Hey everybody, as I record this, there continued to be protests against police brutality and anti-Blackness of all sorts, frankly, in the streets of over 140 cities around the country, and that is both

inspiring and uplifting to see and terrifying, to see the images that are coming out of it.

We on our editorial team are having trouble making it through meetings without bursting into tears.

And I just want to acknowledge that that might be where a lot of you are when you listen to this too.

We are there with you.

But we are also continuing to think about all of the work we have to do as a society,

all of the baggage we have to do as a society, all of the baggage we carried into this

COVID-19 crisis. A few weeks back we talked about mass incarceration.

Scroll down in your feed and check that out if you missed it.

But suffice to say, almost none of the stuff that we do to control the spread of this

virus is happening behind bars.

So there's been a movement to get people out of those facilities and that movement has seen some success.

But the success begs a whole new question.

What then? What if we totally empty jails and prisons? What happens to all those people

who had been hidden away in cages? That's the question we're asking in this episode

and it turns out a huge share of them will remain

captive to choices we made as a society decades ago. Yes we can. I'm Kai Wright and this is the United States of anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.

A huge number of people who are locked up in this country are mentally ill,

or addicted to drugs, both depending on how you

calculate it and where you live it's anywhere from 20% to more than half.

Oh yeah, the first thing cool my name is Germain.

Germain is one of those people.

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