Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by the authors of book dismantling mass incarceration, handbook for change.

Fremel, Darya, James Foreman Jr. and Maria, hello. Welcome to Current Affairs.

Thank you. Thank you for having us here. Well, I'm excited to have you here, especially because I

managed to sneak into this book. You were kind enough to include a contribution from that I had

written for Current Affairs a couple years ago called

Can Prison Abolition Ever Be Pragmatic? And it has resulted in what I have to say is the

honor of one of the honors of my writing life, which is to appear in a table of contest next to

the legendary Angela Davis, who is also in this book with an excerpt from her great book, are prisons obsolete.

So here's where I want to start.

Okay, so your book is a handbook about dismantling mass incarceration.

You have compiled here a lot of different perspectives from academics, practitioners, people who have been incarcerated,

lots of different ideas for different ways in which mass incarceration can be dismantled.

But let me start with, because you say in your introduction, you know, all of the authors

included here agree that mass incarceration is an outrage.

They disagree on what you do, but they agree. They have a sort of starting premise.

But that premise is not necessarily shared by everyone, so I want to start by getting the premise established,

which is to say, why is it that these authors and yourselves see mass incarceration

as an outrage in need of dismantling? Well, let me take a shot at that one. Okay. I think that's a great

question and a great way to start. I think we sort of all are familiar now, culturally almost, with the numbers.

All of the millions of people, almost over 2 million people locked up in our jails in prisons,

over 10 million people who come in and out of our jails, and the numbers sort of start to blur with one another.

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