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

🗓️ 3 December 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

The United States has the largest prison population in the world. But, until the publication of Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow,” in 2010, most people didn’t use the term “mass incarceration,” or consider the practice a social-justice issue. Alexander argued that the increasing imprisonment of Black and brown men—through rising arrest rates and longer sentences—was not merely a response to crime but a system of racial control. “The drug war was in part a politically motivated strategy, a backlash to the civil-rights movement, but it was also a reflection of conscious and unconscious biases fuelled by media portrayals of drug users,” Alexander tells David Remnick. “Those racial stereotypes were resonant of the same stereotypes of slaves and folks during the Jim Crow era.” Plus, a conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts, who discovered poetry while in solitary confinement, during a prison sentence for a carjacking that he committed when he was sixteen. Betts reads a poem, which appears in his collection “Felon,” about trying to explain to his young son that he has served time in prison.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.3	I'm David Remnick and welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. The United States of America
0:14.9	imprisons its people at a rate unique in the entire world. 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.
0:53.1	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 if you add up parole and jail and
1:12.0	prison and all of that. And of course, two-thirds of those people are black or Latinx.
1:15.6	Does any country come close to the United States in these numbers? Absolutely not. And I don't
1:19.3	know, I think you can probably say that no country ever has come close to these numbers. And
1:24.1	it's also a thing to remember that we never came close to these numbers until very recent history.
1:30.6	I mean, this was a problem that began in the 80s.
1:32.3	Right, we didn't back into this accidentally.
1:33.8	It happened as a result of politics at a certain point in time.
1:36.9	How did that happen?
1:37.4	In the 1980s, when we began the war on drugs.
1:40.5	And in the 70s were a period of great upheaval in many places in the United States, culturally, politically, economically.
1:48.4	And we came out of that period with a lot of agitda.
1:52.4	And as the Reagan era began, from Washington all the way through municipal governments, there became this idea that people are out of control
	...

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