Lisa Bloom, Attorney at Law | Jean Houston, Author/Lecturer | Marilyn Rainwater, Political Candidate
Sara Jane Rose, Founder of Sally’s List | Charlene Spretnak, Author/Lecturer | Marianne Williamson, Author/Lecturer
Adam Winkler, Professor of Law | Womens Campaign School at Yale University
Lisa Bloom – Attorney at Law
The United States leads the world in the rate of incarceration of our own citizens. We now imprison more of our own people than any other country on earth — including China, which has four times our population — or in human history. A new Pew report announces that we are now keeping even nonviolent inmates behind bars for increasingly longer terms. 95 per cent of our prisoners are boys and young men; a young American man today stands four times the chance of incarceration than he would have twenty years ago.
In 1983, when Lisa graduated form University of California, Los Angeles, before attending Yale Law School, California spent more on higher education than on prisons; that equation is now reversed. Over the past 23 years, California constructed roughly one new prison each year, at a cost of $100 million each, while it built only one new public college during the same period. Non-violent offenders are 60% of our prison population; releasing half of them would free up nearly $17 billion per year for schools or other worthy programs, with no appreciable effect on the crime rate.
Lisa Bloom will explain how we can create the political will to stop the raging tide of mass incarceration
Since few prisons offer therapy or vocational programs and children left behind in fatherless homes are more likely to grow up to become offenders themselves, the problem just gets worse. We now spend $68 billion annually, and this number is increasing, on local, state and federal corrections.
Lisa Bloom – founder and managing partner of The Bloom Firm, a general practice law firm that handles family, civil and criminal matters — will explain how we can create the political will to stop the raging tide of mass incarceration. She will discuss the reasons behind the increasing role of the prison industrial complex in the United States, how we can change the alarming trajectory, and why we must.
Lisa’s first book, Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World, was a New York Times bestseller. Her newest book, Swagger: 10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness, and Thug Culture, both raises an alarm about a terrible problem and creates a blueprint for its solution.
