The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Summary

greetings from Gloucester, Massachusetts, which is why you might hear some

aquatic birds in the background. Most of today's show will be taking up by an

interview with James Foreman Jr. whose book Locking Up Our Own Crime and

Punishment in Black America was published in April by Farra Strouse. At the end of

the show we'll hear a reprise of an interview with

Kanga Yamada Taylor from June 2016 on a political strategy for dealing with the disgrace that is

mass incarceration. 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 Snick, the student

nonviolent coordinating committee in the 1960s. The younger Foreman spent six years as a

public defender in DC, an experience that is 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 demeared 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 prison 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 of important points.

Okay, on to James Foreman Jr.

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