Robert Lustig and Martin Horn

Published Mar 17, 2014, 4:00 AM

Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco, studied brain tumors in children and began to see a connection between sugar and childhood medical problems, addiction, and lethargy. According to Lustig, sugar is as addictive as cocaine, heroin and crack, and is producing the fattest, least-healthy Americans yet.

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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I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers, to hear their stories. What inspire their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influence their work. Dietary fructos is completely irrelevant to life. People say, oh, you need sugar to live garbage. I would advize drugs across the board. We couldn't possibly do worse than we're doing now. My guests today didn't set out to become outspoken critics of powerful institutions. As experts in their fields. They found themselves confronting two issues that have an impact on our everyday lives and our futures, obesity and the criminal justice system, and they haven't been afraid to speak their minds. You'd have the government dispensing cocaine and heroin, I would sell it in the liquor stores. Martin Horned was head of both the New York City Department of Corrections and Probation. New York City processes nearly one hundred thousand inmates every year, more than many state systems. But first, before we talk about prisons, we consider another problem that has been getting worse over the last decade. One of every three American adults is obese. The epidemic is arguably the most important health issue of our time. Children today may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, in large part due to obesity, which has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. My guest today, doctor Robert Lustig, makes a strong case that our addiction to sugar is at the root of the obesity epidemic. Americans consume an average of one thirty pounds of sugar a year. Two years ago, this issue became a personal one when my doctor told me I was pre diabetic. So when I read about Dr Lusting and his popular anti sugar lecture streaming online, I paid attention. So why do I at the Coca Cola conspiracy? And next I gave up sugar? What else is in coke? We'll get to the sugar in a minute. What else salt? Milligrams of sodium per can. It's like drinking a pizza. So what happens if you take on sodium and lose free water? You get thirstier? Right? So why is there so much sugar and coke to hide the salt except. Dr Lusting is a pediatric endochronologist and you see San Francisco back in the nineties. He became interested in diet and obesity while working at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. Now a bit of biochemistry to explain some of Lustig's research. Leptin is a protein that works like a thermostat for your body's energy levels. If leptin levels are low, your brain senses starvation and you feel hungry. If levels are high, you feel full. Lusting asserts there was an epidemic of people who have developed leptin resistance, people whose brains can't register when they are full. Lustig has studied leptin and its effect on pediatric patients. In the nineteen nineties, he was treating children recovering from brain tumor surgery. I had a stable of kids who were enormously obese. And the thing was, they were an obese before the tumor, but they started gaining weight at thirty to forty pounds a year after per two year, per year, with no cessation, NonStop, and they were constantly hungry and worse yet, they were the world's biggest couch potatoes. They lost interest in every single thing around them. They would sit in the couch, eat doritos, and sleep. This was their life. And the parents would come to me and say, this is double jeopardy. My child has survived the tumor only to succumb to a complication of the treatment. Why did they become couch potatoes? What was the link there? Because when your brain sees lepton, you want to burn energy. You want to exercise, you want to be physically active, you want to concentrate, you want to go do things. Leptin signals the body to exercise. Leptin signals the body that you have enough energy on board to exercise. When your brain can't see it, your brain thinks you're starting. My job was to figure out a way to take care of these kids, so my research and obosity started back. We said, okay, these kids brains, that area of the brain is dead. I can't bring it back. I'm not a neurosurgeon. I can't transplant the hypothalamus. What can I do? So I, after doing some research, realized we could work down stream of the brain. The brain was signaling the pancrease to make extra insulin. Insulin makes you store energy. So these kids are known to have enormously high insulin levels. So I said, all right, let's give these kids a medicine that will block the release of insulin. We did a study and Lo and Behold, patients started losing weight, but more importantly, they started exercising. One kid started competitive swimming, two kids started lifting weights at home. One kid became the manager of his high school basketball team, running around collecting all the basketballs. I mean, you know, parents were calling me up within a week saying, I've got my kid back. Right. We were interfering with insulin release, and these kids changed their behavior, and that was the first key to what I think is the entire enchilada in terms of the obesity epidemic. And then what happened for you wanted to do next? So then we said, maybe there are adults out there who have the same problem, they just don't have a brain tumor. Let's look for it. So we did a whole study, pilot study with forty four obese adults, and we gave him the same drug to do the same thing, and Lo and Behold, eight out of the forty four, not all of them by any means, but it out of four lost a lot of weight. A pound a week over twenty four weeks without doing anything. And what was even more amazing was their fat intake didn't change, their protein intake didn't change. Their carbohydrate intake dropped on a dime. They went from nine hundred calories at day to calories a day and carbohydrate they stopped snacking between meals and most important bugles. You know, absolutely, and these kids needed to get their insulin down, and the medicine did it. And these adults needed to get their insulin down, and the medicine did it for them too. And most importantly, when we got there insulinde down, guess what they started exercising. So this all of a sudden became very clear. What's going on for these kids with the brain tumors. They couldn't see their lepton. Their insolence were sky high because their brain was starving. And because their brain was starving, they would eat everything on of the sun and it still wouldn't be enough because they could never see their leapton. And what we realized was this is adult ob city too. They can't see their LEPTONI that's where sugar came in. So sugar was a culporate that also triggered other it enabled other bad eating exactly. And we've learned that the higher insulin goes, the hungrier you get, hunger you are. So the sugar is an appetite stimulant in a sense, whatever you want to call you can call it that. Absolutely. We know that because David Ludwig, my opposite number at Boston Children's, he prepped a bunch of kids with a soda, a can of soda, a hundred fifty calories, and then he let him loose at the fast food restaurant. So the question is did they eat more? Did they eat less? Do you think more? Ate more? Their insulind was high, and also there's high insulin makes you hungry, that's right, High insulam makes you hungry. And also there's a hormone in your stomach that signals hunger called grellin, And when grellan's high, you're hungry, and sugar doesn't knock it down. When I gave up sugar, it was amazing. It was like pushing a toboggan along a track to eventually get down the slope. The first couple of weeks, the first couple of months, that part in early May through June By the time we get to July and August, we're going downhill and the weights just coming off. I cut out carbs, and I gave up pasta because that was the mega dose of carbohydrate, right. I mean, I would eat, you know, the fish tank sized bowl of pasta, and it's easy to do. A lot of people think that the Italian diet is the Mediterranean diet. Not at all. There is no pasta in the Mediterranean diet. We started the pasta craze because of all the immigrant Italians who couldn't afford to eat meat and vegetables here. That's what they fell back on, and it actually got exported from here back to Italy sam as Chop Suey did to China. You know, these are all American inventions. The Italian diet is not the de deterranean diet, never was, never will be. But I would say to people, I cut back on bread. They say, okay, great. Then I'd say to them I gave up pasta. They'd say, whoa that. I'd say, I gave up sugar, and they go and they're insane, exactly right. It was as if I said to them, let's go learn to play the classical piano. Now let's begin. Now, how did sugar become They were consuming a hundred and thirty pounds of sugar per person per year. Was it always that way? No? No, this is very What do you think change that? Money and marketing and you know, the food industry. So there are a couple of sort of milestones in this story. The first is the nascent candy and soft drink and sugar industry in America, which dates back to the early nineteen hundreds, but that didn't really get things started because sugar was still kind of expensive, and sugar had been expensive all throughout history. In nifty nine, we lost our sugar fix because Castro took over Cuba and that actually started the Florida sugar industry because the sugar had come from Cuba prior to that's a lot of it. So that started the American sugar industry really in top notch gear. Then high fuctose cornsyrup, camel high fuctose corn syrup shows up and all of a sudden, it's in everything. Why, well, it actually took It is sweeter, but most important, it's cheaper. But do you find that also, this is what's happening over the last I don't know how many years. I mean, I'm not somebody who knows the history of this, but certainly in my lifetime, which is the goal is to make everything sweeter. The point is that this is actually evolutionary. This isn't our DNA, because there is no food stuff anywhere in the world that is both sweet and acutely poisonous. So it was a signal to us. It was a signal to us that it was safe to eat, even Jamaican hockey fruit, which has a substance in nicolled hypoglycin, which causes Jamaican vomiting sickness and can kill you. It's only in the immature fruit. As soon as the fruit falls from the tree to the ground. Jamaican's no, it's a ky to eat because it's now ripe and the toxin is gone. We are programmed to like sweet, and what has happened is the food industry figured it out and they hijacked our taste buds for their own purposes. When you think about this epidemic, and it is an epidemic because it's a pandemic, I don't say this with any smugness or satisfaction. I say this with a lot of sadness because I had always been thin, and for somebody who didn't eat meat and didn't eat I thought I thought I was doing the right thing health wise. I'm a vegetarian, I'm a pesketarian, if you will, And I'm beginning to really really blow up here. You know, Listen, we've got vegan type two's who are massively obese. And just because you're vegan, doesn't that from what do you think they getting from soda? Vegan? Especially South Asians Indians, they can't carry as much subcutaneous fat. And once you basically fill your subcutains your love handle fat stores, it starts building up in your liver and when that happens, it's all downhill after that. But other people have worked towards this prior to you. You're not the first person sugar is bad. Look, this has been going on since the seventies, this discussion. The chief anti sugar campaigner was a guy by the name of John Yudkin, and he was a British physiologist, nutritionist, and he wrote a book back in seventy two called Pure White and Deadly. You read this book, it's just astounding. Everything came to pass on the other side, we had this guy, ansel Keys and he had done a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge in nifty two and he saw what, you know, the Brits were eating, and it was pretty horrible, and he came to the conclusion that saturated fat had to be the cause of heart disease. We didn't know at that point what happened to sugar in the liver. We didn't know that it got turned into fat. What we knew was that saturated fat correlated with LDL levels in l d L correlated with cardiovascular disease. So the thought was, let's get rid of the saturated fat and cardiovascular disease will disappear. The whole country went low fat back in Here's the problem. When you go low fat, the food tastes like cardboard. And the food industry knew it. What were they gonna do? How are they gonna sell food? And now we had high fructose corn syrup too, When does that get introduced into the food market the early seventies, seventy three, seventy five, actually I don't know. American corporations in the second worst hurricane in American history, Hurricane Allen, it wiped out the entire Caribbean sugar crop, and the food industry, especially the beverage industry, ran scared. They said, where are we going to get the sugar for all the soft drinks? And that's when reliable market exactly, And they started introducing it, and they started upping the dose, and the transformation was complete. Is the process of getting table sugar from cane sugar more labor intensive and more expensive than the high fructose corncerp process by a lot. High fructose corn syrup comes from corn, and the corn market and the corn supply in this country is far more plentiful and far more reliable than the cane sugar. Correct of all of the corn grown in America today ends up as high fructose corn syrup. So we have boatloads of it, and it's cheap. And because it's cheap, it started finding its way into things that never had sugar before, like hamburger buns, hamburger meat, barbecue, sauce, catchup, salad, dressing, I mean pretty much everything you can imagine in the store. Indeed, Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina has just done a study that shows that eight of the food items there are six thousand food items in America them are laced with sugar. Add a sugar. Do you think that they understood back then that sweetening the bond was just about taste. They knew that when they put it in, we bought more that they knew when this was in there, people ate more of it. Palatability equals sales. It did then, it does now, and we love sugar, and that's why the entire food supply of America is now sweeter than you can imagine. Here's the problem. There's an area of your brain called the reward center. Everybody's heard of it because you know drug addiction. You know that cocaine, morphine, heroin, nicotine, They all work in the same place. And the neurotransmitter that signals pleasures called dopamine. You probably heard of it. Of course, when you get a dopamine rush, you get pleasure, and sugar does it the same way as all of those drugs of abuse. The problem is, when you get that pleasure, you downregulate the little proteins that catch the dopamine, called dopamine receptors, and the more you downregulate them, the more dopamine you need to get the same effect, and that's called tolerance. And then when you take the stuff away, then there's no dopamine to interact with these few proteins left, and that's called withdrawal. Tolerance and withdrawal that's called addiction. So we know how that works for all of these other drugs of abuse. Turns out sugar does the same thing. It's the same as cocaine. The difference is that for cocaine you gotta go find it, whereas for sugar we have what we call system saturation. It's everywhere, you can't escape it. Coming up more with Dr Robert Lustig, who says that cutting out sugar is not the single most important thing you can do for your quality of life. You're going to want to sit down for this, or actually you won't want to sit The single best thing you can do for yourself quality of life wise exercise, by far and away. Nothing else comes close. I'm Alec Baldwin and here's the thing. Take a listen to our archive more unexpected conversations with artists, policymakers and performers like the amazing Dick Kevin. Amazing. We all are saying amazing all the time. Now, I got five amazings and watching morning television amazing guests we have. It's an amazing script. It's just amazing. I was amazed. But your career amazesn't there Go to Here's the Thing, Dot Org. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. America's obesity epidemic is complicated by issues of education, poverty, and personal freedom. In July two thousand thirteen, an appeals court struck down in New York City ban on the sale of supersized sugary drinks. Mayor Bloomberg was disappointed, but maybe not so prized. Two years earlier, as my guest Dr Robert Lustig recalls, the mayor had tried to change things on the federal level. Bloomberg petition the U. S d A to take soft drinks off food stamps, and the U. S d A rebuffed it. Why do you think they did? Why do you think that other than the straight up political influence of the soda indus, isn't that enough? How does the U. S d A do that? No one's saying that the people who are on food stamps you can't have soda. I doesn't want the government to pay for it. The U s d a's job is to sell food. That means sell whoever is going to buy it. So it's about commerce, it's about absolutely and who controls the U s d A. The U s d A is basically the governmental arm of the food industry and the job of the us D. You don't have a lot of faith in the us D not a whole lot. Now, the job of the U s d A is to protect the food supply, and that includes protecting from people like me in terms of threats to public health. Would you equate other products and other substances that are commonly used as being equally threatening as sugar, Maybe not, not not equally, maybe not as much. But I think there's a caffeine epidemic in this country. There is a caffeine epidemic. I believe there is, and and it's being stoked by all the coffee companies. But it's a less concern to you than sugar, oh way, because there's no toxic downside with sugar. Type two diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, gastric bypasses a hundred and forty seven billion dollars a year down a rat hole for taking care of chronic diseases which don't need to be We wouldn't need healthcare reform if we had obesity reform, and we can't have OBEs reform until we have some sort of sugar policy. You you mentioned pretty regularly the food industry, this, the food industry that. And you know, most Americans I think who are smart, realize that we have more than enough food to feed three quote unquote square meals a day to everybody in this country and those that aren't getting it. It's because of the distribution of food in our society. However, we have to cut a lot of corners to get there. In the way we produce beef, and the way we produce livestock, and the way we produce pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, all of this stuff, we need a new food model. We need a new food growing model. By we're gonna need four California Central Valleys in order to feed our population. We won't even have one because of the runoff in the sierra that changes in soil erosion. So you know what, the obesity epidemic might even take care of itself because we'll have a famine because we are misusing our food system. And until we fix it, we will continue to be sick. We will continue to die of things like diabetes and heart disease. Medicare will be broke by because there won't be any money to pay for it. You won't be able to see a doctor because they will be too busy taking care of all the other fat people in the emergency room we're having their heart attacks, and there won't be enough food. Anyway, as I'm listening to you, I'm getting really depressed and I want to go have ice cream. Now you're really bumber me. I want to know. I'm enjoy bar really badly. The bottom line is, there's a lot of reason to be positive. And I'll tell you why. Give me an example. People are getting it. People are starting to recognize that there's an obesity epidemic, not just obesity, noncommunical disease epidemic, diabetes, yeah, exactly. Breast cancer in particular is famous for having insulin receptors and growing in response to insulin. Prostate insulin receptors. Yes, they do. So there's a lot of reason to be concerned, and there's a lot of reason to keep your insulin down. Number one, it doesn't fuel any tumors. Number two, it lets your left and work. Number three, it doesn't increase the smooth muscle of your coronary arteries so that you might end up getting a heart attack. There's a whole bunch of reasons to keep your insulin down and the thing that makes your insulin go up most sure. You know people, a lot of people are terrified when they it down in the restaurant. A lot of people that are trying to stay fit and trying to stay healthy. They can go through periods. So I've been through this myself where I have like a mild panic attack when I sit down at the restaurant because I say to myself, there's an enemy lurking in everything. Here. There's a mercury and the fish, and there's hormones in the chicken. I don't eat beef and poultry, and there's too much sodium here, there's too much fat here I don't need. It's true. The single best thing you can do for yourself quality of life wise, exercise by far and away. Nothing else comes close. The next thing that's most important is when you're eating, make sure you have some fiber. When people want to go eat fiber that you recommend they eat. Now where do they go? Very simple? Brown food, brown and green. Okay, if it's brown and green, it's got fiber, because fiber is brown. Wheat comes out of the ground. What color is it. It's brown, You send it to the mill, you make bread out of it. Now, what color is it? It's white? Where'd the brown go? Got milled off? God made carbohydrate with inherent fiber. So we have brown rice, whole grains, beans, we have nuts. They're all just great. But as soon as you remove the fiber, which is called processing, now you've got a problem because now when you eat it, the sugar gets absorbed so fast that your liver gets overloaded, your mitochondria basically get sick, and now you've got insulin resistance, and now you've got all the diseases going downstream from People need to have an elevated level of consciousness and discipline about eating pasta, rice and potatoes as well at the moment they do. I'm hoping that the food industry will pick up on this and do the right thing. But well, the right thing would be to actually sell real food so that we can eat real not processed. If you we can do it, now, you know, years ago we couldn't because we didn't have the distribution system to be able to do it. We have it now, we could do it. We have the technological capability to serve and eat real food. But the food industry is making any hand over fist. If you could pick one or two things that you would change in public policy, if it was like getting the soda machines out of schools, it would be like no food stamps for soda. What would be a change in public policy? You'd make one thing? What is it? The FDA currently has fructose, the sweet part of sugar, on what it's called the grass list g R as generally regarded as safe, also has transfats on it at the moment as well. It needs to be reevaluated. It needs to be revised. The last time this was looked at, and this was before the hints corn syrup blood, this was before the excess sugar order of a century ago exactly, and they have no plans on doing so. If I could do one thing in this entire thing, it would be that what would be one more um? I would think very strongly about limiting access of sugar beverages to infants and children like zero there no reason for it. There's not one biochemical reaction in your body, not one that requires dietary fructos, not one that requires sugar. Dietary fructos is completely irrelevant to life. People say, oh, you need sugar to live garbage. Dr Robert Lustig's book about the dangers of sugar is called Fat Chance, Beating the Odds against Sugar, processed food, obesity, and disease. Knowing what you know? What are things you don't eat? What's your diet become since you've been doing this work. I carry a few extra pounds and I'm not happy about it. I don't eat sugar. You don't know. I have dessert twice a year when I'm in New York, I have a piece of Juniors cheesecake, and when I'm in New Orleans that have bread, pudding, whiskey sauce. Those are my too uh deserved twice a year. Well, other than that, no, I really don't. What are you eating that you think you should be eating? Well, I have a half a bagel in the morning with cheese. That's sort of my standard breakfast, and my wife gets on me for that for lunch. Unfortunately, because I'm running between you know, patients, it often ends up being something very processed, and it's a real problem for dinner though it's a very standard dinner, and I don't snack between meals, and I still can't lose it. So I understand. I'm there. I'm part of the Sere Lupton. Probably not. Dessert is a luxury many of us take for granted, but many people in America go decades without the privilege of selecting what to eat, or for that matter, what to wear, when to shower, or any other meaningful life decision. 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. I met armed robbers, rapists, dealers, and murderers, and I'll never forget my experiences there. As my next guest, Martin Horn will tell you, prisons are memorable. The first prison he set foot in was sing Sing in upstate New York. That's the Kensian, right, I mean, it's uh. It was built in eighteen nineteen or thereabouts. The prisoners hewed the stone off the palisades. The walls of the original cell blocks still stand For over forty years, martin Horn's career has focused on prisons and the men and women who live there. 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 Yes, that's a pretty well stunned well. I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that while I worked for a governor or a mayor who was an elected offense. Why wouldn't you say that then? As opposed to know because I had a mortgage debay. Martin Horne's career in corrections started right out of college in nineteen sixte 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 you for a variety of positions. I grew up in Brooklyn, uh in Flappish, my father from fourth All right, well you took this as what did you want to be a police officer? Was that first? I wanted a job the family and civil service and police and 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. The first thing they did was they assigned me to a unit they had then which they no longer have, called the employment unit. We would get a paperwork on individuals who were 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'd have to go out and find them jobs. What was people's attitudes toward employing those people back the 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 to 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 Board of Parole. So you were interacting and during this time with yes, but I wasn't responsibly supervising. I was. I was interacted with families. I was learning how to do investigations. So the guy that took this test in nineteen sixty nine, who didn't have an eye toward 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 had grown up in a middle class home in Brooklyn, on the edge of Brownsville. I was familiar with Brown's villainies New York. There were adjacent neighborhoods. Yes, not as tough as now, not as desperate as now, but Oceanville, Brownsville, Ocean While I was as a 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 between poverty and crime, and said, listen, there are more people who grow up and live in poverty who don't commit crimes. Yeah. And you know, before I turned around, it just turned into a career and I enjoyed it and I did well at it. 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 that it changed you became more of an administrator, and you 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. How would it was one of recognizing that every one of them was just a normal, ordinary guy. They were all guys back then who had made bad judgments. I made very few, really very few who would 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 anyone of them. 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 the circumstances and still commit crimes more harshly, Yeah, I always think to myself, we've got it wrong. We need to be having longer sentences for white collar and then we do forrect 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 people have accept that dichotomy. I don't tell me, well, I don't buy rehabilitation by that way. You mean, I don't think that prisons 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. You 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. And 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 classification 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 are 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. My opinion is New York, Well, the United States generally incarcerates people longer than any other country. I think we have over lengthy prisons, absolutely absolutely. I mean if for victims crimes, and even for crimes with victims. Ever since m Richard Nixon and the War on Crime, which was really just 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. And I think this has been the politics and the media have driven it in this country to a terrible extent. So you were a parole officer 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 to upstate New York to teach in the State University of New York. I got a teaching appointment as an assistant professor, but that didn't last long. Martin Horn left to become Director of work Release Programs for New York State. This was seven and New York was investing in halfway houses. The idea is simple, reduce an inmates time and maximum security to get that person a job. This saves a lot of money and reduces recidivism, but is obviously no easy task. 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. If you have six thousand guys in halfway houses, some of them are going to screw up. The story about New York that that we should feel good about is that where in five New York State had seventy thou people in prison. And mind you, when I started in there were ten thousand people in prison, so were seventy thousand today it's down to fifty the reform of the Rockefellow 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 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 of 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 was so proud of it's public university system, reached the point where it was spending more on its state prisons, which now hold a hundred and sixty 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 concern is that it's driven by cost and that it does not reflect a genuine rethinking of our approach to crime and imprisonment. When I was a parole officer, we had an expression trail um, nail him and jael um, and the idea was that it was up to the parole 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. Martin Horne's years of hands on experience changed his opinions. He grew to believe that the prison system wasn't doing enough for ex inmates. For Horn, there are three elements to successful re entry from prison. Ex Offenders need help finding a job, a place to live, and staying sober. Coming up, Horn on his decision to leave public service. To this day, I'm not entirely sure what happened. I will tell you this is something you think can happen anywhere, 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. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In October two thousand eight, and eighteen year old boy was killed at Rikers Island, New York City's largest jail, by fellow inmates. The Village Voice had been reporting for the past year about violence among prisoners at Riker's guards were said to be looking the other way. In two thousand 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, delivered the most challenging moments of Martin 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 pecking ortist. So now he gets there and these guys who had been there for a while, who were this clique, they step up to him and they said, we're going to extort from you, and he says to them on the extorter here, you don't extort from me. So they tune them up, they beat them 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 we'll let you run the show exactly, which, by the way, you know, most officers, perhaps all officers, are scared out of their minds. The job that we ask corrections officers to do are terrifying. We asked them to supervise fifty often angry, sometimes mentally ill young men in during the worst period of their life, 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 twt 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 a rounds 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 fifty of the correction officers in the city of New York are 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 assystem 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 oppressive. 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 usual. 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 sell? They do? They prefer it. Some like company, some like company for the wrong reasons, 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 now a lot of gangs. I can't come it on New York State prisons. I know that it's certainly a problem in New York City and in the city, and they do these gangs. I guess, like, if I got into prison tomorrow, is it just expect that I'm going to join a gang my own potential. 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 whatever. Not too many of those in 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 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 they 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, there's no girls, there's no sex. You know, there's no money, and it's 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, an officer has a choice to make. First of all, he should see it going on, and if he sees it going on, he should take that away. Were there any prosecutions of any of the officers to 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 made off example. You know Martha Stewart, you've met her many times. I'm sure she's a lovely person. So we know that some years ago she um lied to a federal officer investigating supposed inside her stock manipulation. She was not convicted of stock manipulation. She was convicted of line to a federal officer, and she got what four months in a federal prisoner 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 them? 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 the 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 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 turn 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 but I agree with you in terms of what you're suggesting. Whoever, we do have that now we have the internet. As my friend one 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. I don't 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. 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. Right when you say that, though, I mean obviously there are people who inside that argument talk about cocaine and heroin. 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. And then 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 who are now prison for that. You know. I 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, pure kids are smoking today. We can prevent, we can provide treatment, and there will be and there will be money to spare. 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, you have to incapacitate him forever, right, Jeffrey Dahmer, Right, you have to inca mentally mentally ill, that's a whole different story. That's that's item four. 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. Mentally ill people don't belong in jail, and it is a scandal in our mentalists out of crime. You're not allowed to give violent inmates in any kind of a system drugs. You're not allowed to well if if if they're being treated for mental illness, people mentally just for being, 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. 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 arguments, take 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. 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 at five or is at fifteen, and parlber PAROLESO five. The victim 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 more years. When I pleaded 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 probert says, well, we were in the room when that deal got made. The whole system currently is deceptive, 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 its spiritually deadening in other ways as well? I mean, because I I can't think of anything more horrific than when I was in prison. At some level, there is no place also 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 hills 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 governor. And it was fascinating and in that respect, I couldn't have had a better career today. Martin Horne is a Distinguished Lecturer in Directions at John j College and serves as the Executive director of the Permanent Sentencing Commission, which works to clarify, simplify, and create New York States sentencing guidelines. Here's the thing. You can hear more in depth conversations in our archive, from artists to policymakers to performers like David Letterman on his early days in television. We've got a bunch of complaints. He's either not wearing underpants or he needs to wear underpants. That's how I distinguished myself. Do you want to clear that up now? Were you wearing underpants? I was wed, it was Indianapolis, and we're not talked to pout without American go to Here's the Thing dot org. Here's the Thing is produced by Emily Botine and Kathy Russo with Chris Bannon, Jim Briggs, Wendy Door, Ed Herbsman, Melanie Hoops, Monica Hopkins, Trey k, Sharon Machine, and Lou Okowski. Thanks to Larry Josephson and the Radio Foundation. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. M

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