Mass Incarceration, Then and Now

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; although the country makes up about five per cent of the global population, it holds nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners. David Remnick is joined by WNYC’s Kai Wright, the host of the podcast “The United States of Anxiety,” to talk about mass incarceration and the beginning of a movement against it. Remnick also talks with Michelle Alexander, whose book “The New Jim Crow,” from 2010, which was a best-seller for nearly five years, identified how mass-incarceration policies have been a disaster for communities of color. The poet and public defender Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was formerly incarcerated, reads from his book “Felon.” And we follow a man who returns home from prison to find a changed world. Taber Gable contributed original music for this episode.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.4	I'm David Remnick and welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. The United States of America imprisons its people at a rate unique in the entire world.
0:19.5	While we make up only about 5% of the global population,
0:23.2	we hold nearly one quarter of all prisoners in the world, which is an astonishing statistic.
0:29.2	Today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we're talking about mass incarceration and how a movement
0:34.2	against mass incarceration took shape. And to do that, I've invited WNYC's Kai Wright to join me for today's show.
0:42.2	Kai hosts the program, the United States of Anxiety.
0:45.6	So, Kai, you've been thinking about this problem for a long time.
0:48.4	Please help me understand some of the numbers on this because they are staggering.
0:53.0	They really are, and you've given us some of them already. But, I mean, for many Americans, it's funny to think that we can recite these by rote at this point. There are one in five people in the United States who have a criminal record. One in five, that's fifth of the population. There are about seven million people in the system in some way, you add up parole and jail and prison and all of that.
1:13.2	And of course, two-thirds of those people are black or Latinx.
1:15.6	Does anybody, does any country come close to the United States in these numbers?
1:19.3	Absolutely not.
1:19.9	And I don't know.
1:20.6	I think you can probably say that no country ever has come close to these numbers.
1:24.8	And it's also a thing to remember that we never came close to these
1:29.9	numbers until very recent history. I mean, this was a problem that began in the 80s.
1:33.6	Right, we didn't back into this accidentally. It happened as a result of politics at a certain
1:37.6	point in time. How did that happen? In the 1980s, when we began the war on drugs. And in the 70s
1:43.3	were a period of great upheaval in many places in the United States,
1:47.0	culturally, politically, economically.
1:50.0	And we came out of that period with a lot of agita.
	...

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