Chris Anderson: Welcome to the TED Interview. I'm Chris Anderson. This is the podcast series where I sit down with a TED speaker, and we get to dive much deeper into their ideas than was possible during their TED Talk. Today, it's an absolute delight to have with me Robin Steinberg. Robin's a public defense lawyer who is working to disrupt America's system of cash bail. And she is a force of nature.
(Recording) Robin Steinberg: Look, we all know the shocking numbers. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than almost any nation on the planet. But what you may not know is that on any given night in America, almost half a million people go to sleep in those concrete jail cells, who have not been convicted of anything. These mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are there for one reason and one reason only: they cannot afford to pay the price of their freedom.
CA: Robin is out to change this. She's being backed by an initiative from TED called the "Audacious Project," which offers significant funding for truly bold ideas. Her idea is as bold as they get, and we're going to be talking about all of this in the next hour. I'm telling you, once you have met Robin, you cannot get her out of your head. Robin, welcome.
RS: Thank you. It's nice to be here.
CA: Robin, I'd love to start with your own story. How did you become a public defender, even?
RS: So, I went to law school many, many years ago, thinking I wanted to be a women's rights litigator. I was committed to that idea. I got to law school, and I began to work in a women's prison and was so struck by the conditions of jail, why people were in jail, who was in jail -- all black and brown women from low-income communities here in New York. I'd listen to their stories, which have stuck with me my whole career. They felt railroaded by the system. They felt like they didn't have advocates that cared. They had very low opinions of their public defenders, which got me interested in what was going on in the criminal justice system. So my third year in law school, I enrolled in a criminal defense clinic, and I began to represent people in Manhattan criminal court, and quite frankly, I think I stepped foot in that courtroom my very first day, and I never looked back.
CA: Talk about holistic public defense. What does that mean?
RS: I started my public defender career in a traditional public defender office in the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County, and then later, I transferred into the Legal Aid Society in New York City. And I loved the work; I loved everybody I was working with, I thought my colleagues were incredible, I thought the clients were inspiring in the face of all odds, and I loved representing people in courtrooms. But I also could always see the gaps in what we were doing. I saw the disconnect between the communities that clients came from and the people that were defending them. I saw the gaps in what kind of representation we were providing. When clients would sit across the table and I would be focusing on their criminal case, and they would continually ask me questions about their housing or about their kids or about something else that was on their mind, I realized that an arrest was never just an arrest, and that there were these other issues that were both driving people into the criminal legal system, but also a whole host of collateral consequences for that arrest, and that people were oftentimes concerned more about that than the actual criminal case in front of us. So I began to think there has to be more to this picture.
CA: So effectively, you couldn't effectively defend them as a public defender without paying attention to some of these other issues. What did that actually look like? Did that mean that you would sort of go from legal work into social assistance of some kind? How did you actually do that?
RS: So, I think really dedicated public defenders in any office, whether they're holistic or not holistic, try to do the extra work beyond the criminal case. So, of course, it meant focusing on the burden of proof and the evidence against the client on the criminal case and working out either a disposition or going to trial, but it also meant sometimes picking up the phone and calling the housing authority; picking up the phone and calling the child welfare worker that was knocking on my client's door, trying to take their kids from them because of their arrest; intervening in advocacy ways that are nontraditional and not in the lane of criminal defense in the way we think about it, but that are 100 percent connected to the criminal case. These systems all talk to each other, and if we as public defenders weren't actually providing advocacy and counsel in those other areas, the system was going to win.
CA: And so one issue of particular concern to you became this issue of bail. Talk about that. When did you start noticing that there was a problem here?
RS: The very first day you're a public defender, you recognize right away that bail is the driving force behind mass incarceration. And what I mean by that is, you stand next to a client in an arraignment, which is when the charges are read to them, a judge sets bail, and inevitably, because the majority of your clients are from low-income communities and obviously, disproportionately, people of color in a city like New York, they can't make the bail. And so you're standing in front of the judge with a client who has just said to you, "I can't pay that 500 dollars" or "I can't pay that thousand dollars," and you, as the lawyer, are sort of saying, "Well, you're going to have to stay in jail, then, until we work this case out, either go to trial or have a disposition." Inevitably, the judge would turn and say, "Well, if the client wants to plead guilty now, I'll give her time served." And of course, anybody will plead guilty to anything if it means going home. If the only choice is going to Rikers Island and sitting in those horrific conditions, terrifying conditions, or pleading guilty to something and going home, people plead guilty. So you, as the public defender, stood there, almost as a cog in the system, watching as people pled guilty, one after the other, because they recognized they couldn't pay the cash bail, and they were going to be sitting in a jail cell for months if not years, before their case actually got to trial.
CA: So help us a bit more with the time line here. Someone gets arrested for an offense. How long is between that moment and the arraignment? That's a short period of time, usually, right?
RS: It depends on the jurisdiction. In New York City, if you get arrested, you will see a judge and be assigned a public defender and bail will be set within 24 hours. In Oklahoma, where we work, you don't see a judge or a public defender for eight to 10 days after the arrest, where the sheriff has set bail, cash bail, according to a bail schedule. So it varies from place to place.
CA: I see. But in New York, for now, that 24 hours is spent not in jail, it's spent in a police cell.
RS: Yeah. You go to central booking, which is literally the bowels of the courthouse. You are sitting in a single cell with probably eight to 12 people in that same cell with you, with one toilet in the middle. And you are waiting for 24 hours for somebody to call your name.
CA: Still, the difference between that and the prospects of actually going to, say, Rikers Island -- that's a terrifying prospect. And that moment when a judge says, "Bail is x," and you know you can't afford to pay it -- that turns out to be just this horrifying moment that can determine someone's future, and that was what you saw so clearly early on.
RS: Absolutely, and I can tell you that the faces of people and their shock and terror as they got led back in through the door that was going to take them out to Rikers Island will be forever ingrained in my brain.
CA: So talk about how this system is set up, because the logic behind it, from one point of view, makes a lot of sense: if you've arrested someone, you think they may be guilty -- you think they are guilty -- of doing something, you want to be very sure they will come to court, so you need to give them an incentive to come. So the bail system makes sense from that point of view. When was it initiated, and how did it start to go wrong?
RS: So, the bail system and the setting of cash bail has a very long history. Its purpose, actually, was to ensure that people came back to court. It was not meant to actually decide guilt or innocence or risk or not risk. It was literally meant to incentivize people to come back to court. That was its purpose. What that meant was, the judge was supposed to set bail in an amount that was just enough that somebody could afford to pay. And the theory was, well, if you have your money up, you're going to come back to court each and every time, because at the end of a case, your money comes back. If you don't come back to court, you'll lose your money. So for a very long time, everybody believed, myself included, that it was the putting up of cash bail that made the difference. That's what made people come back to court. And so bail was supposed to be set at an amount people could pay, giving them some skin in the game.
CA: But when judges set bail, in practice, they just have a number in mind. They don't make any investigation into what a defendant's actual financial position is.
RS: That's a hundred percent right. There is almost nowhere where there are individual findings of individual abilities to pay in a financial sense. In fact, you could argue, as I would, that if you're being represented by a public defender, the screening of that indigency has already happened by the public defender, and a judge ought to recognize at that moment that this person is low-income.
CA: So a judge says, "OK, 500 dollars bail," the person can't pay it, they go to jail, then. Talk about what happens next, because you've seen this many times. In your talk you quoted horrifying stats on it. But tell us that part of the story.
RS: So, you get sent to jail, and what happens in the jail is bad enough, right? You are likely to become the victim of violence or sexual victimization. Almost half of jail deaths happen in that first week that somebody's in jail. That's suicide and homicides. And so terrible things happen while you're in jail. The conditions are terrible. It has really, really negative impacts on your mental health, your physical health. But what also happens is your life on the outside begins to fall apart. You lose your job. You may lose your home and get evicted. Your children may actually get removed from your care, because child welfare may actually come in. Your immigration status may be jeopardized. You may actually lose your place in school if you miss enough time. So lots of life consequences happen while you're sitting in a jail cell.
CA: OK, so you saw this happening, it was horrifying to you, and one night, you and your husband had an idea to do something about it. Talk about that.
RS: We were venting, as we do often, about something that had just happened in court and how angry it made us, and almost always, that revolves around the client who pled guilty who you didn't want to plead guilty, because you could've actually taken their case to trial, and they should have won, but they pled guilty, because they didn't have enough money, and how unfair that seemed, and the amounts of money, that for most people, 500 dollars or 1,000 dollars to a lot of people sounds like, "Well, of course you can pay that bail money." But the truth is, our clients can't. And so we were sitting and having dinner, and David said to me, "You know what we should do? Why don't we just create a bail fund and start bailing our clients out of jail?" And we began to unpack it -- Could you do it? Is it ethical? It is legal? How would you do it? What would it look like? -- and then spent some time over the year after that, two years after that, really exploring: What would a potential bail fund look like? And we came up with the revolving bail fund model that we started in the Bronx, called the Bronx Freedom Fund.
There had been bail funds before that, historically, that were political actions by various organizations. So during the civil rights movement, there would be a bail fund established to bail people out who were arrested at a demonstration, or there might be, actually even before that in the McCarthy era, there was actually a bail fund that was started to bail people out who were being questioned in terms of their loyalty to America and being arrested for treason and all sorts of other charges. But those were political actions that bailed people out, and it wasn't a sustainable, revolving fund, and then inevitably, they would close. They would stop after that political action was over. This was the first time we had thought about doing something that was revolving, that was sustainable. Because bail money comes back at the end of a case, it is a political act, of course, to bail somebody out of jail, but it isn't around a particular political action. It is simply a model that can be sustained almost forever, as long as people come back to court and the money comes back.
CA: You actually probably didn't know that when you started this, because the assumption that many people would make is, if you bail someone out, they'd have no skin in the game, they probably won't come back to court, they'll be out of there.
RS: I'd love to tell you that we were so smart that we could see the future, but we couldn't, and frankly, it could have gone a different way. There was a part of me that thought, well, maybe money does make people come back to court, I'm not sure. We weren't sure people would come back; we didn't really know. So we began to use philanthropic dollars to provide bail assistance for people, and we were stunned to see the results. Ninety-six percent of our clients came back to court for each and every court appearance, even though they had no "skin in the game." And we also then began to track: What was the downstream impact? We know that it saves jobs and saves families and keeps people's homes and roofs over their head. But we weren't sure what the downstream impact would be on people's criminal cases. And that's the other thing that was very surprising, was when people got out of jail, over half those cases got dismissed by the prosecution, and what that means is, they weren't sustainable at the beginning. That was interesting to learn.
CA: Well, that was one of the most blood-chilling parts of your talk, was when you spoke about -- and in a way, this is obvious, but it certainly hadn't occurred to me, and I think most people don't get that this happens -- someone can't pay their bail, and the next step is that the prosecution basically says, "Look, plead guilty and you're home."
RS: Exactly. Or wait in a jail cell for months and years.
CA: I mean, what's your sense of what percentage of people take the guilty plea when given that choice?
RS: Oh, we know this in the data -- 90 percent will plead guilty.
CA: And it's possible that half of those, or a percentage of those, are guilty. Do you have any --?
RS: I have no idea what the percentages would be, and here's why we don't know: our system has turned from those beautiful marble courthouses that we built to try cases and test governmental evidence and determine whether somebody's guilty or innocent into plea bargaining factories. And what I mean by that is that far too many people that come through our criminal legal system wind up taking a plea bargain of some sort, usually because they need to go home. So our ability to test whether or not the arrest was valid or the evidence is there has disappeared, because we don't test and challenge anything anymore in the criminal legal system. We just process human beings through the system.
CA: But certainly, that step, from, "I can't afford bail, therefore I have to plead guilty. I get to go home, but by the way, my life just got ruined." I mean -- that sequence is horrifying.
RS: You know, when people plead guilty, I think also, they -- you don't always know what the consequences will be long term. So you may plead guilty at the moment and think that's the best strategy, and then in five years, you apply for a job, and you find yourself rejected, because you have a criminal conviction on your record that never occurred to you was going to impact your future.
CA: The key to getting 96 percent of people to show up in court having paid their bail for them -- you don't just pay the bail and then forget them, you stay in touch with them, you understand their case, you remind them of the court case and so forth.
RS: Right. What we learned from the Bronx Freedom Fund is, effective notification systems and the ability to contact people, remind them about their court dates and problem-solve issues that might arise during the pendency of their cases is critical to getting high return rates. We have all sorts of creative ways to notify people of their court dates, just like we would get notified about a doctor's appointment.
CA: And the percentage of people who you bailed out who end up being convicted, is what?
RS: So, half the cases got dismissed. Fewer than two percent of the clients that we provided bail assistance for ever got convicted of a crime at all. So there were people that wound up being convicted of violations, which are less than criminal convictions, which will have far fewer consequences in the future. It was a staggering finding.
CA: So this is an amazing difference, just the difference between paying bail or not. In one instance, 90 percent of people who are stuck in jail plead guilty, and in the other instance, only two percent of them end up --
RS: With a criminal conviction and going to jail.
CA: So what do you say to someone who says, "But, look: yes, there are a lot of people in jail. But 40 years ago, America had a terrible crime problem. High incarceration rates may have been part of the solution or at least part of the cause of the reduction in crime. You are in danger of releasing people who may then go on and commit another crime. We've set up this system to try and process criminal cases, and you are disrupting it. This is dangerous. You are not helping. You are potentially empowering criminals."
RS: So, there's no evidence that mass incarceration is what led to a reduction in crime in this country. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. The evidence is, if you spend time in jail, you are far more likely to commit a crime when you eventually get out of jail than if you had never been in jail at all. That's what the data shows. Why crime goes up and down is a question that social scientists have been debating and arguing about for decades, and I suspect will always debate. But it is certainly not the result of mass incarceration that our crime rates went down. You see that, because as we begin to decarcerate, you don't see an uptick in crime. So you know that that's the truth.
CA: But you mentioned that the system has become this mass system of plea-bargaining, and that's really the name of the game. It's not so much the jury trial, because it's impossible to scale the jury trial to the number of people who we're trying to move through the system. So, the fact that the system can't apply a trial process to anything like the number of people who are arrested, what is a better solution to that? Is it possible, for example, that some people are released, not because the prosecution thinks they're actually innocent after all, but just because they know that to develop the case would be too complex, they have to focus on only a small number of cases, so they just have to let people go?
RS: The solution to that is really simple. We arrest far too many people in this country. We arrest disproportionately people from low-income communities and communities of color. We arrest people for things like possession of drugs for personal use. We arrest people for marijuana. We arrest people for graffiti. We are over-arresting and over-prosecuting. The answer really is at the front end of the system, to really ask ourselves as a nation why is our solution to social problems the criminal legal system? We have ceded all of those issues to the criminal legal system that can't handle it. But the answer isn't to figure out how to process people faster through the system, the answer is to figure out how not to put that many people in the system at the very beginning and to divert people away from the criminal legal system into other mechanisms of problem-solving.
CA: So what other mechanisms might work to solve this problem?
RS: Depending on what you're looking at, particularly if you're looking at drug offenses or some of the minor offenses that we're driving people into the system for, you could imagine a world that if you were to legalize the personal possession of drugs and drug use, you could see that problem as a public health problem and attempt to solve it in our public health arena and health systems. You could look at graffiti and vandalism and trespass and jumping turnstiles as either related to poverty or related to kids after school who need after-school programs and productive things to be doing when their schools are out, and investing in communities to provide those opportunities for young people so they don't wind up involved in the criminal legal system. There are lots of different ways to unpack what we see in the criminal legal system and to find problem-solving solutions that are community-based that actually fortify communities and enhance people, rather than do what the criminal system does, which is to debilitate them and to harm them and to then create barriers for a productive, happy, bright and wonderful future.
CA: Is part of the problem here just the political decisions we make about how policing should be done?
RS: A hundred percent. We decide who we police and what we police. Those decisions are political decisions that dominant culture has made. Let's just be honest about that. We could make different decisions about how to utilize policing. We could make different decisions about what policing even looks like. We could make a different political decision about what we define as crimes. What we do now is we police low-income communities of color and low-income communities across this country in ways that we don't police affluent people and the children of affluent people. That is a political decision that underlies almost everything you see in the criminal legal system. And even when we do prosecute people from affluent backgrounds, they wind up having access to resources that generally will prevent them from getting criminal convictions and from suffering the consequences of a criminal conviction, whether that's jail or subsequent collateral damage that happens from a criminal conviction.
CA: Is that why policing is the way it is? It just feels much harder to prosecute, for example, financial crime. I know you believe that that is probably as prevalent as "drug crime" in low-income communities, but we don't prosecute it the same way.
RS: I don't think we have the will, and I think if you look at drugs, you can see that very specifically. African Americans and Latinos and people of color in this country are shoveled into our criminal legal system for drug cases. You could decide to go to the Upper West Side of Manhattan and look at every family to determine who has prescription drugs in their medicine cabinet that they shouldn't be taking, or who is giving it to their children, or which parents are coming home at night and getting drunk and their children should be removed from them, the way that we remove low-income people's children from them when they get arrested on a drug offense. We make decisions about this that are based on race and class. That's the uncomfortable reality. I don't think it's a matter of, it's too hard to police. I think it's a matter of, we have made a willful decision not to police other communities the way that we do police communities of color and low-income communities.
CA: And so, perhaps, I mean -- could you argue, Robin, that your intervention here, by bailing people out, will actually force the system to start taking this question seriously? Because if you're a prosecutor and you're suddenly losing your leverage, you suddenly can't get all these people to plead guilty just because they've got the threat of jail hanging over them, that that will force people to look at these other policies, these other questions.
RS: Well, that's our hope, certainly, is that we put some pressure on prosecutors and judges to rethink what's happening. I'd love to think that we eventually put some pressure on police departments to rethink whether or not bringing people into the system at the beginning is a worthwhile endeavor at all, but certainly, others in the field, including Michelle Alexander, have argued that if every single person who came through the system demanded a trial, the system would crash in 24 hours. It simply can't handle it. The question is: What does that mean? Should we build more jails and courthouses? Of course not. It means that we need to really reevaluate as a nation why we over-rely on arresting people and who we're arresting, and we really need to reckon with that.
CA: So you had these years of seeing this working in the Bronx, to the point where you became convinced that it was worth trying to roll out nationally. So tell us about that dream. Where are you on that journey?
RS: So, we have opened up bail project sites across the country, and we are learning something new every single day. We're learning how systems operate. We're learning about the unique characteristics of local jurisdictions. It's been incredibly eye-opening even for somebody like me, who's been in the system for decades, to see the way the system is operating outside of even New York City.
CA: Give us an example of the system in action and perhaps an individual who you've worked with and where you've been able to intervene.
RS: So, two days ago we bailed out a young man in Detroit. We just opened up our site there, and he'd never been arrested before. He'd never been in the criminal legal system. A judge set 500 dollars bail, and his family could not scrape together 500 dollars, and our bail disruptor on the ground interviewed him and his family and paid bail for this young man. What we hope is that that's going to lead ultimately to him not having to have a criminal conviction at all, and that his future will be bright. Certainly, getting him back into the community and back into school and back with his family was critical, and so it was one of those moments where you thought, "This really matters to people's lives." It really matters to families and communities. And of course, it will matter in terms of what happens to that criminal case, but more importantly, it mattered for him, for this young man.
CA: Talk a bit about the bail bond industry, because that's been a different type of response to the same problem, in a way. Why isn't that working as a solution?
RS: So, the bail bond industry is a multibillion-dollar private industry that, in some ways, just built a business off the backs of a cash bail system that leads people to desperation.
CA: But, I mean, if they're coming along and offering people an immediate bailout, even though they're charging interest, isn't that still something of a solution? Why isn't that a solution?
RS: It's not a solution, because the families and the people that are in jail cells in this country are overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, living on the edges of poverty and from low-income communities. And so, for families to have to scrape together money to even pay a bail bondsman and then to pay interest on top of that just pushes that family further to the margins of society, and that debt sometimes becomes actually hard to get out from under forever.
CA: So the underlying problem is that if a $1,000 bail can't be paid today, it quite possibly can't be paid in six months' or a year's time, especially when you add on the high interest rates that the industry charges. And so, far from solving the problem, it's just driving families into a deeper spiral of debt.
RS: Debt and desperation, for sure. If cash bail is going to exist, it should be set at an amount that people can pay, and if that were to happen, then the bail bond industry wouldn't be necessary anymore.
CA: Do some of your colleagues who see the problem and agree that it's a profound injustice nonetheless worry that this approach to doing it risks actually prolonging the current system, that it's a Band-Aid on the problem, which, therefore, delays the pressure for fundamental systemic reform?
RS: I have heard that argument before, and I have always said to people that accuse a bail fund of being a Band-Aid that Band-Aids were invented for very good reasons. They stop bleeding, they stop infection, and sometimes, they actually stop somebody from getting so ill that they die. And so if we're a Band-Aid, we'll own that. I think it's shortsighted, and here's why: I think that the data we're able to collect, the stories that we're able to tell, the impacts we're able to show, will actually forward bail reform and ignite bail reform and systemic reform, not impede it. We've been operating our fund here in New York City, and there's two other funds in New York City now, and reform keeps marching forward, and oftentimes, that reform uses what we're learning in the bail fund community to actually forward their reform efforts, and so I think it's actually a critical tool in the fight to end unaffordable cash bail.
CA: And what would reform look like?
RS: Reform would mean that nobody would ever be in a jail cell because they don't have enough money in their bank account to pay bail. Whether or not you eradicate cash bail altogether, or cash bail gets set at an amount that is affordable is an open debate, but certainly, it looks like nobody should be in a jail cell simply because they cannot afford to buy their presumption of innocence and get out. That's intolerable and unconscionable and immoral and unnecessary, and that's what reform really looks like at the end.
CA: I mean, it seems like, in the 21st century, that there's a thousand technological ways where you could keep track of someone if you had to and ensure that if they didn't show up, then at least you knew where they were.
RS: So, here's the thing about the bail funds. The bail funds are a proof of concept that if you release somebody with no conditions, they will come back to court 96 percent of the time. I don't know how much better people feel like it has to be than that. We don't need surveillance, and we don't need ankle monitors, and we don't need supervision, and I worry, and I know all of us at the Bail Project worry, about what comes next. Let's assume we do away with unaffordable cash bail forever. What comes next is the critical next question. We do not want to recreate private industry coming into the field and now surveilling and monitoring and supervising low-income communities of color and low-income communities across this country. We will reinvent the same oppressive systems, and it's really important for us to keep that in mind, because if I know anything from my decades in the criminal system, it's this: systems will reinvent themselves if you do not stay vigilant and you do not get ahead of it. You will do away with one injustice, and it will reappear somewhere else. And so when we think about the future, we think about a future without surveillance, because the proof of concept is, people will come back to court 96 percent of the time if you use somebody else's money to bail them out. You don't need other systems of surveillance.
CA: Someone might say that that four percent, though, those are the dangerous cases.
RS: That's why we have police on the street. And this is not a no-risk proposition. We need to be willing to own that risk and take that risk and recognize that risk isn't on one side of the ledger. So we talk about a lot about the risk of getting somebody out of jail, that they might commit a crime, which almost never happens. But we never talk about the risk that we know does happen -- it's not risk, it's fact -- to thousands and millions of people who are held in jail cells under violent, horrible, inhumane conditions, whose lives then fall apart. The risk to them and their families and communities is undeniable, and there's plenty of data to support that risk. And so when we talk about risk, you can't just talk about it on one side. It's as if low-income communities and communities of color aren't part of public safety conversations. The system as it exists and jail cells and our cash bail system has deep, awful, devastating impacts on public safety for low-income people and people of color in this country who are ensnared in the system.
CA: So your hope is that, as this bail disruption happens in multiple areas around the country, that you will spark a rethinking among people, that, "Wait a sec -- this really is unjust." I'm really struck by the possibility that that itself may force change. No?
RS: So, people tend to understand, even people who have not been impacted by the system, that whether or not you stay in a jail cell shouldn't be determined by the size of your bank account. That seems to be something that most people can relate to. I think the other problem is, a lot of people in this country don't understand that when bail gets set, somebody hasn't yet been convicted, and that the presumption of innocence is supposed to be very much alive and well and that that's not a legal technicality. That's a fundamental right that should belong to everybody in this country.
CA: But haven't some people argued that cash bail is actually in violation of the Constitution? Am I -- is this wrong? Doesn't the Eighth Amendment say, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." If someone can't afford bail, then it's excessive, no?
RS: It's excessive. Right. Exactly. Which is why the answer is, there never should be unaffordable cash bail set on anybody if cash bail continues to be a reality. So bail ought to look like eight dollars for somebody in one community, 120 dollars for somebody in another community, and maybe a million dollars for somebody else who comes through the system who has financial resources to pay that bail, if we're going to keep cash bail at all.
CA: But given that that's in the Constitution, isn't there an opportunity to do something federally if someone wanted to support that as an interpretation of that language?
RS: I mean, there are fantastic litigators out there doing amazing litigation and strategies around the potential legal answers to this. I will say that there are limits to that; I think the litigators themselves would say this. There are limits to that. You can change the law, and it doesn't mean that what's happening on the ground changes one iota, sometimes. And we see lots of examples of that in this country. You certainly see it in the criminal system, where you could argue it's already illegal to do what they're doing with the bail system, but it continues to go on.
CA: Robin, talk to me a bit about just change-making more generally. I mean, it seems to me that there are people like you in all sorts of unexpected areas of life, people who basically want to define themselves not by traditional measures of success, if you like, but by the impact, by the contribution they can make in some form. That's often a lonely journey. It's often an exhausting journey. What's been your experience? How have you found the personal motivation to keep going through the hard times?
RS: So, I would love to tell you that it's something very much motivated by anything, but I have to be honest, I think the thing that motivates me the most is anger and fury at what I see. Injustice makes my blood boil, and it makes my blood boil in every realm. So I happen to be in the criminal legal system, but honestly, I could operate in lots of other systems and see injustice that would make my blood boil as well. And so, the question I think each of us have to ask ourselves is: When you see something, what do you do? Are you the person that sees something and walks away and continues on with your life? Or are you the person who stops and slows down and says, "I have to own this. I'm complicit in this. If I don't speak up, and I don't fight back, and I don't dedicate myself to making change, I am complicit in the system that I have no interest in being associated with. And not only am I complicit in it, it probably was designed to privilege people like me, who are white people with privilege and status."
And so, we all have to really grapple with our own ownership about the systems that have been created and not be complicit anymore. And that may mean that you write a check, and that may mean that you do the work day in and day out. That may mean that you work in a policy organization, but you don't want to do the on-the-ground day in and day out work. There are lots of ways for people to contribute. I don't think everybody is built to do the day in and day out work. I totally get that and appreciate that. But everybody can support change in their own way.
CA: Bryan Stevenson talks a lot about immersion as a first step, and it sounds like you would resonate with that. I mean, you went to visit people in jails. You were there. You were with them. And what you saw almost then gave you no choice. Your blood started to boil. You were in it, you were going to fight for it, and you didn't need extra motivation, is what I'm hearing.
RS: That's absolutely true. And Bryan also talks about proximity, and basically says, you know, get proximate to the problem, because when you do, you can't help but want to change it. And I think I've seen that with funders that have been supporting the Bail Project who weren't necessarily even in the arena of funding criminal justice reform, who we take out to the boat, which is the floating jail that sits in the East River here in New York City. And people are stunned and shocked, and cannot believe that, in their name, this is what justice and our criminal legal system looks like. So if you're not impacted by the system, it's hard to believe what's happening is happening. But when you get proximate, when you immerse yourself in it, you can't have any other conclusion other than it needs to change, and whatever that means for you about how you're going to facilitate change, you just need to do it.
CA: Well, perhaps this is how so much of the world's problems stay intractable. It's not because -- like, most people don't intentionally do evil things, but perhaps a lot of us navigate our lives by basically steering away. Whether intentionally or not, we just steer away from the stuff that's likely to make us deeply uncomfortable. We kind of don't want to know. I'm 61 years old, and I did not understand the depth of the injustice of the cash bail system until I met you. That's shocking to me. Like, I'm an educated adult, and when you actually hear the details, it is so outrageous, it makes my blood boil. I guess that's the start point. If you want to make change in the world, I guess get ready to make yourself uncomfortable, but in that discomfort, you will find your motivation.
RS: You'll find your motivation. You may even find your meaning. You're certainly going to find colleagues and comrades and people fighting with you, who will be your friends forever, and you will get more from those experiences, and you'll work with people that come from communities different than yourself and learn from that experience and open up your life and your heart and your world in ways that you can't possibly imagine but in ways that will only enhance you. There's no question about that.
CA: Robin Steinberg, you are an absolute force of nature, and I have to say, it's been a delight to get to know you, to understand this project and to work with you a bit on it. Thank you, and thank you for this conversation now.
RS: Thank you. I couldn't be more grateful for your support.
CA: Thank you, Robin.
(Music) This week's show was produced by Sharon Mashihi. Our associate producer is Kim Nederveen Pieterse. Special thanks to Helen Walters. Our show is mixed by David Herman, and our theme music is by Allison Leyton-Brown. In our next episode, I speak with Mellody Hobson, and we have what, to me, was an extraordinarily illuminating conversation about race. She argues that we need to stop being color-blind and start being color-brave.
(Recording) Mellody Hobson: Not seeing race is not working. It's just not working for our society. So those people who are holding on to that as a badge of honor, I want them to stop. I want them to actually purposefully see race.
CA: That's next week on the TED Interview. Before I go, I would just love to say something quickly about why we're actually doing this. Now, not everyone knows it, but TED is actually a nonprofit organization with a simple mission: to spread ideas that matter. Normally, we do that through short TED Talks, and this podcast series is an experiment at taking the extra time to go much deeper. So we'd love to know whether it's working for you. Do you like it? If so, we'd love you to share it with your friends, and also to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. I read every single review and love knowing what you think. So thank you for listening, and thanks for helping spread ideas.
