The the Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Three guests

and two segments today. In seconds we'll hear from John Clegg on the

Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration and then we'll hear from Tobita Chow and Jack Werner on economic origins of mass incarceration.

And then we'll hear from Tobita Chow and Jack Werner

on the US-China trade war.

First, mass incarceration.

Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow has achieved canonical status

in explaining its origins in a fantastic war on drugs, part of a racist agenda driven by your actionary politicians looking for the votes of bigots.

There are some problems with this analysis, starting with the facts that only a small share of people and prisoner there for drug offenses and there really was a rise in serious crime for the 1960s onward.

This being the US race did play a major role, but Alexander's version misses some crucial parts of the story.

Here's John Clegg, co-author with Adana Usmani, of the Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration in the fall 2019 issue of catalyst.

Kleg is a collegiate assistant professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

John Kleg.

We have a conventional understanding of, or at least on the left, there's a conventional understanding of how the United that story. What is that story and what issue do you have with it?

Alexander's story, which as you mentioned has kind of become the canonical story both in the popular and scholarly scholarly literature relies on a change that occurred

in the 1960s.

I mean, any attempt to explain mass incarceration has to begin in the 1960s and 70s

because that's when incarceration rates began to rise and her story begins

with a Republican political strategy that sometimes referred to as the southern strategy to

appropriate votes from the Democratic Party,

specifically from Southern Whites,

who were aggrieved by civil rights movement victories

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