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terms and conditions apply. And now we'll come to this episode over the award winning best of a left podcast in which we shall learn how we came to have some of the

mandatory minimum laws that we do how they came about in part from a sense of desperation from very well-meaning legislators and how prosecutors have used those laws to make things worse.

But we will also learn that there is a movement of foot to turn things around. Clips today come from Jacob and Radio, the Ezra Cline Show, Real Justice and a TED Talk from Adam Foss.

James Foreman Jr. is a professor at the Yale Law School. He's the son of the distinguished civil rights activist James Foreman, who was most notably associated with SNCC, the student nonviolent coordinating committee in the 1960s.

The younger Foreman spent six years as a public defender in DC and experienced it as central to the analysis presented in his book, Locking Up Our Own Crime and Punishment in Black America.

In my opening question, I asked Foreman to explore the limitations of the new Jim Crow argument, which he expressed in review of Michelle Alexander's book published in the Yale Law Journal.

He demurred some, but what I was getting after is a point that he makes in that review. That while the original Jim Crow made no class distinctions among Black people, mass incarceration does.

Most of our present population, regardless of color, comes to the ranks of the poor. Just one to two percent of the people behind bars, for example, have college degrees.

And the risk of a Black college graduate going to prison actually declined between 1979 and 1999.

There is no doubt that our criminal justice system is deeply racist, but saying that it revives Jim Crow obscures some important points.

Okay, onto James Foreman Jr.

The Michelle Alexander book, The New Jim Crow, has been a very influential thing. It's shaped away a lot of people think about the problems of mass incarceration.

I first became aware of your work with your review of her book and then your book develops some of those themes.

But the whole new Jim Crow model is not necessarily a fruitful way to think about mass incarceration, is it?

Well, I think it partially is. So I would want to start there because I think in a lot of ways my book, my book, as building on that work, more so than, you know,

rebutting it. And so I don't think we can understand the history of this country and certainly not the history of the criminal justice system, without really deeply understanding the role that racism has played in forming every structure of our government of our constitution, of our legal system, of our criminal justice system, of our policing structures.

And so I think that the New Jim Crow and not just the New Jim Crow, but books like Jermersi by Brian Stevenson, Between the World and Me by Tana Hasekot, and many other books that are less well known, but that academics have been producing over the last 10 and 15 years.

I think have done and really more than that 20, 25 years have done an amazing job of documenting all of the ways in which in difference to black suffering has helped to create

the criminal justice system that we have today. For me, and indeed, those motivations and that critique is part of what led me to become a public defender in the 1990s.

And what I learned when I became a public defender in Washington, DC, and practiced in a majority African American jurisdiction with a police force that was majority black and judges, many of whom are African American.

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