Hi, this is Boschers-Sankara.

I'm the founder and editor of Jackman magazine.

I don't often do radio advertisements, but I just wanted to say how happy it was that Dig is a part of the new Jackabin podcast network.

You know, we need new critical left-wing analysis and thinking, and Dan Denver and his team is needed more than ever.

That's why you should find the dig at patreon.com and give them a monthly donation.

I just gave them $10, and since I'm doing this radio promo for them, I was under absolutely no obligation to do that.

Anyway, thanks, and here's Dan.

Welcome to The Digg, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island.

If an extraterrestrial anthropologist touched down from outer space tasked to describe the United States,

this fresh-eyed observer would no doubt note that we have constructed our gargantuan system of human punishment.

As of 2015, the United States held an estimated 2,173,800 people behind bars, 1,526,800 in prison, and 728,200 in jails. That's according to the most recent data from the Bureau of

Justice Statistics. As Adam Gopnik wrote at The New Yorker, mass incarceration on a scale

almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today, perhaps the fundamental

fact as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.

It's a fact, however, that had for the affluent faded into the background, normalized as part

of a functioning criminal justice system.

Before Black Lives Matter, the new Jim Crow and anti-mass incarceration activists across

the country loudly insisted that what had become normal is in fact a moral monstrosity.

Mass incarceration is also so systematically essential to the way our country works that

it must be considered in any analysis

of American political economy, including the rise of Donald Trump. Today, I'm speaking with

...