Welcome to the vast majority. I'm Jacobin managing editor Micah Utricht. Mass incarceration

has become a major topic of discussion and organizing on the left in the last decade or so,

and rightly so, given how absolutely barbaric and soul-crushing that incarceration system is. But our guests today, Adana Usmani and

John Clegg, have some problems with the way that we talk about that mass incarceration regime.

They argue that although mass incarceration is of course characterized by massive racial

disparities and who is in American prisons, fundamentally mass incarceration is not a new Jim Crow as

Michelle Alexander famously argued. It's a product of America's uniquely weak social

democracy and dismantling massation will require building American Social Democracy.

Adana and John have an article in the fall 2019 issue of Catalyst, called The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration.

It's an article that will at some point be part of a book on this topic,

and I really cannot recommend the article enough.

Adana Rusmani is an assistant professor of sociology and social studies at Harvard and an editorial board member of catalyst.

John Clegg is a collegiate assistant professor in social sciences and a Harper Schmidt

fellow at the University of Chicago. John joined me in the studio and Adoner joined

from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Also, before we move to that conversation,

a bit of shameless self-promo.

Megan Days and my book, Bigger than Bernie,

how we go from the Sanders campaign to Democratic socialism.

It's very much done. In fact, I have a copy of it in my hands. You hear that? It's a hard cover. You can hear the beautiful sound of a hard cover you can hear the the pages there

in front of the microphone it's incredible I just got a copy in the mail of it

today and it is actually finished it will be out officially on April 28th and you can pre-order it on the Verso Books website

...