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In 2007, I became the attorney general of the state of New Jersey.
2007年，我擔任了新澤西州的司法部長。
Before that, I'd been a criminal prosecutor, first in the Manhattan district attorney's office,
在那之前，我曾是一名刑事檢察官，先是在曼哈頓地區檢查官辦公室，
and then at the United States Department of Justice.
后來是在國家司法部。
But when I became the attorney general, two things happened that changed the way I see criminal justice.
但是在擔任司法部長之后，發生了兩件事讓我改變了對刑事司法的看法。
The first is that I asked what I thought were really basic questions.
第一個是我提出我所認為的很基本的問題。
I wanted to understand who we were arresting,
我想要了解我們逮捕的是什么人，
who we were charging, and who we were putting in our nation's jails and prisons.
我們指控的是什么人，還有我們是將什么樣的人關進看守所和監獄。
I also wanted to understand if we were making decisions in a way that made us safer.
我也想要了解我們所做的決定是否會讓民眾更加安全。
And I couldn't get this information out.
但我無法獲取這類信息。
It turned out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn't track the things that matter.
原來多數大型刑事司法機構，就像我工作的地方，他們并沒有對真正重要的事情進行持續的跟蹤調查和記錄。
So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated,
所以經歷了約一個月的異常沮喪之后，
I walked down into a conference room that was filled with detectives and stacks and stacks of case files,
我走進一個會議室，滿屋都是探員和成堆成堆的案件檔案，
and the detectives were sitting there with yellow legal pads taking notes.
探員們坐在那里用黃色便箋簿作著筆記。
They were trying to get the information I was looking for by going through case by case for the past five years.
他們試圖獲取的信息就是我一直在尋找的，通過逐個分析過去的五年間的所有案件。
And as you can imagine, when we finally got the results, they weren't good.
你可以想象我們終于得出的結果并不是很理想。
It turned out that we were doing a lot of low-level drug cases on the streets just around the corner from our office in Trenton.
原來我們一直在做很多低級的毒品案件，就在拐角處的街道上，離我們在特倫頓的辦公室不遠。
