The economics of mass incarceration (with Robynn Cox)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What role does the criminal justice system play in economic inequality? How does economic inequality cause mass incarceration? And how do we tease those two questions apart? Robynn Cox, an expert in the economics of mass incarceration, talks about her research uncovering the links between economic inequality and the criminal justice system. Robynn Cox is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Social Work. She is an economist and inequality researcher, and her work focuses on understanding the social and economic consequences of mass incarceration. Twitter: @RobynnCox Overcoming social exclusion: Addressing race and criminal justice policy in the United States https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Cox.pdf The Impact of Mass Incarceration on the Lives of African American Women https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1007/s12114-011-9114-2 Identifying the Link Between Food Security and Incarceration https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/soej.12080 www.robynncox.com https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.22277 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2019.1709883 http://www.jameinpcunningham.com/uploads/1/1/2/0/112070441/black_lives_ccow.pdf Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	As a matter of policy, we decided to chuck people in jail for just about anything.
0:07.0	I mean, we tried to incarcerate our way out of this and it's just really expensive to do that, right?
0:13.0	Like, the public is paying the cost, the individuals who are having contacts with this system.
0:18.0	They're also paying.
0:19.0	It's inequality creating mass incarceration, this mass incarceration, creating inequality a little above.
0:25.0	How does this all happen?
0:26.0	A lot above.
0:27.0	A lot above.
0:31.0	From the home offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics.
0:37.0	With Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
0:49.0	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:52.0	I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
1:00.0	So Nick, one thing we've talked about on this podcast in the past is how when we look at economics,
1:07.0	we don't always look at all of the costs or all of the benefits.
1:12.0	We'll focus on one or the other.
1:15.0	And I think a great example of that in the United States is our huge prison industrial complex.
1:24.0	Yeah, it's interesting because as a matter of policy, we decided it was better to chuck people in jail for just about anything as a way of fighting crime.
1:37.0	But in the end, it may have created more crime because it creates more poverty and criminalizes more things.
1:44.0	And you know, the repercussions and the costs of mass incarceration are almost certainly massively outweighing the benefits of prosecuting people and throwing them in jail today.
1:58.0	Right.
1:59.0	Obviously, you know, you need to balance the costs, the economic cost, the pure dollar costs of incarcerating people with the benefits of the legitimate role of the criminal justice system and discouraging bad behavior.
2:15.0	But we definitely seem to have gotten our approach out of whack.
	...

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