This is Daniel Denver, and welcome to the long-delayed, and, at least for me and my long-suffering producers, hotly anticipated first episode of The Dig, a monthly podcast on the politics of American class warfare.

Thank you. Mass protests against police violence have escalated a quietly growing sentiment that something is wrong with American criminal justice into a widespread certainty that it is a complete disaster. Exhibit A, the drug war,

a piece of the system that a growing number of people of various political stripes

believed to be both a grave injustice and an epic policy failure.

According to surveys, 84% of Americans believe that the U.S. is not winning the war on drugs,

and a majority now favor marijuana legalization.

Even 63% of Republican millennials, a gun-toting and or loafer-dawning demographic that could certainly benefit from a bong rip support legalizing weed.

And 67% of Americans believe that government should focus on treatment rather than on prosecuting drug users.

But sadly, that does not mean that most Americans actually want to end the

drug war. Just about one in ten want to legalize cocaine, heroin, LSD, or MDMA. The spotlight that

protesters have shown on police violence and misconduct marks the opening of a new civil rights movement

in the United States.

But an encounter with police on the street

is only the American criminal justice system's opening scene.

Even a typically peaceful arrest

belies the violence of what happens to people

rendered invisible behind the anonymous prison walls of

the carceral state, sentenced to years, decades, and lives inside the world's most tremendous

system of human punishment.

Mass incarceration is arguably the defining feature of American society, just as slavery once was.

It's not so much that mass incarceration is a capitalist ploy, but rather that it resolves, however bluntly, some really huge socioeconomic problems, namely, the mass exclusion of so many poor people, especially poor black people, from the formal labor market.

The prison boom supplanted Jim Crow and became the late 20th century's most powerful tool to ensure

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