This is the FCB Podcast Network. A braais Masoda day that we won't to say, and then we won't to say, oh we got it does? No one can take that, Owady, this gonna be okay. A braas Masoda day that we won't to say and then we won't to say, oh we got it does? No one can take that oway don't be okay. Hello, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Just Listen to Yourself with Kira Davis. I am your host, Kura Davis, and this is a podcast where we take hot topics, hot button issues, and we discussed the talking points on those issues, and we draw those talking points all the way out to their logical conclusion. Today is a j lt Y plus that means we get to interact with the guests today and we're talking about a very important Supreme Court decision which I'm thrilled to be able to break down with our guests today. Please welcome to the show the public safety policy director at the Cicero Institute, Devin Hurtz. Devin, welcome to Just Listen to Yourself. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. Before I get started, would you just tell us a little bit about yourself, where you from, what do you do, and what does the Cicero Institute do. Sure, So I am. I've been with Cicero for pretty much my entire career since it started in San Francisco. So I was out there for a while and saw the homeless seitsue firsthand when I was living in the city during the pandemic. I moved to Vermont, a small town of two thousand, where I lived for the last five years, and I'm now back west in Salt Lake City, Utah. The sister institute is based in Austin, Texas. Moved there from San Francisco in twenty twenty and we do state level domestic policy work now in about twenty two states, So we have sort of a core research team, and then we have advocates in all those states helping us translate research on the best practices and policy into laws out in the field. Very good, And before we get started, I like to ask my guess this question, besides the Bible, in case this is your answer, what is the book that has been hugely influential in your life. This can be personally, this can be career wise, what it can be a children's book, a book you read in You're a Kid. Do you have a book that you think of if that Wow, Yeah, that really made a difference for me. That's a great question. I think that as it relates to my professional work, which again is public safety. But for us and for my life, it's been very much directed towards prison reform, do prison ministry. So I'm glad that she took out the Bible from those options. But I think the most influential book is a book called The American Prison. It was edited and partially written by criminologist Francis Collin from the University of Cincinnati, who's the most celebrated criminologist in probably the world right now. And the book offers chapter by chapter different aspects of prisons that people criticize, and offers a more optimistic way of thinking about the future of prisons, so that it's not sorting to sidesteps argument that we just shouldn't have them, which a lot of academics have concluded, and actually present sort of what could the potential be for prisons if it were a positive agent for change in society. That's interesting. Yeah, that does sound very interesting. Okay, that book is called The American Prison correct, Yes, it's from the early two thousands. Oh okay, very interesting. All right, we'll go pick that out listeners, if that's something that interests you. I know my father in law as a pastor, and he's been deeply involved with prison ministry over the years. And I have a lot of good and faithful friends who have come out of the system and found redemption. But it took a lot of help and a lot of effort, and especially on their own part. So I love the idea of exploring this issue of punishment, crime and prisons. Well that very good, Thank you so much for that. Well, let's go on to talk about in effect punishment and crime because some major Supreme Court decisions have come down, But the one I want to talk to you about today is the grant the decision on Grant paths. This is a decision that is going to have a huge effect, hopefully on crime and homelessness and maybe even drug addiction across the United States. It's everybody who lives anywhere near a city right now in America is very familiar with the problems we have with crime, and this decision essentially bans or gives cities and municipalities are right to ban outdoor public camping. But I know that I'm a layman and all of this, So would you explain this case if you can briefly summarize it and tell us what this decision is. Sure, so without getting too nerdy, and I will say, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but any stretch, but this is a decision that really what it comes down to is there is It was an Eighth Amendment case on the issue of whether or not it was cruel and unusual punishment to arrest someone for sleeping on the street when there was as a it was framed by some nowhere else to go, and that's what we'll get to that part and why that's not entirely accurate in a little while. But that was the crux of the case, and it was what raised the issue. Was in twenty eighteen Martin v. Boise, a federal judge was able to pretty much stop enforcement of camping prohibitions sweet sleeping prohibitions in the entire ninth circuits of the entire Western United States by saying that this was quote and unusual, and he relied on decision from probably fifty years ago Robertson v. California, which found that it was unconstitutional for an individual to be prosecuted for a status versus an action. In that case, it was substance abuse. Is in California, it was legal to be a drug addict versus the action of doing drugs, and that case struck down the criminal statute for being a drug addict. And you know, instead say it's had to focus on something that was an action. I'm going to stop you right there. That's very interesting. I didn't know anything about this. That's an interesting legal distinction which feels like it has a lot of fallout from. So the case was there is a difference between being a drug addict and somebody who there's a difference between addicted to drugs and buying drugs. Are using drugs publicly? Yes? And the logic there was that a a category is a something that's more passive than a direct action. And it's hard because being a drug addict is a summation of actions. But they tried to distinguish it as you know, you can be a drug addict who is in recovery, who is maybe abstaining from drug use, maybe relapsing occasionally, but you could only prosecute them for that active role that they take periodically. You cannot just criminalize them for being addicted. So and even the way that grammatically being addicted is in passive voice, so you know, they got Really it's a really interesting decision, both legally but then also just sort of morally. Come right, and before you go out, what was the name of that decision again, because I definitely want to look this up later. That was Robinson versus California, And I don't have the exact date, but I believe that was in the nineteen sixties. No, fascinating. I did not know. And now my brain is going crazy because I'm like, oh my gosh, the fallout of even just that nuance is deep. Yeah, which and and and it did, I mean, it shifted how the United States approached criminal prosecution for drugs. And now that that was sort of around the turn of the War on Drugs and all of those sorts of things, so it really had a lot of implications for that and how we've approached it. But there's so there's that was the basis for the decision in Martin D. Boise, which argued that and it was an extension of this it, you know, to make a law that says it is illegal to be homeless would fall more neatly into the Robinson d California paradigm. What happened in Boise was that Boise had a law against sleeping outside, and the argument that was made was that that is an action taken only by homeless people. So you are in effect criminalizing the status by criminalizing an action that is only taken by one category of people. Now, that broke down in Grant's past, Corcus's decision, and even in oral arguments that came up, a major part of it was that that's not true. There are many different people who might be taking you know, camping outside, notably protesters and the you know, Israel Palestine protests. So that that made it into the decision and has been an issue you know, in multiple states that have camping traditions, they have used them. This was in Utah to clear those those protests. But it also Clarence Thomas brought this up. Justice Thomas brought us up in oral arguments, what about someone who is who has a house but is a through hiker and is deciding to camp out in a park without any sort of you know, permit or anything. That individual is not homeless us, but is choosing to sleep outside, you know, can can a law be enforced against them? So that part of the of the argument from you know, the sort of people opposed to Canton prohibitions, that argument sort of fell flat. But there are a lot of other other issues at stake here beyond just that. But but the from the Supreme Court's angle, those were sorts of the sort of the questions they were trying to answer. The the other one, and I should why I said this. The other major one is that martin or sorry. That the Robinson versus California case was the only instance and Supreme Court decision where the Eighth Amendment was used to invalidate a a criminalization question versus a punishment question, so cruel and unusual punishment. For most of us, we think of that as a question of degree of punishment, type of punishment genre, that sort of thing like are you heading people, are you, you know, putting them in stockades? Are you beating them? You know, that sort of question, are you depriving them of something? It is because only and only in that case, as far as I'm as I know, that's the only time it was ever interpreted to say that a category of criminal law cannot exist because it's inherently cruel and unusual. So that was one of the other things that Gorsch. Justice Gorsitch pointed out was that this seems to be an over extension of the Eighth Amendment. That's very interesting. I also want to point out too that a lot of the public camping prohibitions were in major cities and in most states were rolled back. Does anyone remember this during what Occupy Wall Street we were going through that, and that was Occupy Wall Street is when I came into politics and the Conservative movement. I came in as an activist, and so I was covering a lot of the Wall Street by Wall Street protests and embedding around the country. And that was the argument we were having at the time. We have laws on public camping. These people were setting up house in front of I mean some of them are still there, They've just never left. They just because what it did then is it morphed into homeless encampments. But because we repealed all of these all of these laws and policies, now this is really why we have this explosion of homeless camping. Because cities deliberately rolled back that prohibition to accommodate the Wall Street protesters because there was some political expedience in there, and that's how we got here to where we have. We see this explosion. We've always had homeless campers, but this explosion of it is because cities don't want to enforce this. So this SCOTE is decision now because the administrations of all of these places have turned over several times since the days of Wall Street protesting, and so now the people who are here who might want to reinstate those laws have been prevented by our courts, particularly here in California, and so now this Scots decision will give those cities back the power to ban public camping, to go back to kind of how it was before Occupy Wall Street. Is that what I'm to understand, doesn't mean they'll take yeah, exactly, they don't have to do it. They just have the tool if they should want it. And that's where you saw even Governor Newsom filing you know, and Amicus free from his office and in support of Grant's pass Oregon, because this is a crucial tool. Now there is, however, an issue of state intervention and in Oregon, for example, this decision isn't as big of a win for Grant's Pass Oregon, there is now a state law that is going to prevent them from being able to take full advantage of this decision. However, in other places, we've seen states go in the opposite direction. In places like Florida and Georgia and Texas, municipalities that refuse to enforce camping ordinances or remove their camping ordinances can actually be held accountable by the state, either by losing funding for certain types of public safety and helplessness, or in the case of Georgia, they can have suit brought against them by the Attorney General or also by residents who are being subjected to these sort of unaddressed encampments. And I think it's important as we talk about this to emphasize that this is this is not a putative measure, and because the nature of criminal law is one where we discuss punishment, that's what we focus on. But we really need to think about this as an authorization of intervention by law enforcement. And it's important that law enforcement already does this so when it can't no matter where you are, including California, when it camp, homeless encampment reaches a certain size, police get involved because they have to. It catches on fire, people have firearms. You know, there was a case in Montpellier, Vermont, a town of eight thousand that had a homeless encampment, not exactly you know, Oakland or San Francisco or Seattle, and a homeless individual discharged a firearm into the windshield of a school bus full of kids. Oh my gosh, I mean really alarming things. So they're finding increasingly that there are our firearms in these encampments and others are sort of weapons, and some of that is because of this sort of escalating criminal activity around them. And people are quick to point out that homeless individuals are disproportionately victims of crime, and you know, Los Angeles, for example, will say this, and that's true, but when you look at the perpetrators of those crimes, it's almost always other homeless individuals. So it becomes the sort of arms race that we're seeing in these encamps listening hello, Oh yeah, you're just breaking up a little bit here, but I've still got yeah you there. Sorry. Yeah, there's this this issue where when in campus are to a certain size, irrespective of camping bands, law enforcement has to intervene. The other issue is one of pollution. So in Austin, Texas, there are times where they have removed literally tons of trash from these encampments. These are polluting waterways, you know, like damage and wildlife, and then when you add in human waste, that sort of thing. Like, all of these issues are ones where basic public safety and public health issues arise and municipalities have to respond. What this camping prohibition does is it allows law enforcement to intervene before it gets to that point when an encampment is only a handful of people. It allows law enforcement to approach them and say, hey, you're not allowed to be here, let's get you some help before it gets to the point of where they're trying to find a place to go for sixty people at a time, while also sending in law enforcement and firefighters into a potentially dangerous environment. That's really it's a preventative measure. What we saw in Austin is when they remove their camping ban. In twenty eighteen, city council voters, you know, again not exactly a super conservative area, Liberal voters in Austin reinstated the camping ban by referendum, and we saw in the first two years a twenty percent reduction in unsheltered homelessness, a twenty percent increase in holmeless people in shelters, so those individuals moved inside and then there was only about one arrest. There was an article from two years afterwards they only found one arrest. So this was not one of those situations where they were rounding up people and putting them in jail. To the contrary, law enforcement was helping them get access to shelter. They were using that social worker, you know, adjacent skill set that we already are asking law enforcement to do. And frankly, for a lot of cases where there are weapons, where there are people with severe mental illness, people who are using substances, outreach teams can only go so far, and they're the first one is to admit that there are service resistant people for that population. The current approach is just to leave them there, and you know, growing number of Americans are uncomfortable with that, and the only other option you have when you're adding any kind of coercive element is law enforcement. You said you're in Austin's sister Institute is in Austin, I'm in southern California, so I'm right next to the homeless problem, and we have this huge issue. The camping issue is huge here. I served on a jury a few years ago and had to be accompanied to my back and forth to my car by the sheriff. All the women did because we because they had a home that the courthouse in Santa Anna is a homeless encampment, or it was. They've cleared it since the whole courthouse was. They actually took out all of the chairs and tables from the decks where people would eat their lunch on and allow people to camp there. You can go online and see the courtyard was just it was just insane. And so I yes, the idea that we're going to help anybody by just sort of opening all these public spaces and letting people work out their problems in the public spaces. They don't work them out, They've just now found a comfortable place to continue to engage in all of this activity. This is what we're up against. But I bring up Austin because it's an interesting thing now here in California. Okay, great, we have this boost from Scotis, but I still live in California. It's a deep blue state. Politics are everything. Politics are religion here, and we have politicians who are deeply attached to the homeless industry, so they're not going to want to solve the problem. There's too much money in this already. But Austin is sitting in a red state. It's a deeply liberal city, but it's sitting in a red state with a governor who has already proven he's willing to take actions against rogue cities that don't line up with what he feels are in the best interests of the state. So I wonder if you could speak to the way you see maybe this decision working itself out. I know you're not a lawyer, and I'm asking you to be a bit predictive here, but just put on your punnit hat for a second, and the differences you see in this decision working out in a state like California and in a state like Texas, for instance. So I think for states outside of the Ninth Circuit where they were not bound in quite the same way that a state like California or Oregon was by Martin v. Boise from twenty eighteen, the decision that prevented them from forcing Camp and prohibitions. In the rest of the country, what we've seen is a fierce debate between municipalities which largely already have these laws, and states that want them to enforce them so much that they couldn't enforce them. It's that progressive governmance governments and municipalities were refusing. So we've seen I mentioned Georgia as one where there are ways the state can step in Texas as well to ensure that these communities are in fact enforcing them, but the Scota's decision is going to be kind of wind in the sales for those efforts. There were a lot of states that were hesitant to take on this issue because they didn't want to pass a law that was then immediately struck down. If the Supreme Court had gone the other way instead that actually camping prohibitions are cruel and unusual, then that would not have only applied to the Ninth Circuit, that would have invalidated all of these ordinances and state laws nationwide. So it was a really high stakes case and everyone was sort of waiting with bated breath to see where it would go. Now that it's gone in this direction, I think a lot of states that were hesitant to take up this issue, or had but it hadn't gone where. I'm thinking of Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana, states that had considered this issue in the last legislative session but it was didn't reach any support. Those states are probably going to take it up again. And then in states like Arizona, which I've been thinking about this a lot, but we're bound by the Ninth Circuit decision, I think we're going to see I say, like Arizona, Idaho, they're going to be really proactive about this. California, Oregon, Washington. It's going to be really interesting. I don't quite know how that's going to work out. I think that Oregon's state legislature are going in a direction to try to supersede in the other direction towards not enforcing encampment. That's going to be really, really interesting. But it brings up something that I want to discuss about the decision and how it's going to affect the rollout of it. So one of the key tenants of the Martin v. Boise decision that you know, prohibited municipalities and enforcing campan onin certit was that there was nowhere else for them to go and that was incorrect, an incorrect frame, because what that meant by that was that there were no government funded low barrier shelters for them to go. Low barrier is a you know, official ease for a a service provider that does not require any kind of engagement with mental health or substance abuse treatment or sobriety, and it's it's if you're familiar with the term harm reduction, it's it's an extension of that. It's sort of harm harm reduction built into the entrance policies of a service provider. So what this meant was that in the case of Boise, there were two hundred and forty beds in a faith based shelter that has been at this for a lot longer than the government. Most communities have long had faith based shelters, whether it's a Salvation Army or a smaller group, some kind of you know, city mission sort of organization. They don't let people use drugs in their facilities, and they do require them to be sober and to engage with some sort of path forward. They are not considered one of the available beds under the Martin v. Boise decision. And this was happening really yeah, yeah, exactly. Wow, I did not know that. That's incredible. So when they say, oh, there was nowhere else for them to go, not true. There was somewhere else for them to go, they just couldn't be using drugs there. They had to be engaging with services. So this is really where we get at this of when people, the people who are dominating the converse around homelessness are saying really only pointing to the federal government, because the federal government is the major funder of homelessness through continuums of care, which are the sort of quasi governmental institutions that are made up of the nonprofit service providers to homeless people. So this is the shelters, this is the permanent support of housing, which is sort of this free housing model for homeless people. Outreach teams, these organizations, which have a direct financial incentive in the status quo, are given the authority by the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the federal level to decide how all of the funds coming from hud into a given state are dolled out. So if you are if you and I were going to start a homelessness nonprofit in Los Angeles, we would have to go to the Los Angeles Continuum of Care and kiss their ring and ask them nicely to approve our project to even apply to HUD. And if we don't fall into their priorities, into their model, they can tell us no to act like cartels and essentially close out any sort of competition, any sort of innovative model or experimentation outside of their priorities, and there is nothing that states and municipalities can do. Occasionally a municipality will sit as the lead organization for a continuum of care, but oftentimes they don't, and instead there's this sort of tension between the municipalities that are funding certain projects, states that typically don't fund projects but maybe are trying to get involved. And then these neither of them have a say and how the federal funds coming into their state are being used, and those federal funds require what a housing first model, which is basically the two kind of cruxes of that are that everyone on the street as they are is ready to move into a permanent housing unit. They can go straight from the street into an apartment. And the other assumption is that they should not be evicted again for using drugs or really for any other reason. Other than one that is like a true danger of public safety. But otherwise keep them there for as long as possible. And they tount this housing retention rate as their success metric. But if you look at some of these, but if you take away all the reasons to not give someone a house and not kick them out of it, then yes, you can keep them there. But the really important thing is that the studies that have evaluated these with randomized control trials that sort of gold standard metric of success. The Urban Institute did one in Denver, and they did a really great job. Other than that, there's a little ass risk on the success metric that says, you know, this is the success rate for those who survived. And you go and dig into the appendix and you see that for four years, the entire duration of the project or the evaluation, those who received the housing first intervention had a fifty percent higher death rate than the people who were right. What hang on, Devin, Oh yeah, I have never talk I talk about homelessness a lot, but I clearly don't know a lot. This is blowing my mind. This I had no idea about. I mean, I could tell you anecdotally, you know that, yes, the Housing First model is a complete disaster. But I had no idea that statistic is out there. No one ever mentions that I buried in like page you know, forty five or something of this report. No one ever reads that far. Wow. They look at the conclusion this was a wild success. But you have to ask a success for whom When the success is only for those who survived the intervention, it's alone. And this this really is. It comes back to the birth of Housing First, at least in support within academia, which then translated into larger support by policymakers who will say, oh, this is evidence based, which first off, meaningless term. But second of all, when you look at the evidence, okay, what what is The original study that got everyone super excited about housing first is from two thousand and one, I believe, and it looked at a transitional housing model where people had, you know, to kind of go up each step of the way towards independence, and they had to be sober and had to be engaging with treatment and individual and then the other side was people who had just received housing trade off the street, you know, no strings attached and no requirements for sobriety. And it found that that latter category stayed housed more, very similar to the Denver study, randomized controlled twild of the thing. But again there was no measurement of mortality or any sort of health outcome. And when we look at the National Academy of Sciences when they've evaluated this was twenty eighteen, they did a massive valuation of like fifteen years of housing first projects and studies, the fact that there was no evidence that housing first improves health outcomes. And now that's a nicely scientific way to say, no one asked if it had worse health outcomes, because again the assumption is that, oh, you know, and they even put it in the report and they say, well, you know, we assume that housing makes people better off because logic brings us there. But they don't consider that enabling people to be self destructive as part of your policy might counteract whatever health benefits there are from being housed. So when you don't even ask the question, we don't measure something. When your only measurement is the sort of intermediary metric of can someone stay inside, it becomes really problematic. And even that starts to break down when we look at a couple other other interesting all right. Wait, I'm gonna I'm gonna be right there because I mean, honest to God, Devin, I could listen to you go. I just remembered that I host this show, so I just say something. But I'm gonna take it to church here for just one second, and this is I'm talking to the listeners now. I want you to hear what Devin has just explained to us. He has told you that it is actually codified in state and federal government policy to push out the very people who have the core value of caring for others. So in America, the Christian faith is the normative faith. I know that's changing, but it's the normative faith. And in Christianity, it is a commandment of this faith to care for the poor, the widow, that those who are struggling. So it's always been very natural that most of these organizations that are charity organizations are Christian or at least faith based, because those are the people who don't feel like they're they're not doing this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. They are literally commanded, they are literally tasked with caring for people and improving their communities in society. So naturally these people have figured out a way to be successful. I mean, I'm not going to go real deep into church and tell you that this is a sole issue. We can get into that, but that's for the pastor to preach on Sunday. But really, what we're seeing is people who have the heart for it, who have the rules structure for this, and who have the experience for this. And yet government is deliberately making policy and law to push out the very people who, at their core believe it is their responsibility to care for others. So while we're getting lectured to you by the progressive left in this country about how hate hate has no home here, and you're so hateful because you don't want to approve this, and and and you don't want to let people live on the street in their own pieces. If that's what they choose to do, then you're you're so hateful. These are the people that are trying to shame you and I into quote caring for the people around us. Yet we have not only the apparatus but the calling to do it, and those same people are making rules and policy and law to keep us out of helping people. So y'all wonder why the homeless epidemic is so bad here in California. Devin just explained it to you. Carry on, Devin, I couldn't agree more. I feel that I'm going I'm gonna change directions to the points I was gonna make, because I you know, the data is really interesting. But I could go on and on. I think that the point you just raised are really essential, and I want to give kind of two ways of adding some detail to them. The first is that there's this assumption by many academics, many sociologists, and the policy makers who listen to them. So you know, again, this is the term evidence based means that a group of academics have gotten together and found something beer reviewed that supports whatever they're doing. And this is an obsession in policy making, and it's something that the left uses all the time to push back against common sense and push back against our values and say, oh, well, it's fine that you think that, it's fine that your moral compass says that, but that's not evidence based. But there are there's moral assumptions baked into these analyzes. And I'm going to talk about a couple you know, so part of the reason why faith based shelters are often not counted in in the you know what's considered a place to go under some of these policies. It's not just because of the issue of drugs and the issue of sobriety that's sort of maybe the most charitable one. There's also this issue of a belief that being in a religious space is like inherently traumatic to say, LGBT people or to people who are not of the faith. And the reason I bring that up is because it also trickles over into the criminal justice side of this belief that any interaction with law enforcement is inherently traumatic, and also within that that jails and prisons aren't how much traumatic. And that might be true. All those statements might be true, but bake it into that assumption is that those types of trauma, however they're measured, are fundamentally works. Then the trauma of the status quo of living in a tent encampment where you're at high risk and sexual assault, we're at high risk of being robbed of. The example I want to give is in Utah, there was a law passed a few years ago that empowered law enforcement intervene in these camps statewide and held municipalities accountable for doing so, very similar to the Georgia law, but there was an exception built in UH and there are you know, a lot of advocates, you know, under the umbrella of housing not handcuffs, that vehemently oppose camping bands at all costs. And these advocates show up at all of these hearings and they, you know, are almost a one to one overlap with a lot of the service providers, and they will do anything to sabotage a camping prohibition. And what ended up getting passed into law was that there's an exception to Utah's camping prohibition that during a Code Blue, which is in Utah is when it is so cold outside that you could die, it's an extreme weather event in the winter. In those scenarios, law enforcement is no longer allowed to intervene in camps and cannot prohibit prohibit camping. They cannot force people to go inside, they cannot arrest them. Now, just to you know, rephrase that when lives are at stake, law enforcement is not allowed to intervene. This was changed recently by a police officer from Provo who is in the legislature, whose spearheaded changing that because he was in those situations during code Blues, trying to coax almless people off the street, and his hands were high. He was not allowed to say, if I leave you here, you're at serious risk of dying. And let's be blunt. The moral question at this heart of that is is it better to let that person die on the street or for a police officer who arrest them and put them in jail. There are people who believe people who are driving homeless politicans country that it is better to let someone die of their own free will in the street due to exposure than to have someone be subjected to whatever traumas there are of an item jail. This is so anti christ. I can't even stand it right now, Devin. I'm just this is not I thought I was going to feel better after this interview because we're talking about a very positive Scot's decision, and all I'm hearing is this is like a concerted anti God, anti creative effort. It is it is opposed. It is this radical extremist interpretation of free will that says that any coercion is inherently problematic and that it is always worse than allowing someone's free will will to the even when it is destructive to themselves, jeopardizing their own life and those around them. It's shocking. We've got to start wrapping this up. I never have enough time. I always have the most interesting people. And Devin, you've been great. I'm gonna I'm gonna wrap this up with I'm gonna summarize it, and then I'm gonna ask you for conclusion. I'll give you the last word of concluding comments. But and I want everyone to know that Devin is here as a policy advisor. I mean, he's not here to go to church. But this is what we do on the podcast, and this is this is what I want to say when you look around you, and I mean this in regards to everything we've been talking about on this show, all the things that are wrong, all the strange and weird and bad ideas that are out there that we parse through every week on this show. You if you, if you're looking around, you're asking yourself, why is everything so chaotic all of a sudden? Why does everything feel upside down? You got to understand you're dealing with people who don't want to follow rules. This is what I learned when I was working with homeless people. And when I was even working in the education system, you deal with people who don't want to follow rules. This is when you're talking to people who won't even discuss the idea of God. It's because they don't like the idea of the rules. There is a sense of rebellion in every human heart. We don't want to follow rules. But sometimes the rules are the fence right that keep you from running out into the street and getting hit by a car. But we're so focused on ourselves, making ourselves our own gods to make our own decisions, we don't want to follow the rules, and so that leads into the policy making that bleeds into the decisions people make to live on the street or become addicted to drugs. That just talk to bottom whatever area of society you are in. At the end of the day, it boils down to people who understand why there are rules and are willing to operate within that that created order. And then there are people who rebel against rules, and they will they will work to make sure that we are all in rebellion of those rules even when we don't want to be, Which is what I've heard Devin saying, is these as he's illuminated some of these policies and decisions over the years that are tiny, that have been embedded into this larger issue. That's how I what I have to say about this issue. That's what I have gotten out of what I heard from you today, Devon. But wrap this all up for us if you can. I said a lot. I think there are reasons reasons to be optimistic and to address your last point, our faith has been here for you know, since since Christ two thousand years if you count, you know, it's it's Hebrew predecessors even longer. The American government and its current iteration, uh, you know, the sort of giant bureaucracy is only you know, it's less than a century old. It's you know, a new deal bureaucracy. There's some wisdom and something I heard from a friend of mine who's in medical school in Pennsylvania and he does harm production outreach to homeless individuals. He's one of the people who does wound care while the people next to him are handing out crackpipes to people on the street, clean crack pipes, which you know, I'm going to side step the discussion of that entirely, but he says something really interesting. Yeah, this is one of the most progressive people I know, one of you know, we are on opposite ends of many issues. But one think he said to me that frustrates him is that most of his peers in medical school and even in the homeless outreach space have deep disdain for people of faith. And what he always reminds them is he says, Look, you're going to burn out and leave this line of work in a few years, the people of faith will still be here, and I'm going have to remember that. You know, we have the benefit of millennia of commitment to these things. People who are addicted to government and addicted to politics do not. I couldn't think of a better way. I couldn't think of a better way to end that. That is so perfect point. All right, Devin, thank you so much for joining us today and for all of the information you gave us. I'm definitely going to go order this book, The American Prison from Francis Collins, so thank you for that. Tell people how they can find you and your work and what you're doing at Cicero Online. Sure, so on the Francis collinpoint, his preceding book from the nineteen eighties, reaffirming rehabilitation. Also a banger. He anticipates progressive resistance to criminal justice was going to lead to the massive incarceration expansion that we saw. It's really interesting. He's a progressive academic who fully anticipated our current situation and lays blame not at conservatives but at progressives who abandoned the idea that the criminal justice system could be a force for good. Also a really interesting book. But I can be found, you know. The Sister's website has my information, and I'm often in you know, not so much in California, but in the interior of the country. I will be in a state capital near you very very soon. We're again, We're in twenty two states, so I make my rounds try and talk about these issues, and always I am interested in hearing from people who can talk about the specific issues in their state and how we can can help turn these things around. Well, more power to you, Devin, Thank you, thank you so much for joining the show today. I want everybody to I'm going to go get these books, but everyone look into this, and I just want to take this opportunity to remind you. I did an episode on the California homeless epidemic. I think I'm gonna have to do another one. I'm gonna have to update some of my thoughts after talking with Devin and doing some research, but that one still covers a lot of the ground we covered here if you're curious. And as a matter of fact, a Canadian friend, an old high school friend of mine, texted me the other day and she was like, here, I don't understand your position on homelessness. You're a Christian, don't you think you should be helping these people in California? And so, rather than get into a whole long text conversation, I just center that episode. I'm like, here's let me explain what's happening to you. I do want to solve it. What we're doing is not going to solve it, so go look that up. As always subscribe if you're not subscribed to the podcast already. This is mainly an audio podcast, although I do use video clips on my Rumble and YouTube channels, so if you want to go look for those. But I'm a one woman show, so it just depends on if I have the time to get a video clip up or not. But this audio is always up, so if you are not subscribed. Whatever platform you're listening on, please do me a favor. Hit that subscribe button. It makes all the difference in the world. Follow me on Twitter at real Kira Davis and until we meet again. Everyone, remember every once in a while, just stop and listen to yourself. A prayers Masoda Day that we won't with say then we won't to say oh we got it? Does no one get tag that owen? It is gonna be okay? A prayers Masoday that we won't with say then we won't with say oh we got it? Does no one get tag that owen? Don't ma, don't be okay. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network, where Real Talk lives Visitors online at fcbpodcasts dot com.
