Mercy Costs Money: Emily Galvin Almanza on the Price of Criminal Justice in America

[00:00:46] Andrew Keen: One of the things that disturbed me in many ways about my conversation with Thelton Henderson was that even though he grew up in the late Jim Crow era, he seemed to believe that things weren't that different from the 1960s. And my guest today, as it happens, clerked for Thelton Henderson, so she's all too familiar with him as a remarkable figure. She has a new book out. She, like Henderson, is an activist for legal justice, a critic of the current American criminal justice system. She has an important new book out, The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender's Search for Justice in America. Emily Galvin-Almanza is the Executive Director—her day job—at Partners for Justice, and she also teaches at Stanford Law School. She's joining us from Palo Alto. Emily, congratulations on the new book.

[00:01:46] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Thank you so much for having me. And boy, seeing that picture of Judge Henderson made me want to drive up the bay and go pay him a visit. It's really good to see his face.

[00:01:56] Andrew Keen: Yeah, he's a wonderful man. My wife and I actually had dinner with him a few months ago in Berkeley. What's your thoughts, Emily—on, I'm not sure if you've had this conversation with Judge Henderson—but about the idea that in many ways things haven't changed dramatically since the '50s or '60s when it comes to criminal justice and the criminal justice system in America?

[00:02:22] Emily Galvin-Almanza: It's not a conversation I've had with the Judge expressly, but I think it's something that is certainly not a stretch to say. We are still dealing with a system which tolerates rampant abuse of accused people, which tolerates the blatantly racist application of the law, which tolerates a total lack of transparency for ordinary people and voters who want to know more about their criminal court system and have more of a say in the free and equal application of justice. We haven't made huge strides. And what's really staggering about that is, as I cover in the book, the strides towards fairness are not mysterious to us. There are dozens of excellent, tested solutions with really strong data behind them and fixes we could make tomorrow if we had the political will. We're just not moving in that direction and we're allowing this court system to remain in stasis because too few people think about it and the people who do aren't given enough information to make informed choices.

[00:03:31] Andrew Keen: Emily, there's obviously outrage these days over what's happened in particular on the streets of Minneapolis, many other consequences of the current administration. But I wonder why in your view there isn't similar outrage over the criminal justice system—why people aren't angrier?

[00:03:52] Emily Galvin-Almanza: It’s something I've been talking about so much recently, which is that each thing we are seeing unfolding in the crisis in Minneapolis and across our country—to those of us who work inside the criminal court system, it's not at all new. We're in that world of shocking but not surprising, shocking but not new. I'll give you an example. When we've seen killings of people in the streets of this country, and we've had the government immediately issue a statement that completely contradicts what we can see with our own eyes on video, that is surprising to many people because they think: "How can the government just lie to me about what is evident from this video?" You know, years and years ago, my first trial as a young public defender was a case where supposedly my client was on video doing a crime. And I watched this video and I thought: "Is there something wrong with me? I can't find the crime anywhere on this video." And it actually went to trial, and I had this police officer up on the witness stand and I was showing her the video saying: "Could you just show me and the jury where the crime happened here?" The answer was that there was no crime on the videotape. But the government had been comfortable just insisting and insisting, and hoping that in a system where more than 90% of cases end in some sort of negotiated disposition, hoping that they could get away with insisting a different story was the truth. So all of these incursions, attempts to trespass on our Fourth Amendment rights—these are not new. And I think that understanding the roots of this stuff in the criminal court system will make people better able to take action about what they're seeing today.

[00:05:46] Andrew Keen: One of the people who blurbed your new book, The Price of Mercy, is Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow. Do you agree with Alexander? Are we living in a new Jim Crow system, especially when it comes to criminal justice?

[00:06:05] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Oh, I mean without hesitation. I mean, the data is there. I cover this in the book, but most of what we see reflected in our criminal court system is not an accurate cross-section of crime in America. It's an accurate reflection of where police choose to spend their time and what they choose to focus on. And these are policy choices. We blanket one neighborhood with police who come up with eighty-gazillion misdemeanor charges. I mean, literally 80% of the cases in the system are misdemeanors. I cannot tell you how many black and brown teenagers I have represented on cases for like trespassing because they went to a friend's apartment building to see if the friend was home, and the friend wasn't home. And then they get picked up and the cop says "Who are you here to see?" and they say "My friend's not home," and they get charged with a crime. If a white kid like me growing up in a neighborhood like my neighborhood growing up had gone over to a friend's house and the friend wasn't home, I wasn't going to get picked up for trespassing on their property to go see if they were home. These are policy choices. Sometimes the system becomes even more overtly discriminatory. For example, in gang prosecutions, we rarely, if ever, see gang laws applied to white people. Gang databases, for example, tend to be 99% people of color and also very, very inaccurately. Famously, the California gang database was revealed back in 2017, I think, to have like literal babies listed in it as having admitted their gang affiliation. Well, inclusion in a database like that and being subject to gang charges at that time in California meant that prosecutors could actually put evidence in front of the jury about crimes you had nothing to do with—crimes your friends did, crimes you weren't even there for—then arguing that "See, these are the crimes of a gang and oh look, this person is affiliated with these other people who did these crimes; therefore they're part of the gang too." Now California was forced to strongly amend that law, but that meant that for a period of time in California, black and brown people were literally experiencing like different rules of evidence that never would have been applied to white people in criminal court. So it's a very, very overtly racially discriminatory system.

[00:08:52] Andrew Keen: Why Emily? Is it because White America is by definition racist? Is it a legacy from Jim Crow? Is it coincidental, accidental? Does it reflect the indifference of White America? Why is this the case?

[00:09:11] Emily Galvin-Almanza: I'm certainly not coming in here to say like every white American you meet is a racist.

[00:09:17] Andrew Keen: And you, of course, are not black or brown yourself.

[00:09:20] Emily Galvin-Almanza: I'm not. No. I'm what I want to say is that we have tolerated this system. We have allowed it to remain as it is. We haven't taken action to name the discrimination that we're seeing and actively dismantle it. And so to me, seeing something that's going on that's continually hurting black and brown people and not taking action to dismantle that harmful thing is a form of being complicit in its continuation. Now, I think a lot of people aren't aware of how bad it is. Like, I want to give most people credit for like not having any idea of how far things have gone in this system. And that's why I wrote the book—is because I think: "You know what? If I can get hard facts, data..." I mean, this book looks like kind of a—here, I'll hold it up—looks like kind of a chunky book, right? Until you realize that a hundred pages of this is citations because I really wanted people to know that I'm just giving them the data on what's happening in the system, and I'm giving them some ideas of how we could do better. And so maybe if people become more informed and take the time to inform themselves—also about how feasible a lot of these solutions really are—then we can get the political will to finally end this legacy of incredible, incredible harm.

[00:10:49] Andrew Keen: I'm guessing that you're not particularly optimistic that the kind of reform you're calling for will be instituted by the current administration. But what's the record of the Democrats? What was the record of Obama? Of course, I know you were an undergraduate at Harvard; Obama was at the law school. Or Joe Biden? Have they done anything to address this, the Democrats?

[00:11:15] Emily Galvin-Almanza: I think one thing to think about that makes me actually very optimistic about our chances for progress in the near term is this: this is not a topic that the federal government leads on. The US Constitution reserves criminal law largely to the states. 87% of people who are in prison are there on state charges, not federal charges. The federal system—the federal prison system, I should say—is a small minority of criminal cases in America. I had to say prison system because right now, given the way that ICE is funded, the immigration detention system is quickly becoming one of the largest and is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in America. But when it comes to reforms, Democrats have not been amazing all the time. Some of them have been better than others. Police—what Alec Karakatsanis calls "copaganda"—has been incredibly effective in this country to undermine smarter solutions that take a little bit more time but will actually diminish crime much more strongly in the future. So I can't say that Democrats have been amazing on this issue. I can't say the Republicans have been amazing. What I can say is the issue is one of local law. So in order to get traction and move these issues forward, we don't need hundreds of millions of Americans voting for the right people on the federal level. What we need is a few thousand Americans voting for the right people for their state legislature, for their governor, for their mayor, for their DA crucially, and for their sheriffs. And if we can focus on those elections, actually I think these are incredibly feasible policies with really strong numbers behind them.

[00:13:14] Andrew Keen: You've written extensively, of course, about this, not just in the book, but in Partners for Justice—the nonprofit you executive director on—are trying to break the cycle of poverty and criminalization. How much of this then, Emily, is a legal issue versus an economic or political one, or even cultural?

[00:13:38] Emily Galvin-Almanza: That is a great question. These things are intimately intertwined, and I will give you an example. When we think of incarceration, many people who aren't that familiar with it think of it as like a period of confinement. But actually over 90% of people who go to prison come back home. We get to decide how they are when they come back. And right now the decision we as a society have made is that they come back really, really undermined and having a very hard time to succeed in the future. For example, being incarcerated cuts a person's expected lifetime earnings in half. American families lose over $300 billion per year due to prior incarceration. It also impacts people's health. Every year of incarceration shaves two years off a person's expected lifespan, and about 80% of people who do time come back with some kind of long-term health condition. So as a society, here's what we're doing: we're paying for the policing, we're paying for the prosecution, we're paying for the courts, we're paying for the incarceration to the tune of billions and billions of dollars per year. And then we're paying for the hospital bills for people who became sickened by the system and can't afford their own care and don't have insurance. We're paying the social cost of having fewer taxpayers, fewer people who are able to shop at the corner store in our neighborhoods. We're paying through our collective prosperity. So people when they calculate the cost of incarceration, they're usually leaving off the long-term costs of poor health, joblessness, increased homelessness, etc. On the solution side, though, giving people access to three things—housing, income, and healthcare—is more effective at reducing crime than almost anything else. If you give an unhoused person housing, you diminish their chances of future arrest by 80%. And some of these interventions literally just have to do with like, you know, favorable activities and future prospects. If you give a kid who's got nothing to do after school an after-school program, you have a huge dent in youth crime overall. After-school programs can drop youth involvement in violent crime by like 50%. So when you ask "Is it a legal problem?"—yes, in the book I talk about lack of discovery and bad forensics and all of this sort of like baked-in entrenched unfairness in the system. But when it comes to solutions, so many of the solutions are about removing cases from the criminal court system that shouldn't have been in there in the first place, and forcing through incentives—professional incentives—forcing the people who work in the system to think about root causes and actually address them in how we solve these problems instead of just trying to like punish our way out of stuff, which has not worked yet.

[00:16:53] Andrew Keen: I don't think we'll ever punish our way out of stuff. Emily, there's so much paranoia about criminality and the level of crime, particularly in contemporary America. What are the numbers? In terms of crime, is it going up or down? And what are the numbers in terms of incarceration? Are there more or less people in jail than there were five or ten years ago?

[00:17:19] Emily Galvin-Almanza: So I have really good news, which is that if you are less than 50 years old, you are living through the safest period in your lifetime, at least safe from crime. There are other dangers right now. Crime has been dropping. It has been dropping all across the country—I think in part due to a lot of these policies that I talk about in the book being implemented post-2020. And we are seeing, you know, the fruits of a lot of these policies now. I talk also in the book about how the public has a really hard time feeling how safe they are because when we look at the news, we are constantly being confronted with like the weirdest and most memorable crimes that any reporter can find. And so even though the chance of, you know, experiencing a certain type of crime might be roughly the same as us having a heart attack that day, we worry about like getting our car broken into and we don't worry about dropping dead from a heart attack even though the risk may be similar. So our risk evaluation framework is really, really thrown off by the way in which the media over-emphasizes weird and violent crimes. Violent crimes are actually a small minority of what's in the system. When you look at what police actually spend their time on, the vast majority of it is like unfounded calls, dogs barking, people peeing on a stoop. Then there's the whole world of misdemeanors—you know, trespassing, driving without a license, not paying your fare on the bus—and only then do we get into this small number of actually violent cases each year. So lots of good news on public safety, but lots of good news that people haven't heard because they don't know how to accurately evaluate their circumstances.

[00:19:15] Andrew Keen: I need to be more careful when I pee on my stoop, although I don't suppose the police would arrest me—

[00:19:22] Emily Galvin-Almanza: That’s sex crime! You better watch out!

[00:19:24] Andrew Keen: Yes, especially in San Francisco. Well, the police have retreated. You've talked about the racialized elements. As I said, I don't think this would surprise your former mentor, Thelton Henderson. What about the gendered side of it? I mean, more and more of course of prisoners are men, but you've written extensively on the role of public defenders, particularly when it comes to women in a post-Roe v. Wade world. What's the gendered element in The Price of Mercy?

[00:19:59] Emily Galvin-Almanza: So men obviously are overrepresented in the criminal court system. But some of the things that women experience are bizarre and shocking, and I think when laypeople find out about them, when they read the book, it will really change their mind about what's really happening in these systems. So for example, women experience all kinds of criminalization that most normal people would not expect to be criminal. One example might be "failure to protect" cases where a woman who has been abused by a partner is charged with a felony for being present while the partner also abuses their child. In other words, the crime is failure to protect the child from the abuse that she herself may be experiencing. Now, at the same time, our self-defense laws were designed with like two men fighting in an alley in mind. So for example, if I want to claim that my act, my criminal act, was justified—I was right to defend myself and I should not be held criminally liable—I need to be able to show that I didn't start the fight and that I was facing imminent harm and I responded with proportionate force. Also that I either didn't have a chance to retreat or I tried to retreat. Now if you look at a situation of abuse, where a woman has been living with an abusive partner over the span of decades, if she takes violent action against that partner in a moment where he is vulnerable, like he's asleep, she will never be able to use self-defense in her case because she cannot prove that his force coming at her was imminent because the law wasn't designed with unequal combat or an abused partner in mind; the law was designed for like two guys fighting in an alley. The things that women experience in our criminal court system are also especially, you know, horrifying. I covered the case in this book of a woman named Adelaida, and she, in her case, fought back against an abusive partner, was convicted of a felony for it, was pregnant, was separated from her child, and had to deal with the nightmare of the family court system when she came home with no help from probation or judges or anyone in the court system to help her regain custody of her child. She's just one of so many women who have experienced giving birth in shackles, who have experienced family separation, who have experienced the horror of not having a family member who's able to come and pick up their baby, so they lose their parental rights entirely and their baby goes out to be adopted. When we talk about the horrors of family separation in the immigration system, we also need to be talking about the horrors of family separation in the criminal court system where it has been happening every day for generations.

[00:23:09] Andrew Keen: You've written on moving past punishment. I'm not sure those are exactly your words, but it was a conversation that you had on somebody else's show. How careful do you think progressives like yourself need to be in terms of imagining a criminal justice system where maybe the police are more marginalized and we move, quote-unquote, "past punishment"? Do progressives need to recognize that America, for better or worse, is a conservative country, and in spite of what you said about people's paranoia about crime, some of their concerns are fair?

[00:23:55] Emily Galvin-Almanza: So one of the first people I sent—when I placed my own orders for this book—one of the first friends of mine that I sent this book to is a friend of mine that I grew up with who's a MAGA conservative. I think he's really going to like what's in the book, actually, because across political—

[00:24:15] Andrew Keen: Not J.D. Vance, I hope?

[00:24:17] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Oh god, no. I don't hang out with intimate couch people, no. This is a friend of mine who's a—he's a really cool guy, he's a cowboy, he's a rancher, he's a great dad. We grew up doing like child labor on ranches together, so I know him in a non-political context. And I believe that a lot of these policies are going to resonate with him because they are common-sense policies and have nothing to do with politics. If you poll people on a lot of these issues without injecting politics into it—this is the Democratic perspective, this is a progressive perspective—but you just say: "Should we be giving people mental health and substance use treatment or should we be using our jails as mental hospitals?" Most people say: "Let's just do the treatment so that we don't end up with jails full of people who are experiencing a mental health or substance use crisis." Like, most people don't want to spend their money on jails making people worse instead of just building the health infrastructure that we actually need. Now people may disagree about how to do it. I may say that I want a public option in terms of health insurance; he may say that he really doesn't like government health insurance. Cool. But we can agree that if a person's conduct—their conduct that's doing harm—is caused by some factor that we could address, why would we not address it? It's very, very common sense. And I think that this subject matter, you know, reforming the criminal courts and embracing safety, shouldn't be political. You talked about marginalizing police, and I kind of chuckled because I was sort of like: "Nobody wants to marginalize the police."

[00:26:06] Andrew Keen: Well, there are—I mean, we've had a number of people on the show talk—or imagining a world where the police have somehow retreated or they'd been turned into some other kind of force.

[00:26:17] Emily Galvin-Almanza: That’s okay. I mean, look at it this way: I have a kid. When I take her to the doctor, I want a pediatrician most of the time; I don't want a gerontologist. There are different specializations that are good at different things. Police are good at violent responses to violent crime. Now I use "good" with some like—I have a lot of critiques of how police respond to situations of violence. But I understand that there—when you have, you know, an armed person on the loose in the community, there is a role for someone who can take action in a situation of really serious risk of violence. I get that. Why would we want to use police for somebody who's having a mental health crisis? If your loved one is having a mental health crisis and you call for help, you don't actually necessarily want a guy with a gun showing up; you probably want a mental health professional who can de-escalate the situation and get your loved one into the right kind of care. If you've got a kid who's not acting right and that kid isn't dangerous to anybody, they're just being a knucklehead, you don't want an armed guy coming up on your kid; you want some sort of counselor or social worker who actually has the skill set to deal with nightmarish teenagers. So I guess what I'm trying to say is there's nothing dishonorable about saying police shouldn't be doing 18 different jobs. That's not marginalizing them; it's just acknowledging that they're doing too many jobs and we need more types of professionals to handle the jobs. Police agree with that, by the way. Most police when you poll them on this topic agree that they should not be the ones handling medical situations, mental health situations, counseling situations. They also don't want that to be part of their job. So I feel like it's a win-win.

[00:28:16] Andrew Keen: What do you see as the role of the Black Lives Matter movement, of the protests in the march towards or perhaps away from justice? Do you see it as a healthy chapter?

[00:28:32] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Oh, I'm not sure if it's for me to say, if I'm being really honest—

[00:28:37] Andrew Keen: Well you're an observer of this, you write about the injustice of the system, so I'm curious.

[00:28:43] Emily Galvin-Almanza: I think that what the Black Lives Matter movement has done is really, really effectively marshal attention on topics that were previously ignored and bring to light these stories of people whose names we might not otherwise have known, whose stories are vitally important for us to understand who we are and where we are as a nation. So when I talk about how safe we are today and the reforms that have been implemented since 2020, a lot of that is due to the political pressure brought by the Black Lives Matter movement. And so I think we have to acknowledge their role in highlighting issues and forcing reforms that were long overdue.

[00:29:32] Andrew Keen: What do you expect the consequences of the murder of a couple of white people on the streets of Minneapolis? Do you think ultimately this is going to have a big impact, particularly in the context of your arguments of The Price of Mercy?

[00:29:48] Emily Galvin-Almanza: I hope so. I hope so. I mean, acknowledging that these were not the only people murdered by ICE, and you're absolutely right to point out that the two white people got the most attention—

[00:30:00] Andrew Keen: To put it mildly.

[00:30:02] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Yeah. We need a moment of national recoiling and organization. I mean, it is not sustainable for a country to have its government not just violating the law in some sort of mild everyday way, but really, really just trampling the Constitution, lethally trampling the Constitution, shredding the idea of due process. I think that—yeah, I mean, I think that for the book, the undergirding of what we're seeing now is in this book because we wouldn't be where we are now if we hadn't tolerated decades of this kind of lawlessness in the criminal court system where we go from here, it's a moment of national reckoning. I mean, obviously I hope and pray that this moves us towards better policies in terms of creating accountability for law enforcement. You know, federal law enforcement is shielded in a very different way from civil liability than state and local law enforcement. And there are a few different bills right now that could make it so that federal law enforcement officers are held to the same standards as you and me in terms of their conduct and accountability for their conduct. And if we just get to a point where the public demands—demands transparency, exerts skepticism towards its system—and healthy skepticism, skepticism designed to look for improvements in the system—and also enforces real accountability for the people who work in that system including law enforcement, we would be in a transformed place as a nation.

[00:32:00] Andrew Keen: It strikes me, Emily, that—and this is a bit of a cliché I guess, but it seems particularly obvious today—that there are two Americas. We live in an age, of course, where everyone seems to be obsessed with the Epstein scandal, but what people sometimes forget is that he bought his way out of the system, he played around with the criminal justice system for years in spite of all his self-evident guilt and paid for bail. Meanwhile—and you've written about this—cash bail doesn't reduce crime or make us safer. In other words, two Americans—two Americas—where people like Epstein—I mean, Epstein I guess is a unique case—where his huge wealth was able to manipulate the system mostly to his advantage in spite of his criminality whereas the kind of people you cover aren't able to do that. How self-evident are these two Americas for you on the front line of criminal justice?

[00:33:04] Emily Galvin-Almanza: 80% of people who get prosecuted are so poor they are assigned a public defender, like me. And I think that really tells us who the system is directed at because 80% of crime in this country is not committed by one group of people, one socioeconomic class. Crime is happening behind closed doors in middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods across the country. Crime is being carried out by corporations, by powerful actors, by lawmakers, by law enforcement. I mean, humans engage in rule-breaking. But the system focuses almost exclusively on the transgressions of the poor. And this also means that it is built to allow, as you point out, off-ramps for people of means. Bail is a great example. Most civilized countries do not have a system where you can buy your freedom back from the government. But in the United States, it's a $2 billion per year industry. Now, again, stepping back, a rational person might say: "If the consideration is how do we get this person to come back to court and make sure they meet the obligations that the court puts on them, and how do we make sure they're not a danger to society, there are innumerable ways to do that." One of the most effective ways to get people to come back to court, honestly, is telephone reminders. If you like call or text a person to remind them of their court date, it is remarkably effective at getting them to come back to court. We can put conditions on people, we can use forms of supervision, we can do all sorts of things to ensure return to court and to give judges a chance to weigh in on whether a person is in fact safe to be released. There is no world in which ability to pay should be a factor. Now, long ago, this idea of bail was making a person have enough skin in the game that they would be motivated to come back to court to get their money back. But that has not been the way this policy has panned out in America. The vast majority of bail is bail people can't pay. Jails right now are 70% filled with people who have not yet been convicted in their case. 70% of people in jails are people who are awaiting trial and simply could not afford the price of freedom. So if you look at our system from a socioeconomic perspective, it's very, very clear who the system targets and the mechanisms it uses to do so.

[00:36:11] Andrew Keen: You've been calling for a reckoning. Is it conceivable that this Epstein scandal, which has implicated a number of other people in the American elite—business, cultural circles—both morally and criminally might spark this reckoning?

[00:36:28] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Maybe. I mean, it's—it kind of takes a couple of steps of analysis for people to see the problem here. When I talked about policing and the locus of policing being a policy choice, what I mean is like we have elected leaders who choose to blanket the New York subway system with cops, but there's no cops on Epstein's island, right? Like there's—there's cops like filling up the streets of Fort Lauderdale but not Mar-a-Lago. And I'm not saying you should necessarily blanket Mar—well, look, I'm just saying that our policy choices of where we find crime are not reflective of where crime is actually happening. So to have a moment of reckoning, you have to get the American people to see that the way in which wealthy elites can escape observation if they choose to engage in misconduct has a lot to do with where we as voters have chosen to put the focus of our law enforcement apparatus. Now I need to be clear: it's hard to address this from a really like simplistic "rich people need more scrutiny" point of view because that's not actually what I'm saying. There's a second layer here which is that prosecution has become so overpowered in our criminal court system that even as applied against the wealthy and powerful can sometimes result in wild miscarriages of justice. I mean, there have been people who have had their assets seized, who have been wrongfully prosecuted, who have been prosecuted for political reasons using an apparatus that is very, very easy to implement as a way to ruin someone's life regardless of how wealthy they are. So at the same time as we think about where our focus is in terms of where we are seeking crime, we have to also think about the power balance of how much have we empowered prosecutors to ruin lives first and engage in scrutiny later.

[00:39:10] Andrew Keen: Emily, you're talking to me from Palo Alto, ground zero of Silicon Valley. You're involved with Stanford University where many of the tech community have been educated and participate, send their kids to. Can technology help here, or is it a hindrance?

[00:39:27] Emily Galvin-Almanza: I mean, there's so much bad technology in my field. My god! Like people are—everybody who saw the Super Bowl Ring commercial, I hope saw that and was like: "Oh, they're saying this is about a puppy, but it's a mass surveillance network." And everybody who was previously rah-rah body cams is probably now coming to realize: "Oh, when we put body cams on every ICE officer, we're just creating a mobile surveillance network with facial recognition technology to enhance the ability of the government to surveil the public." The same with flock cameras—Santa Cruz County was the first county in California to end its flock contract and get rid of those cameras because it turned out they were not enhancing safety, but they were sharing a lot of data with ICE. So can technology help? I'm a little bit skeptical. I think there have been forms of technology that have enhanced lawyers' ability to review documents and review evidence more expeditiously. There's been technology that automates reminder phone calls and text messages for to help people come back to court. That’s been really good. But so much of the technology in this sector is just new forms of mass surveillance. The new forms of mass surveillance, I don't think are advancing safety for anyone, and they certainly are advancing the ability of the government to engage in political targeting of its opponents.

[00:41:20] Andrew Keen: Yeah, we had a few days ago Andrew Ferguson from GW University on who has a new book out warning of surveillance. Finally, the title of the book, The Price of Mercy. Is that ironic? What does that mean, "the price of mercy"?

[00:41:40] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Well, in this system, in order to seek mercy—and by mercy I really mean a recognition of the humanity of the person who is in the system and action based on that recognition that is ameliorative—to reach that point is so difficult. I mean, I detail the case of Janelle in this book and the cases of Ken Oliver and the cases of others who have just, you know, come up against a system that wrecked their lives by failing to recognize their humanity and listen to them and give them a fair shake. And this is with lawyers doing all that's within our power just to try to get that fair shake. So yeah, I think the title is saying that the price of mercy right now is way too high. And that if we want a system in which merciful—mercy is plentiful, or in which we can find in the words of Clara Shortridge Foltz "free and equal justice," we need to make changes. Those changes are sensible, they're feasible, they're not particularly political, and we can make them. We just have to pay attention.

[00:43:10] Andrew Keen: Well, that's what's laid out in your new book. Maybe it should call be called "the price of injustice," but it's called The Price of Mercy by my guest Emily Galvin-Almanza. Congratulations Emily on the new book. It's out this week, and I will send your best to the great Judge Thelton Henderson. Thank you so much.

[00:43:31] Emily Galvin-Almanza: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:43:34] Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kind of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.