Reform Alliance CEO Van Jones sat down with Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers and Sibile Marcellus discuss the disparities in criminal justice and what it would take to make a more equitable system.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Welcome to "A Time For Change." I'm Kristin Myers, here with Sibile Marcellus. Now, in less than 24 hours, President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. And the real work will begin to unify a divided country as much as possible and to make good on the promises he made on the campaign trail.

SIBILE MARCELLUS: That's right, candidate Biden ran on one of the most progressive criminal justice platforms in history and promised, among many other things, to end private prisons, end mandatory minimum sentencing, and reduce the number of people in US prisons. And the number of people in prisons, that number is enormous. More than 2 million people in prison or jail and an additional 4 million on probation or parole.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now, our next guest will be one of the first in line to hold Biden to his word. Van Jones is a graduate of Yale Law School, who has spent years working with both parties on criminal justice reform. He is CEO of the Reform Alliance. Now, I spoke with him about why the time may be right for making meaningful changes to the US criminal justice system. Let's listen.

VAN JONES: First of all, the criminal justice system is a big waste of money. It's a big waste of money. And as a result, there are conservatives, Republicans who agree that some changes are needed. So this can be a bipartisan issue. The Democrats have both sides of Congress, plus the White House.

But Donald Trump signed a criminal justice reform bill. Obama signed a criminal justice reform bill. This has become a bipartisan issue. My organization, the Reform Alliance, plus the Dream Corps, which I was at before, combined have done about 18 bipartisan criminal justice bills over the past three or four years. And so there is some common ground here. But I think the urgency of not wasting money, not ruining lives for no reason, and not just adding to this sense of unfairness should push the issue to the front.

KRISTIN MYERS: And we hear Republicans talking about a lot, deficits. They're very, very concerned about the US deficit. And I'm wondering if you can kind of just connect the dots for some folks about how criminal justice reform isn't just a social justice issue, but it is also a smart financial decision to make for the American economy and for local economies and budgets.

VAN JONES: Well, listen, we spend $80 billion a year every year locking people up. And 80%, 90% of the people that we lock up, when they come home, and most of them come home, don't do very well. And if you had a system that-- if you had anything that you were investing in that was spending $80 billion a year and had a 20% success rate, you'd probably want to rethink it.

And we all want peaceful streets. We all want safe communities. We all want people who do dumb stuff or bad stuff to have to take some accountability and have a consequence so they don't do it anymore and so other people don't want to follow them down the same bad path. We all agree on that. There's nobody who agrees on that more, frankly, than people who live in communities where you have a problem with crime.

The problem is if you had, I don't know, one kid and $120,000, and that's how much it costs to lock up a kid in California, for instance, if you took one kid who was in trouble and you had $120,000 to try to turn that kid's life around, would you spend that $120,000 putting them in a cage and brutalizing them and having them hang around other kids that are also being brutalized? Would you be shocked in that $120,000 turned out to be a bad investment? No.

So why not have some competition? Why not have a community safety super fund and let some community groups compete for those dollars? Let a Black grandmama compete for those dollars. Give one-- give one kid to a Black grandmama and give that Black grandmama $120,000. That kid's going to go to Harvard. That's the bottom line, we are wasting so much money.

KRISTIN MYERS: What's some of the low-hanging fruit that can be done pretty quickly and pretty easily when it comes to reform?

VAN JONES: Well, I mean, I think there's some things on the policing side. I think the idea of having co-responders going along, riding along with police who are trained in mental health, who are trained in coaching, who are trained in de-escalation so we aren't just sending police into communities where they may not know anybody and they may over-- tend to overact. You have people who are trained to go into situations with no weapons and to calm things down. So I think the idea of co-responders, which, frankly, the Trump administration had signed onto, is something on the police reform side.

On the criminal justice side, as I said, I think the low-hanging fruit has to do with the reentry process. I think on the front end, which is where I think a lot of work has to happen, people are very concerned about why are these sentences so long in the first place? Why are people being disproportionately policed and jailed in the first place? That is not low-hanging fruit, but that's the center of the battle.

The low-hanging fruit and a good place to start is no matter what they did when they got arrested, at some point, they're coming home. And they should come home job ready, transformed, and set up to succeed. We've got to stop paying to set up these trap doors into failure, which are these impossible probation conditions, impossible parole conditions with no opportunity for jobs or any redemption. Those are trapdoors into failures.

We need to be building springboards to success by getting people the help that they need to get on with their lives. And so I think the low-hanging fruit is everything that happens to people when they leave prison, when they've, quote unquote, serve their time, they paid their debts, and they need a new shot. That's where I think we can do a lot better with without a lot of bipartisan-- without a lot of partisan conflict.

KRISTIN MYERS: You just mentioned the Trump administration and some of the moves that they made for reform. We have a new administration about to take oath of office. What should the top priorities be for a Biden-Harris administration? And how best do you think they need to effectively get them done?

VAN JONES: Well, the good thing about the Obama administration was even though they didn't pass a bunch of laws on criminal justice-- they passed a couple-- but they made sure the Department of Justice was not focused on just giving people these long sentences, just throwing the book at people. For a long time, the Department of Justice prided itself on taking somebody who's a nonviolent drug offender, to use that old phrase, and giving them 30 years or 50 years or two lifetimes or whatever. And it doesn't make any sense. So Obama changed that.

Trump, unfortunately, changed it back all too often. And so I think Biden has a chance to go back to what was working under Obama, which is to make sure you're reserving your harshest punishment for your toughest cases and not wasting a whole bunch of money on people who really, there are other alternatives. And you don't have to change any laws to do that.

Biden, there's a lot of stuff that Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, can do that does not require a single vote in Congress. They can just stop charging and overcharging a bunch of these different categories. And you could see a real big difference in terms of right away change, at least at the federal level.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now, Sibile, there was so much more that we did not get to talk about in that interview with Van Jones, CEO of the Reform Alliance. Now, he also talked to me about how the riots that we saw in the capital just under two weeks ago really showed the vast discrepancies in the criminal justice system. But even on that point of how much money is wasted, just a couple more facts for everyone at home, probation violations cost the state of California $2 billion, while another $200 million was spent by the state of California in just incarcerating folks for technical violations or these so-called victimless crimes, which is a huge drain on resources, especially, as Van was talking about, in the midst of a pandemic that has absolutely slammed the United States economy.

SIBILE MARCELLUS: That's right, Kristin. So we've seen the criminal justice system in this country fail in spectacular ways, incidents that have become famous. I interviewed Korey Wise. He's one of the Black teenagers that was arrested for the rape of a woman in Central Park, the famous Central Park Five case. He didn't do it.

These five Black and Hispanic teenagers were coerced into confessing a crime they had not committed. And that is just one spectacular example of the whole criminal justice system really failing these teenagers. Obviously, now they're men. And under the Mayor Bill de Blasio administration, they've been let out. They got a multimillion-dollar settlement.

But it's just another instance of the system needing to be reformed. So yes, it's very much welcomed that incoming President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris would try to reform this system. And what I really liked about what Van Jones was saying there is about the trapped door to failure. We have to make sure that once these people leave prison, they actually have a path to getting a job and having a productive life.

KRISTIN MYERS: I'm actually really glad that you mentioned that, Sibile, because the fact that this criminal justice system is a huge dragnet that disproportionately impacts Black Americans, we find a lot of innocent men and women, as you just mentioned Korey Wise being one, dragged into the system. And I did some research on this. It cost taxpayer dollars-- taxpayers a billion dollars in just incarcerating innocent men and women. So a huge financial waste there.