This episode of The Dig is brought to you by the listeners who support us on

Patreon and by University of North Carolina Press. One book that we think you

would like is City of Inmates by Kelly Lydell Hernandez.

Los Angeles imprisoned more people than any other city in the United States.

It is the carceral capital of the world,

but its punishing habits took rude much earlier than the wars on crime and drugs.

Marshalling more than two centuries of evidence, city of inmates, unmasks how native

elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance were at the heart of

imprisonment in Los Angeles, revealing that mass incarceration is mass elimination.

According to Kaleel-Jibran Muhammad, city of inmates is a remarkable book.

Since the Spanish colonial period, every kind of American, from Native Americans to Mexican

and Chinese Americans to

landless whites and African Americans has passed through California's

jailhouse stores with profound implications for the shape of our nation today.

No telling or teaching of the past is complete without reckoning with these supremely urgent

stories.

City of inmates by Kelly Lidal Hernandez, out now from University of North Carolina

press. Pick up or download your copy now. Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacob and magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from

Providence, Rhode Island. During his first inaugural address, Bill Clinton

crowed that communications and commerce are global,

investment is mobile, technology is almost magical,

and ambition for a better life is now universal.

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