You're listening to TED Talks Daily.

I'm Elise Hugh.

Mass incarceration in the U.S.

turns into something sociologist Ruben Jonathan Miller calls the supervised society.

In his talk from a TED salon in 2021, he shares the reality of mass incarceration through the stories of the people who lived it, left it, and still have to grapple with their records.

He challenges us to think deeply about how to change this system or rethink it altogether.

There are few things we know about mass incarceration in our country. We know, for example,

that we're the world's leading jailer. With 5% of the world's population, we incarcerate 20% of its

prisoners. And we know that we punish our poor, our own. Half of the prison, in fact, well over half live below the poverty line.

This is nothing to say about the egregious racial disparities in how we administer justice,

in how we choose to punish. Black Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated

than white Americans, and they do

lengthier sentences, even for the same crimes. This is punishment in the United States.

But what is punishment for? When does punishment end? Why do we punish in this way?

In the 1970s, we said that punishment was for the purpose of rehabilitation. But on the heels of the civil rights movement and a predictable because it was

cyclical crime wave, we decided that rehabilitation no longer worked. In fact, our policy makers said that

nothing worked for people like them. That is to say, the people that we lock away in our

American jails and prisons, the kinds of people that we put in a cage. We made a political decision in that moment

that what we would do

is we would sentence people to longer terms in prison

and that we would make sure that the punishments were more harsh.

But my research shows that punishment doesn't end when the sentence ends.

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