Bryan Stevenson
speaker
1,245 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 3 Jul
Bryan Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what was really frustrating was the person who he robbed and shot was absolutely appalled that he was being treated that way. And she was actually advocating for him to be released or to have a different sentence. And we worked on his case for a very long time. ultimately won his release.
I'm so proud that now he's living in New York, he's doing poetry, he's speaking to young people, he's doing things. But yes, we've done horrific things to children in this country, and we've allowed that mindset of fear and anger to cause us to do some really destructive things. And I do believe that
When you allow yourself to be governed by fear and anger, when you root your decisions in fear and anger, you're going to make bad decisions. You're not going to do the things you should be doing. Until the 1970s, we had a relatively small number of people in jails and prisons. It was fewer than 300,000 people in jails and prisons in this country.
And then that shifted radically in the 1970s when elected officials from all political parties began arguing that people who are drug addicted or drug dependent are criminals who should be punished for their addiction and dependency. And we were angry and we were afraid. And so we put hundreds of thousands of people in jails and prisons for addiction and dependency.
Now, if we weren't being governed by fear and anger, we would have said, oh no, those people suffering from addiction and dependency, they have a health problem. And we need a healthcare response, not a punitive response. But we didn't do that. And now we have... Two million people in our jails and prisons. We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
We've destroyed so many communities, so many families, and we still have one of the highest rates of opioid addiction in the world. We still have families devastated by drug overdose and all the violence and dysfunction that addiction can create. And we haven't helped families. We haven't helped children and mothers recover. We've just punished people. But it was rooted in this fear and anger.
And that's what has shaped so much of our thinking about putting kids in adult jails and prisons. And it's tragic. I write in the book about meeting one of my clients who was... 14, living in a household where his mother had a boyfriend and when he would start drinking he'd get violent and one day he came home and he walked into the kitchen and punched the boy's mother and she just fell.
She didn't even say anything, he just punched her. She ended up on the floor bleeding and unconscious. Her son came running into the kitchen to try to help his mom, but she was non-responsive and that little boy thought his mom was dead. She wasn't dead, but he thought she was dead. After 10 minutes, he got up to go into the bedroom to call the police.
And then he remembered that this man kept a handgun in the dresser drawer. And he goes over to the drawer. He pulls it open. He pulls out the gun. He goes over to where the man is sleeping. And he points the gun at the man's head.
and the man is snoring at this point and at some point the man stops snoring and jumps and when the man jumps the little boy jumps and when the little boy jumps he pulls the trigger and shoots this man in the head killing him instantly this child was very small for his age it was under five feet tall he weighed less than 100 pounds he'd never been in trouble before no prior juvenile adjudications he was a decent student he was the kind of kid
that might have been tried as a juvenile, but for the fact that the man that he shot and killed, his mother's boyfriend, well, that man was a deputy sheriff. And because he was a deputy sheriff, the prosecutor insisted that this child be tried as an adult, and the judge immediately placed this child in an adult facility.
I got involved three days later, and I went to the jail to see this kid, and I was struck how when he walked into the room, he seemed to be so terrified. And he sat down and I started asking him questions, but no matter what I asked him, he wouldn't say anything. He just stared. And I remember getting up and going around the table and pulling my chair close to him.
I said, come on, you got to talk to me. I can't help you if you don't talk to me. He wouldn't make eye contact. He was just staring straight ahead. And I couldn't figure out what to do. And at some point, I just leaned on him. And when I leaned on him, he leaned back. And when he leaned back, I put my arm around him. I said, come on, you got to tell me what's going on.
And this little boy started to cry. And through his tears, he began talking to me, not about what happened with the man, not about what happened with his mom. but what had happened at the jail. And he told me on the first night several men had hurt him. He told me on the next night he'd been sexually assaulted by several people.
He told me on the night before I'd gotten there so many people had hurt him. He couldn't remember how many there had been. And I remember hugging this boy while he cried hysterically for almost an hour. And I finally got him calm and I said, look, I'm going to get you out of here. You stay right here. And I'll never forget trying to leave the jail. And that little boy grabbed me by the arm.
He said, please, please don't go. Please don't go. I said, no, it's all right. It's okay. You stay right here. I'm going to try to get you out of here. And when I left the jail, the question I had in my mind, of course, was, who's responsible for this? And the answer is, we are. We've allowed fear and anger to demonize whole generations of children. I believe all children are children.
I don't think we show our commitment to children by looking at how well we treat talented kids and gifted kids and privileged kids. Our commitment to children has to be expressed by how we treat poor kids, abused kids, neglected kids, kids that are disfavored, kids that are struggling. These are the children that reflect our commitment to children.
And I just think if we took a trauma-informed response to these kids, not only could we help these children, but we could create healthier communities. I hate violence. I don't want to see any child commit a crime. I don't want them to hurt anybody. I don't want them to be part of gangs. I don't want them to be part of things that create injuries and violence. I want healthier communities.
But that means we have to help these kids who are being pushed in all of these unhealthy ways. And we don't get to that when our policymaking is blinded by our fear and our anger, just like we don't get to healthy parenting. We don't get to healthy caregiving. We don't get to healthy relationships with one another if we're blinded by our fear and our anger.
When we don't see the humanity of the people, even that we care about, we do things that can be really destructive.
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