, New York. They were adjacent neighborhoods. Yes, not as tough as now, not as desperate as now, but Oceanville, Brownsville, Ocean I was as tough, and and the desperation of the families, and more importantly to me, the dignity of the families that we're making it. I used to come home and say, what's remarkable is not how much crime there is, but how little crime there is when you see how people are living right and so to this day, when much people you try to hang between poverty and crime, I said, listen, there are more people who grow up and live in poverty who don't commit crime. Yeah, And and so it was fascinating, and then you know, before I turned around, it just turned into a career and I enjoyed it and I did, well, When did you become an actual parole officer where you are well after after the first year you went from being a parole officer trainee one to becoming a parole officer trainee to classic civil service, and then at the end of the second year you became a full parole officer and you got more cases assigned to you, and you worked fairly independent. Did your attitude, and this is a very broad question, but did your overall attitude toward paroled inmates evolve over the years where you were more at eye level with them and hands on with them, And then it changed you became more of an administrator and it became head of the department. I really think that my attitude towards imprisoned and formally imprisoned people was formed during those early years as a parole officer. It was one of his recognizing that every one of them was just a normal, ordinary guy. They were all guys back then who had made bad judgments. I met very few, really very few who were downright evil and mean. They were pushed loves. I said to one guy at one time, this was a guy. This is when you could smoke on the on the subway He had a cigarette lighter that was in the shape of a derringer. He took it out and a cop was looking at him, and he held his arm out and aimed it at the cop. And he got arrested. And I said to him, if stupidity was a crime, you would get the death penalty. A lot of them were addicted to drugs. And I met their families and they were just folks. And you know, there, but for the grace of God, could go any one of us. I agree with you. I often think to myself, my God, how many moments in my life could something have gone wrong? Or I could be in a docket and I could be in a courtroom and I could be facing prison time and probably had the benefit of far better circumstances than most of these guys, Right, they didn't, You know, they had difficulty Frighten John. When you see people who do have the benefit of these circumstances and still commit crimes, mo, Yeah, I always think to myself, we've got it wrong. We need be having longer sentences for white collar crime than we do. For I've always felt, and I said this even in my last years as the head of a large corrections agency. This is what I said to my staff. I said, this is our standard of care. It is that every person in our custody is to be treated as we would want our own child treated if they were in that circumstance. You felt that, I absolutely felt, because for most people, you know, you think about prison and imprisonment in our society, you know, prison is divided into a dual function. There's to protect the public and to take away these predatory people and put them away, and then the rehabilitative aspect of it. And most publics sept that dichotomy. I don't tell me, well, I don't buy rehabilitation by that way. You mean, I don't think that prisoners do a very good job. I think it is a valid social purpose two punish people to reinforce our social norms. That's why we punish people. It is a valid social purpose to punish people, to extract vengeance in the name of society on behalf of aggrieved victims. It's a valid social purpose to incapacitate people who endanger us. See, that's the more important to me. And the prison system does those three things pretty well. There was a sociologist, Hans Motok, who once said, you can't train an aviator in a submarine. You can't train a man to live in the community in prison. And if a person needs rehabilitation and they're not dangerous, the best place to rehabilitate, whatever the hell that means, is in the community where they're gonna have to live. Now, let me ask you that someone said something to me on this visit to Rahway, and this is probably the most significant thing someone said to me. And I said, the problem with this system is the sentencing relative to the class C stification of the crime, relative to the record of the individual inmate. Because they said, some guys come in here and the following thing takes place. They come in here and they're sorry, and then three months go by and they're really really sorry, and six months go by and they're really really really sorry, and they're ready to get out and they're sorry, and then you keep them in there another couple of months and they're not sorry. Now they're angry. Flip and now they're angry, and now they've switched sides. And I'm wondering what your opinion is. In my opinion is New York Well, the United States generally incarcerates people longer than any other country. It's just our culture and it's our system, and it's we have over lengthy prison absolutely absolutely, I mean for crimes, for victims, crimes, and even for crimes with victims. Ever since m Richard Nixon and the War on Crime, which was really just, uh, I think, a way to capture the Southern vote, because he really meant a war on black people. Ever since Willie Horton, which was just an extension of that same thing, no politician has been willing to reduce criminal sentences. You know, during his tenure, Mario Cuomo as governor of New York steadfastly opposed the death penalty, as did you carry before him, principal, and to be honored for that, but he also during his tenure built more prison beds in New York State than all the former governors of New York before him. Yeah, because because he could not oppose efforts to make sentences and penalties longer, because of his death penalty stance, he had to protect himself by want to be tough on everything else. And I think this has been the politics and the media have driven it in this country to a terrible extend. So for how many years I was a parole officer for about seven years, and then what happened? Uh then? Actually, well, I got a graduate degree, and I moved uh to upstate New York to teach in the State University of New York. I got a teaching appointment as an assistant professor. I was bored out of my mind. You went from one prison system to another. Yes, so to speak, Although an interesting story in that and the time and the time I was a pro officer, I had arrested people. I had sent people back to prison for very lengthy periods of time, guys who had committed murder, guys who had committed rape. And nobody ever laid a glove on me. It was never a problem. I'd walk up to a guy, said, look, I gotta take you back. I put the handcuffs on him, I put in the car, we take him to jail. But while I was teaching, I got embroiled in a tenure battle with a colleague who one day walked into my office and cold cocked me. So I always felt the teaching was somewhat right dangerous teachers precisely, you know, And what they fight about in academia is so stranguous because what they the issues are so petty. How soon after you got cold cocked by the dune six months I went to Albany to work for the newly appointed Commissioner of Corrections. This was seventy seven. I went there to work as the director of work release programs in New York. At that time was really building up its investment in halfway houses work release as a way of reducing the time that people spent inside upstate maximum security prisons. What work released then and what was it what is it now? Is basically the same. It's been decimated. It's been decimated. Um reaction. No, actually it saves money. It's less expensive reaction from who I think from the find crime. Absolutely, during the last years of the Cuomo administration, I think there may have been as many as six thousand inmates in New York participating in work release programs. In New York, for example, Well, they would literally they would leave the upstate prisons. They come down to a minimum security facility located in New York. There's still one on T Street, just off Central Park. And how many people that one houses about probably a hundred and fifty people. Yeah, and they get assistance finding a job, and once they find a job, they're allowed to leave the premises. They leave, they go to work, they can do some personal chores, and then they have to be backed by a certain time, and then if they're doing well after a period of time, on weekends, they're allowed to go home for the weekend and come back. Under Governor Pataki, they dramatically reduced the program. I would say I'd be surprised if today there are even six d people in work release in New York. What do you attributed to Look, this business of corrections and and releasing people from prison is essentially nothing more than a risk management exercise. Right. We can never eliminate risk. The only way to have no risk is to never let anybody out of their cell. The many you let one guy out of the cell, you're incurring some risk. So how do you manage that risk? Well, if you have six thousand guys in halfway houses, some of them are going to screw up. How many New York state stilities are there today? Roughly, Gee, I don't know off hand. There are probably forty between forty and fifty several state prisons of varying sizes. Right, so yes, but I think the story about New York that that we should feel good about is that where in n five ninety six, New York State had seventy thousand people in prison. And mind you, when I started in nineteen sixty nine, there were ten thousand people in prison, so there were seventy thousand. Today it's down fifty the reform of the Rockfellow drug laws. So it's there's no question in my mind the number of people that are in prison is a function of policy decisions made by elected officials. Who do you think was ultimately responsible for bringing down those laws because a lot of people that was just insane. Well, look, I mean, I think that there was an advocacy the organization dropped the rock in New York. I think that then Governor Patterson deserves credit. I'm not sure any other governor would have accepted that. And then also, I think you cannot ignore the cost issue. The cost of imprisonment in New York State today even is still two billion dollars a year in UM. Just about every state in the country, over the last twenty years, the cost of imprisonment has been the fastest growing item in state budgets. In California, which for years uh I was so proud of its public university system reached the point where it was spending more on its state prisons, which now hold a hundred and sixty thou people, than it was on its state universities. So I think that it was a perfect storm. All the factors came together. The fiscal conservatives were driven by the price issues and the country and that's happening is that it's driven by cost and that it does not reflect a genuine rethinking of our approach to crime and imprisonment. So when you leave the edge vacation job and you go work for the Department of Corrections in work release, when is the first time as an official of the state you walked into a prison in New York State? Oh, I had walked into prisons as a parole officer. And so with the first prison you walked, first person I ever walked into a singing and describe that the first time you walked into Well, it's Dickensian, right, I mean, it's uh. It was built in eighteen nineteen or thereabouts. The prisoners hued the stone off the palisades. The walls of the original cell blocks still stand. When I was there, New York still had a death penalty, and the guy who took me around had been there since before the war. And two things I remember about him when was he said to me, kid, he says, there's nothing new under the sun. In corrections, he says, everything we're doing today was done years ago. We just called something different. And he's right. Our approach to imprisonment hadn't changed much. It's it's very much a nineteenth century invention. And the other thing he was he took me to see the death house where Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been executed. Horn was only five years old when the Rosenbergs were killed, but growing up in a Jewish household in the nineteen fifties, their death nonetheless had a powerful impact. Sixteen years after first seeing the death house at sing Sing, Horn was executive director of the New York State Division of Parole, and his opinions had evolved. When I was a parole officer, we had an expression trail um, nail him and jellum, and the idea was that it was up to the paroley to do all the work, and if he screwed up, we would catch him and lock him up. And we had this belief that if we locked him up before he committed a more serious crime, we were performing a public service. I had come to the conclusion that parole and the prison system generally wasn't doing enough to ease the transition for people leaving prison. When an individual comes out of prison, everybody gets out of prison, and they have some statistical probability of succeeding or failing. And we can improve these odds a little bit if we attend to three things. One with sobriety. And I'm not a teetotler, I don't make a moral judgment, but sobriety is a primary condition. If you don't stay sober, I mean alcoholism and drugs, you will fail. You have to have a place to live. If you're living on the street, if you're living in this in the shelter, you're gonna fail. Today. Guys coming out of prison in New York City's housing market, they can't afford a place to live, right, I mean you say, oh, you get a job, Well, people coming out of Yale can't afford exactly. And the prison system has also as the rules, you can't have roommates who are ex offenders, you know, the Yale guy and the prisoner maybe should broom together. So I felt that we needed to help men leaving prison stay sober. We needed to help them find a place to live, and we needed to help them find a job. It's a three legged stool if you you know, if you can't stay sober, you won't hold a job. If you don't have a job, you can't pay the rent. And if you lose your apartment and you're living on the street, you're hanging out with guys, you're gonna get owned. So it's it's a it's a vicious cycle and one that Horn strive to change. Coming up in a minute, Martin Horn talks about serving under Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, his return to New York, and his ultimate decision to leave public service because I felt that I could not trust my workforce any longer. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to. Here's the thing, this is Alec Baldwin. There were nineteen newly elected governors across the country. A new administration often means new staff, including new corrections directors. Martin Horn took advantage of the moment, and so I started making cold call sending letters to every newly elected governor. Dear Governor elect, here's my resume. Wouldn't you like me to be your corrections director? I called a friend in Pennsylvania, actually called the president of the college I graduated from in Pennsylvania, and he said, gee, I don't know, but i'll check and you call me back. The next day he said, I spoke to the guy that lobbies for our college in Harrisburg, and he says, and here's what they said. They said, the newly elected governor, they did not expect to get elected, you know, send to me resume, here's the address of the transition office, and put a post it note on top that says, put this on the pile of corrections because they're so disorganized they've got resumes coming in through the transoms. So I did exactly that idea, Governor Elect Tom Ridge, let me introduce myself. I'd like to be your corrections director. Here's what I've done. Here's what I and I put a post it note on it that says put it on the pile for corrections. And two weeks later, his deputy chief of staff called, how long were you in Pennsylvania with Ridge? Well, I was in pennsyl manu with Ridge for seven years. I was Commissioner of Correction for six and then at the end of the sixth year, he appointed me to be Secretary of Administration, which took me out of the correction department and put me in charge of labor relations. And I t if you stayed there for seven years, did you develop a good relationship with Ridge? I think the world of Tom Ridge. I really think the world of Tom Ridge. Well, how would you to the extent you can characterize the six years you ran the system? And they were but for the fact that I was in Harrisford, Pennsylvania, they were the greatest six years of my professional career. Truth, Oh yeah, I had. I had the best boss you could have. He knew how to be a leader, and he knew how to back up his people, and he knew how to hold people accountable. And he was the world's best listener, better than any politician I've ever met. I think partly because he has a hearing impairment, but he listened intently and he briefed well. He had good values and good instincts. I didn't agree with him on many issues politically, but on on the core issue was I think he was he was, and he was he was just a good person. He was an approachable guy, and many of the elected officials that I've worked for aren't that way. In whatever way you can characterize this, how would you describe the system you inherited when you went in and what would you leave behind six years later? Well, I think you know. Pennsylvania is interesting. Pennsylvania's sort of the birthplace of American corrections, where the first prison, the Eastern State Penitentiary, which exists to this day is still open as a museum, was created in the early eighteen hundreds. The Pennsylvania Society for the Alleviation of the Misery of Prisoners counted among its members Benjamin Franklin. And there was a very strong Quaker influence and a very different feel. When I got to Pennsylvania. The prisons overwhelmingly were very different than the New York. There was a level of civility in those prisons that I had not experienced the New York State. In the prisons in the seventies and eighties, you could walk through the prisons and you could feel the antagonism and the tension. You could cut it with a knife. I used to say that to Oh, I don't know. I think part of it the training of the tradition. Yeah, well that brings us obviously to something that we would that we didn't want to bring up, which was about this story that broke about the program at or what happened there. Well, I don't to this day. I'm not entirely sure what happened. I will tell you this is something you think can happen anywhere. Oh, absolutely, and it is I will say, what caused me to decide to retire because I felt that I could not trust my workforce any longer. In October two thousand eight, and eighteen year old boy was killed at Rikers Island by fellow inmates. The Village Voice had been reporting for the past year about violence among prisoners. At Rikers, guards were said to be looking the other way. In two thousand and twelve, the Voice obtained and published graphic pictures of knife wounds and other injuries from inside the jail walls. The largest jail system in the country had a fight club that was condoned and even promoted by jail officials. The program, as it was called, deliver the most challenging moments of Horne's career. The story is that a young man by the Christopher Robinson was put into a particular housing unit, in the adolescent housing unit, and he had been transferred there because in the unit that he had been in previously, he had actually been extorting from a weaker inmate and he was caught. So his classification was increased and he was put into this higher classification unit. So, you know, the sort of a pecking ortist. So now he gets there and these guys who had been there for a while, who was this click, They step up to him and they said, we're going to extort from you, and he says to them, on the extorer here, you don't extort from me. So they tuned them up. They beat him up. Come to find out that they had been extorting from other inmates and that this has been going on for some time with the prior knowledge and arguably the connivance of the officers, and basically the officers had made a devil's bargain with the image, look, you don't beat us up, you don't attack us, and will let you run the ship exactly, which, by the way, you know, the job that we ask corrections officers to do are terrifying. Most officers, perhaps all officers are scared out of their minds. We asked them to supervise fifty often angry, sometimes mentally ill young men, during the worst period of their lives, during the worst period of their lives, who are craving some addictive substance in an open dormitory. And they're in that dormitory by themselves. So how does this one individual assert himself. He does not carry a weapon, he does not carry a baton. There may be another officer in a controlled room some ten ft away who can sound the alarm and ask for help, but by the time help arrives, he can be beaten to a bloody pulp. So it's two in the morning. You're making around, walking around this dormitory of fifty year old guys. In the back corner, you stumble across two of them smoking weed. You have a decision to make. You can turn your back and walk the other way. You can try and bust them and run the risk that their friends will pounce on you and pummel you. So which happens, which certainly happens, how frequently more frequently than we'd like it to. And that's another reason that I left, because I feel the prisons are understaffed. I think it's is wrong to ask one man, and by the way, today more than the correction officers in the City of New York or women. So when you say that the two guys smoke weed, the corrections officer comes. He sees you got a decision to make, and someone's gonna pummel you. Do you have a system in place where you know who's more disposed towards violent behavior inside the facility when they come in, and why can't you separate them before in an anticipatory way. Well, we have what assistant we refer to a classification, and you basically separate the most serious inmates and put them in maximum security. But at the end of the day, somebody has to supervise those maximum security inmates. What reforms do you think could be made in supervising maximum security inmates? Generally? I don't like to open dormitories. I think every inmate should have his own cell. Cells do not have to be oppressive, they do not have to be depressing. They can be bright and airy, they don't have to be oppressed. They have everybody in their own room. Everybody should have their own room. I don't you don't selling, I don't, and I don't. Well, well, I think that I don't think that's cruel and unusual people, I think, well, I don't like to use those terms cruel and unusual. And in fact, the Supreme Court has said that there is no one man, one sell rule living in the constitution. But I think that we all have privacy needs to your knowledge, and I would trust your opinion. Do the inmates do they want their own cell? They would do? They prefer it, some like company, some like company for the wrong where, But most people, I think want their privacy. This is your safety zone, right. Nobody can get you if you want to come out. You know, different people go to prisons and and they're terrified to be out in the prison yard with all these other inmates. Is there a constant pulsing sense of fear for people who were in the prison yard not in a well run prison. Look, it's the job of the officers to keep the inmates safe. And if we don't keep the inmates safe, they'll find ways to keep themselves safe. How will they do that. They'll do that by joining gangs, and they'll do that by creating In New York State a lot of gangs. I can't comment on New York State prisons. I know that it's certainly a problem in New York City, and in the city would and they do these gangs. I guess, like, if I got into prison tomorrow, is it just expected I'm going to join a gang for my own pretential? You see, this gets to the program. You're the new guy. You come into this open dormitory of fifty inmates and there's a group of maybe ten or fifteen of them. Perhaps they know themselves from the street, perhaps they self identify as bloods or crips or Latin Kings or Arian Nation whatever. Not too many of those New York. But if you're in California, sure, and they step to you and they say, here's the deal. Are you with us? And if you're stupid enough to walk into a dormitory where there are twenty inmates who call themselves bloods and you say, hell, I'm a crip, Well they're gonna do the same thing to duty on the street. Get off our turf. Prison and jail. Is this artificial scarcity that we create, right, So there's by and large, little food, there's no drugs, no girls, there's no sex. You know, there's no money, and as a black market, and so as with any place else, a group of inmates emerges and they say, we control it, the simplest thing, and this is what was happening. Certainly in the adolescent jail where that program occurred. There were never enough chairs for all the inmates, and a group of inmates would say, on Saturday mornings, when this program is on, or when this sporting event is on, there's one TV said it is for the black guys, and you Spanish guys, you stay in yourselves, because that's our time. Now in office, Sir has a choice to make. First of all, he should see it going on, and if he sees it, take it, he should take that away. Were there any prosecutions of any of the officers. Two officers actually were convicted of gang assault, and five or seven of the inmates ultimately were convicted. I don't know what the charge was, but it might have been manslaughter. I mean, I don't think they intended to kill Christopher Robinson. The troubling thing was that there have been stories for some time. Uh and this is what the voice documented that this had been going on. There were bread crumbs, and that if we had done a better job of following those bread crumbs, we perhaps would have seen it earlier and prevented it to people. You know, I'd like to get back to another point you make, you know, you make the point of it how we deal with white collar criminals or with everybody uses the maid Off example. You know Martha Stewart, you've mat her many times. I'm sure she's a lovely person. So we know that some years ago she um lie to a federal officer investigating supposed insider stock manipulation. She was not convicted in the stock manipulation. She was convicted of line to a federal officer, and she got what four months in a federal prison in Alderson. So today, but for her current troubles with Macy's and Pennies, she's better off than she was when she went to prison. What did society game by that? Let me suggest to you, what if instead we had erected a ten foot high platform in Times Square and we had climate control that we enclosed it in plexiglass, we heated it, we air conditioned it, and we put a stool, you know, like a bar stool in it, and stocks well, I wouldn't put her in stocks, but I every day you want to be here at nine o'clock in the morning, and you were to remain here until five in the afternoon. You know, we'll protect you from the elements, and you'll sit here with a sign around your neck that says I'm a liar. You can bathe, but you can't get all dressed up. You can't wear jewelry, you can't wear makeup. You know, you can attend to all your personality that sort of thing. We're not looking to harm you, but you can't do all that stuff. And after you've sat in Times Square for some period of time where the world could see that you are a liar, you are to perform community service for a year where you're to go out to East New York and teach young women about nutrition, about dressing for success, about all of the things that you do so well. And in addition, you have to pay back trouble or quadruple what you made on this financial fraud. And that's it. But we're not going to imprison you. Would we have had as great a deterrent effect, would we have punished her, would we have convinced her not to try to do it again, would we have deterred others? I would argue yes, And yet we don't do those things. We don't use shape in our society. But I agree with you in terms of what you're suggesting. However, we do have that now we have the internet. As my friend once said, the Internet represents the death of forgetting. Martha Stewart is forever going to be referred to as you know, formerly incarcerated, blah blah blah, that that's going to stay with the rest of her life. But was she punished? My point is simply this, as a society, our primary response to crime is prison. It's the only tool. Understand you know the aphorism that if the only tool on your belt is a hammer, everything looks like an app Well, that's that's true with respect to our approach to imprisonment. Um, what do you think of the whole prison inc notion and the privatization of prisons and the myriad of things that arise from that. Um, it's a very complicated issue, and it's very easy to be opposed to private prisons. It's very easy to demonize private prisons. Private prisons arose because governments needed them. Governments needed them because in the eighties and nineties, the American prison population was growing faster then government could create capacity for prisoners. I have visited private prisons, and I have visited many public prisons, and I have colleagues who work in the private prison industry. Running a prison isn't rocket science. What they do is they hire guys like me to run their prisons. And a private prison will run as well or as poorly as the government who contracts with it wants it to. So if private prisons don't do what government asked them to do, it's the fault of government for allowing them to. But is it is it understood in the current culture that private prisons it's kind of a wink and a nod and we're not going to force these contra I am sure that is true in some places and not in others. Um. A little over five years ago, the board of Correxins in the city allowed officials to listen to in make telephone conversations. What do you think of that? I asked, word, why? Why? What's going on that you felt you needed to have that advantage? Well, for you get you get to the question of the program inmates are running their scams over the phones. Inmates are arranging for drugs to be brought into the prison. Over there operating, they're operating over the phones. There's no constitutional right to even have phones in prisons. We could rip all the phones out and we would be well within our constitutional authority. The federal law is clear that with proper notice and the consent of at least one party, a conversation can be listened to and recorded. I felt that by giving the inmates ample opportunity, Basically we said to them, Look, by choosing to use our phones that we're making available to you, you are waiving your right to privacy. If you want to retain your right to privacy, write a letter. If you had um three things that you were going to change about the federal state city, what would you change about the way we deal with convicted Well, so that's that. That excludes the city. Let's talk about federal and federal. The first thing I do is I legalized drugs. When you say that, though, I mean obviously there are people who inside that argument talking about cocaine and her you don't care you'd legalize. I would legalized drugs. We couldn't possibly do worse than we're doing now, right, But what would you do to take it even further? I mean, you've been involved with the system for a long one time. You'd have the government dispensing cocaine and heroin. I would sell it in the liquor stores, right, and I would tax the hell out of it. You just license it and sell it. I mean, I agree with you as far as I would take all the money we're spending and all the money we're going to make, and I would reinvest it in prevention. You know, I grew up never using a seatbelt, and to this day I'll drive around without a seatbelt. My kids were now that you know, I e suppose my son when he was two years old, if I started to back the car out before he was buckled in, would have a tantrum. Right, if your kids are smoking today, we can prevent, we can provide treatment, and there will be people and there will be to spare. Bobby Kennedy had the funniest line of all. Brobbly Kennedy said, if you ever of the day, would we do. We're gonna bend down with a plastic bag and pick up your dog's poop on the street and throw it in the whoever thought that was you, you know, fifty years at least time we recycle our tin cans. So I would legalize drugs. I would reduce the length of time that people who do commit crimes, violent crimes, well, for all crimes, but for those people who scare us the most. John Mohammad, remember the Washington sniper. Right, that guy scares me. Right, he was just shooting people at random. You have to incapacitate him forever, right, Jeffrey Dahmer, Right, you had to incapac mentally ill. That's a whole different story. That's that's item four. Because they don't belong in prison, right. The great shame of our society today is that the people in prison have a mental illness. More people receive acute mental health care in the jails in this country than they do in the mental hospitals. Rikers Island provides more acute medical psychiatric care than Bellevue. The largest provider of acute psychiatric care in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail. Mentally ill people don't belong in jail, and it is a scandal, and you're not allowed to You're not allowed to give violent inmates in any kind of a system drugs. You're not allowed to drug them or are you well if if if they're being treated for mental illness, people mentally just you're not but you're not even drug them to quiet them down. You can't know without a court order. I mean you can if there's a court order, and you do. They get court orders very rarely, very rarely. Don't equate violence with mental illness. What have we talking about? These guys that are violent. There are some people who need to be incapacitated, and I would incapacitate And that doesn't bother me. A guy who is a serial rapist, as serial child molester doesn't bother me in the least. Everybody but everybody else, the guy who commits a robbery, the guy who commits a burglary, the guy who steals your car that you know, uh, they don't to go to prison for as long as they Number three, um number three is I would change the way we release people from prison. I would actually do away with the parole boards and discretionary parole. I would make every sense a determinate sense. I would say you're gonna be under the control of the state for a period of time. Let's just say, for argument sake, five years. For the first three of those years, you're gonna go to prison, and we'll leave it up to the corrections people to decide back someimum medium minimum. But at the end of three years, you're coming back to the community. And when you come back to the community, you're gonna live in a halfway house. And while you're in the halfway house, we are going to help you connect with a relapse prevention program to prevent your relapse to drug abuse. And we're gonna help you to get involved in an a a program, and we're gonna help you find a job, and you're not gonna have to pay us any money. You're gonna save the money you earn on your job, and we're gonna help you find a place to live. And when you've saved enough money to pay a month's rent in a month's deposit and maybe another month, you can go home and live on your own, and we're done with you. What's wrong with the state, for example, building a facility that is an after care facility for prisoners to come and to live, where they go to work and they continue to produce things that the state needs. Is that a possibility. That's possible. I mean I I'm a believer that these communities have to be small. I cannot resemble prisoners. They should be normalizing. The point is that people need to be normalized as the return of the community. So I would. I would have fixed sentences and that way. What happens now is Johnny Jones goes to prison for uh five to fifteen years? Those are five or is at fifteen if parol parols five, the victims says, my god, I thought he was going away for fifteen years. Or he goes in front of the parole board and they say, Johnny, we're gonna hold you for five w years. This is what I did guilty, And my lawyer told me that if I did everything right and kept my nose clean, I'd be out in five and the proberts as well. We were in the room when that deal got made. We're not bound by that. So the whole system currently is deceptive, causes people to distrust the system, undermines respect for the rule of law, and it doesn't allow us to release individuals from prison in a planful way. So I would Those are the three things I would change. Are you glad You're done. Are you glad you're walking away from that? It was? It was, It was a fascinating career. I am absolutely glad I'm done. You are um? Was it spiritually deadening in other ways as well? I mean, because I can't think of anything more horrific than when I was in prison. At some level, there is no place else a grown man could have as much fun. When I was the warden of Hudson Prison, I used to say to people that it was a cross between being the headmaster of a somewhat down on its heels boys school and the King of England, because you were in charge and you had to deal with everything from the pipes in this hundred year old facility breaking to making sure that there was adequate food and that the food was well prepared, to making sure that there were no contagious diseases, that tuberculosis didn't spread, that measles didn't spread, that people got psychiatric care. You had to deal with labor relations, you had to deal with ethical issues, you had to deal with legal issue with a lord high governor. And it was fascinating and in that respect I couldn't have had a better career today. Martin Horn is a Distinguished Lecturer in Corrections at John Jay College and serves that the executive director of the Permanent Sentencing Commission, which works to clarify, simplify, and create New York States sentencing guidelines. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. Four four