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In 2007, I became the attorney general of the state of New Jersey.
2007年，我担任了新泽西州的司法部长。
Before that, I'd been a criminal prosecutor, first in the Manhattan district attorney's office,
在那之前，我曾是一名刑事检察官，先是在曼哈顿地区检查官办公室，
and then at the United States Department of Justice.
后来是在国家司法部。
But when I became the attorney general, two things happened that changed the way I see criminal justice.
但是在担任司法部长之后，发生了两件事让我改变了对刑事司法的看法。
The first is that I asked what I thought were really basic questions.
第一个是我提出我所认为的很基本的问题。
I wanted to understand who we were arresting,
我想要了解我们逮捕的是什么人，
who we were charging, and who we were putting in our nation's jails and prisons.
我们指控的是什么人，还有我们是将什么样的人关进看守所和监狱。
I also wanted to understand if we were making decisions in a way that made us safer.
我也想要了解我们所做的决定是否会让民众更加安全。
And I couldn't get this information out.
但我无法获取这类信息。
It turned out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn't track the things that matter.
原来多数大型刑事司法机构，就像我工作的地方，他们并没有对真正重要的事情进行持续的跟踪调查和记录。
So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated,
所以经历了约一个月的异常沮丧之后，
I walked down into a conference room that was filled with detectives and stacks and stacks of case files,
我走进一个会议室，满屋都是探员和成堆成堆的案件档案，
and the detectives were sitting there with yellow legal pads taking notes.
探员们坐在那里用黄色便笺簿作着笔记。
They were trying to get the information I was looking for by going through case by case for the past five years.
他们试图获取的信息就是我一直在寻找的，通过逐个分析过去的五年间的所有案件。
And as you can imagine, when we finally got the results, they weren't good.
你可以想象我们终于得出的结果并不是很理想。
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.
原来我们一直在做很多低级的毒品案件，就在拐角处的街道上，离我们在特伦顿的办公室不远。
