- Now a different and sobering look at America's justice system.

Concerns over due process make headlines every day, from immigration, detention, and deportation, to executive branch overreach.

But these have long been normalized in lower criminal courts.

That's what former public defender Emily Galvin Almanza argues in her new book, "The Price of Mercy."

She says a plea-driven system often lets misconduct go unpunished and can even increase crime.

And she's joining Michel Martin to discuss what she thinks has to change.

- Thanks, Christiane.

Emily Galvin Almanza, thanks so much for talking with us.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- You've written a book.

It's part a memoir, but it's partly a policy book about the way the criminal justice system works.

You're a former public defender.

You worked both in California and New York.

It's not exactly new news that the criminal justice system is kind of heavily weighted against people who don't have resources.

Sometimes that tracks with race.

So what do you think is different about what you have to say?

- Well, usually when we encounter news about the criminal legal system, it's in the form of either a very scary story about a crime or a systemic narrative about a system that is hopelessly inequitable and violent and harmful.

And one of the things I wanted to bring into this sort of public ambit is, as a public defender, I have a really different lens on the system.

I've been inside it for many, many, many years.

My lens is kind of dual because I've been both a defender and also a kid who needed to be defended.

And also in my current work, you know, building enhancements for public defense around the country, I've seen so many amazing interventions that are data proven, that are actionable, that are really, really feasible to implement right now.

So my hope was to bring a perspective that gives people the case against our current system and a really solid case against it.

This book is heavily researched and then also spent half the book on solutions that are not pie in the sky.

We don't have to like invent a warp engine.

So here's the thing that's interesting about the book.

It's your own story, but it's just the way you describe how at just about every turn and every sort of point in the system, there are things that could be different that would yield different outcomes.

Here's one of the things that you say in the book.

You said, "I've represented a lot of people who were innocent.

A fact that I have noticed often surprises lay people because television tells us that most people who get arrested are guilty, while in real life, most people who get arrested are poor and may or may not be guilty."

Give us one example of how that works.

I represented someone who I talk about in the book.

Her name's Janelle, so I want to be clear that I'm sharing this story in collaboration with her.

She had worked for the Department of Education in New York City, and she was really struggling.

So when her car disappeared one morning, she assumed it had been repossessed.

And she spent ages calling tow companies, calling the repo people, calling the bank, trying to figure out where her car was.

At one point she was told that it was in a lot called Phantom Towing, but it turned out the car wasn't there.

So then she starts calling the police, trying to get them to help her figure out where this car is.

And the police are not responding.

She finally gets someone on the phone, a car-related person, not a police-related person.

And they said, "If the police aren't taking your request for help, just give them the date of loss as today, and that'll make them take it seriously.

So she said, okay, and she did.

And that worked, the police began investigating, but what they found is that the car had been discovered burned out in Baltimore several days prior.

So for a person of means, first of all, they never would have been in this position in the first place, dealing with debt, repossession.

And if she were calling from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she would have gotten a police response on the first call.

But she's calling from a neighborhood in the Bronx where police are not even taking this seriously.

And in order to get their attention, she did something which they interpreted not as an error of a lay person struggling to get help.

They assumed that she was orchestrating an insurance fraud.

Oh no.

and charged her with a felony that cost her her job, her livelihood.

She had to go through this case which ground on for years, literally years, trying to prove to the court system that instead of being some sort of mastermind, she was just a person who made a mistake.

Even though we were able to get her charges fully dismissed after years of trying to prove that she was not someone who this system should criminalize.

The arrest still appears on her record.

That's an example I give because we've all heard the examples of the person, you know, arrested for failure to pay their fare on the bus, who's a person I've also defended many times or on the train.

Kids who go into buildings to see if their friend is home, but then when their friend isn't home to verify their presence, they get charged with trespassing.

We've had those cases.

selling water without a license or selling fruit in the subway.

Like our system is really, really clogged with badly investigated cases like Janelle's that never should have happened in the first place.

And also junk cases, which while technically, yeah, the kid might be trespassing in a building.

We don't need to be filling our system and using our court time with this type of enforcement.

What's another example of a junk case that you think even somebody who's a strict law and order person would argue, "This is dumb"?

Another example might be a little girl who punched a bully at school because the bully was beating up on her sister who had special needs.

In my world, that would be a reason to give a kid detention and a talking to, absolutely.

Maybe, maybe if you were going to be really strict, it could qualify as a misdemeanor arrest, but I think arresting children is really bad for them, and that's actually backed up by data showing that police contact causes children to disengage from school as rapidly as the next day.

This little girl was charged with a felony, specifically assault with intent to cause great bodily injury and assault with a deadly weapon because she was wearing a little kid's ring.

Now, the reason that happened is because it gave the prosecutor more leverage.

The prosecutor wanted to change the calculus of that girl's family's decision.

If you charge her with a misdemeanor, then a reasonable person might say, "Well, can't we just give this kid detention at school or, you know, some kind of talking to and be done with it?"

But if the upper end is a serious, violent felony where she's risking transfer to the adult system or having an adult criminal record and a real period of confinement, suddenly pleading guilty to the misdemeanor, which otherwise she never would have considered, starts to look really attractive.

- So what's your theory about why it's that way?

Why the bias seems to be toward the most draconian response to things that maybe reasonable people would think could be worked out in a different way?

- Yeah, it's really the incentives that we've allowed in this system.

So as long as we have prosecutors who are incentivized to maximize the number of convictions they can get because they know they're gonna be promoted or rewarded professionally with opportunities because they have a high conviction rate, you are going to see prosecutors who focus on convictions over justice.

Wait, wait, wait, hold on a second.

I mean, convictions could be, you know, for good cases, right?

I mean, a conviction rate is not the same as a prosecution rate.

I mean, you've never been a prosecutor.

So what convinces you that that's their incentive?

It's talking with prosecutors.

And I actually interviewed a prosecutor who I had been up against in the Bronx to get his perspective.

He was a prosecutor who had left that work, and I wanted to know why he left.

And he described to me a system in which any time he wanted to offer something restorative, or he saw that there was a root cause driving someone in the system, he thought he could address that root cause and make a real difference.

He was shut down by his superiors.

And at times he even described to me sending white colleagues into the room to ask for these offers because he would be told, "You just want to give that guy a deal because you're black and he's black."

Literally told that in his place of work.

No wonder he left that job.

And when I say prioritizing convictions, I don't always mean getting five out of five good solid cases.

I mean maximizing numbers.

Why did you only convict five people this year?

And I'm very concerned about that.

If we allow incentives like that in how we elect prosecutors, in how we elect judges, in how we elect sheriffs, in what we expect culturally from our legal system, we are going to keep getting rampant miscarriages of justice that are often rendered invisible by how difficult the system is to scrutinize.

You talk about plea deals, for example, which you describe as one of the most powerful and least understood forces shaping outcomes in our criminal court.

Say more about that.

So the vast majority of cases end in a negotiated disposition of some kind.

More than 90% of cases never go to trial, which is, of course, contrary to how most people imagine the system.

They imagine jury trials.

They imagine law and order, and like Jack McCoy, bringing his prosecutions.

But in fact, most people are not ending their cases that way.

What people also don't have visibility into is that the process of getting to a disposition is in many ways designed to pressure people into taking a guilty plea, whether they are guilty or not.

If you look at the numbers on wrongful convictions, you'll see that a startling number of them were guilty pleas, where someone pleaded guilty to a horrifying crime they did not commit.

Why would somebody do that?

It's because often the system is so punishing, the pretrial process is so punishing, that people will do extreme things just to end it.

And I describe the process in detail in the book.

If you're out of custody, you're already in a better position than somebody who's in.

But even if you're out, you're coming back to court again and again and again for months and months and months.

It's not like you have four court dates and it's done.

This may drag on for years like it did for Janelle.

And every time you're taking a day off from work, risking your job, making everyone angry at your workplace that you're not there, finding childcare, finding transportation, paying for parking at the courthouse, coming into the room only to be treated like a criminal and have nothing move forward in your criminal case.

Or waiting around all day.

Or waiting around all day.

Exactly.

Because whenever they're dealing with whatever else they want to deal with because... Yeah.

Yeah.

Just... And not being allowed to look at your phone or read a book or read the newspaper or step outside because if you're not there when your case is called, it'll be treated as an intentional act on your part rather than, "I stepped out to use the bathroom."

So that's the good version.

Many people, the people who are much more likely to be ground down faster are the people who are fighting their case from inside a jail.

70% of people in jails are not yet convicted of anything.

They are just awaiting trial and too poor to buy their freedom back from the government.

So for those people, they've lost whatever job they had.

God knows if they can keep their housing.

They've been separated from their family.

Many people don't know that when you're admitted to a jail, they cut off your existing medications if you're on any medications, and you have to wait to get re-diagnosed and re-prescribed.

There have been people who've died from, for example, not having access to an anti-rejection medication post-organ transplant, not to mention mental health medications that people are cut off from.

So you're in an environment where 80% of people experience or witness violence daily, and your life outside has long since unraveled.

If somebody comes to you and say, "Hey, if you just plead guilty to this, you can go home in a few weeks instead of waiting this out for another few years, or facing a 20-year top end.

That's irresistible to many, many people.

- Let's talk about some of the solutions that you talk about, 'cause you point to smaller things that people don't necessarily think about.

And one of those things that you talked about, you wrote about actually in a New York Times piece recently, is free bus fare.

Why would that be a good criminal justice reform?

Yeah, so transit is, I think, a really, really under-considered driver of criminal court system population levels.

Here's what I mean.

We as defenders see an enormous number of people coming through the system for failure to pay for transit.

This is in a system where 80% of what's stuffing the courts is misdemeanors.

This is a huge chunk of those misdemeanors.

And the effect of arresting people for failure to pay is dual.

One, you're using a ton of police time and prosecutor time and jail resources and court resources and you're paying a public defender like me to deal with a lost $3 fare.

And at the same time, you're forcing people into positions of desperation with regard to transit access because courts are constantly ordering people to go places and do things.

Judges order people to check in with probation, to go to a program, to find a job, to receive treatment.

And if you can't afford to get on transit, you can't do those things you've been ordered to do, which results in a subsequent wave of arrests for failure to follow the court's orders.

When we remove the cost of enforcement, and we also receive the benefit of low-income people being able to freely make it to job interviews, to medical appointments, to childcare, we receive a lot of benefits to public safety in the form of indirectly people having access to jobs and healthcare and therapy lowers crime, but also directly.

I mean, the study that I cite in the article showed free buses resulting in a 39% drop in assaults on bus operators, because bus operators are no longer having to be the gatekeepers of access to desperately needed transit.

One can go into how transit impacts ability to engage the court system more broadly or ability to remain connected to the community post-prison.

But this is what I mean about looking to the little things, because if you're not a defender, you might not, or if you're not system impacted, you might not realize the degree to which something as small as a $3 fare can be life-altering.

What are some other things that seem small but would actually have a huge impact?

- So after-school programs.

After-school programs for kids result in about a 50% drop in youth involvement in crime.

And it's really intuitive.

Giving kids something good to do after school keeps them out of trouble.

We all, like as parents, I think we, as parents and previously bad children, we can understand this.

But too few jurisdictions are looking at afterschool programs as a safety intervention.

Another thing I talk about a lot in the book is environmental design.

So there are all sorts of things that make our neighborhoods more livable, more beautiful, more valuable, and also lower crime.

It takes about 17 new police officers to eliminate one homicide.

But the city of Philadelphia found that when they painted sidewalks, added street lighting, fixed up neighborhoods that were run down, they saw about a 75% drop in youth homicide in the neighborhoods that they'd worked on.

I'm just sort of wondering, as a person who's worked in this area for some time now, why do you think it is that the kinds of things you talk about don't seem to penetrate into the broader conversation?

I think that this broader conversation hasn't been sufficiently linked to people's everyday needs and everyday pressures.

And I also think that we've created a false binary of tough on crime versus, you could call it soft on crime or smart on crime.

I think we need to break out of the binary.

If people had better information about what was available to them, they would choose the better things.

I'm confident in voters as generally fairly rational actors.

So for example, on bail, the binary of we hold people in on cash bail or we let everybody go and hope for the best, that's not really the choice that people have.

The choice is between having liberty be conditioned on wealth and continuing to be a country in which people are asked to buy their liberty back from the government, or having judges decide whether somebody is safe to be released and likely to return to court and not conditioning it on their ability to pay.

You know, when we look at studies on what makes people come back to court and meet their obligations, a huge factor is reminders, phone calls and text messages.

So, before we let you go, what would you say to people who'd say, "That's all really interesting.

This has nothing to do with me"?

What would you say to that?

So, first of all, there's the whole point that I've been making about how knowing what makes you safe and what causes safety is highly relevant for all of us.

Like, anybody who doesn't want their car broken into and their stuff stolen out of their car or who doesn't want to have to put their keys between their fingers when they're walking down the street alone, like I often have had to in my life.

Like, anybody who's interested in that should care about making sure our government is doing the things that actually lead towards safety, as opposed to the things that seem to be exacerbating the problem.

But additionally, we're living in a country where half of us have had a loved one locked up.

So if you're existing in a society, you're encountering people who have been directly impacted by this system.

And a lot of people don't talk about it.

And it's, I mean, obviously not the first thing that most people bring up in polite conversation.

But understanding the details of how our government is impacting literally half of those of us living in this country, I think has broad relevance.

And the third and final thing I'd say is, for people watching what's happening right now with our federal government, in terms of overreach, in terms of mass detention, in terms of violence towards civilians, in terms of accusations of perjury by public officials.

None of this is new to those of us who've been working in our criminal courts.

You ask, how do we get to a point where public officials have the audacity to lie or to hurt civilians?

Well, because in this court system, that's been happening with essentially no negative consequences for generations.

And so understanding how we got here is a really good way of understanding what we need to do to get out of here.

And that's a good reason to read the book as well.

Emily Galvin Almanza, thanks so much for talking with us.