The New Yorker Radio Hour - Mass Incarceration, Then and Now

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

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. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick and welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. The United States of America imprisons its people at a rate unique in the entire world. While we make up only about 5% of the global population, we hold nearly one quarter of all prisoners in the world, which is an astonishing statistic. Today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we're talking about mass incarceration, and how a movement against mass incarceration took shape. And to do that, I've invited WNYC's Kai Wright to join me for today's show.

Kai hosts the program, the United States of Anxiety. So, Kai, you've been thinking about this problem for a long time. Please help me understand some of the numbers on this because they are staggering. 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 prison and all of that.

And of course, two-thirds of those people are black or Latinx. Does any country come close to the United States in these numbers? Absolutely not. And I think you can probably say that no country ever has come close to these numbers. And it's also a thing to remember that we never came close to these numbers until very recent. in history. I mean, this was a problem that began in the 80s. Right, we didn't back into this accidentally. It happened as a result of politics at a certain point in time. How did that happen? In the 1980s, when we began the war on drugs. And in the 70s were a period of great upheaval

in many places in the United States, culturally, politically, economically. And we came out of that period with a lot of agita. And as the Reagan era began, from Washington all the way through municipal governments, there became this idea that people are out of control and we have to police them more aggressively. So, Kai, when did you first start hearing about the idea, maybe not in this phrase, but mass incarceration as an issue, as a political issue? The thing is, it's a, it's quite a modern idea as well, right? I mean, I encourage people to read James Foreman Jr.'s book locking up our own because it's an important reminder that this was, we had widespread social agreement black and white, left and right, about the idea of a carceral state at one point. This was a

mainstream idea that we should be tough on crime. And it's worth saying that right now we beat up politicians quite rightly for their role in the crime bill in the mid-90s. Just to remind ourselves and remind everybody, how did the 1994 crime bill lead to the situation that we're now in? It is hard to point to a single piece of legislation that was more massive in its impact. and the breath of the things it touched. But the two main things that it did was that it pumped lots of money into local police departments

and encouraged that created incentives for more aggressive policing, which meant now a lot more people are touching the criminal justice system. And then secondly, it increased the penalty for people once they were there. So people are serving longer sentences for more trifling crimes.

The way to understand it is that it took the system and it just pumped steroids into all of the prosecutorial parts of it. And the system ballooned as a consequence. But there really was broad agreement. And there were a lot of African-American politicians and people in the African-American community and conservatives and liberals and whites and all the rest who were deeply concerned about street crime, drugs,

didn't know what to do about it, and poured all their energies into this bill that turned out to be a national disaster. Disaster of the 1994 crime bill. and the idea of being tough on crime, this was a mainstream idea. And it was not until really the last decade, where we started to see a sudden shift in mainstream political people, both in the black community and outside the black community,

start to say, this is a problem. Well, you were at an NDACP conference, I think it was in 2009, where you heard Ben Jealous, who was the head of the NACP at that time, talking about this, and it was quite revelatory. It was really a big moment in this history. What happened? I mean, so this is 2009.

It's a year after Barack Obama's elected, and it's important to remember that context, right? Like, everybody was ready to be post-racial. Black people were euphoric. Everybody was ready to turn the page. And the NACP itself is a, you know, a mainline civil rights organization. Civil rights never included a criminal justice platform. Civil rights was about jobs and housing. Equal access.

Equal access. It was not about criminal justice. And Ben Jealous, not a preacher, not a politician. So Ben Jealous gets up and says what? The youngest person ever to lead the NWACP, and he gets up and he says, we need a new agenda. We need to start thinking not just about rights, but about justice. And justice includes all of these more complicated things, most importantly, criminal justice reform. Was there a big response in the room, by the way, to Ben Jealous?

No. No. Not at the time. It seemed to fall on deaf ears? I mean, I wouldn't say fall on deaf ears, but people, he did not rouse the crowd with this. No kidding. It was not, you know.

And this is a room full of, I mean, this is the 100-year anniversary of this organization. It is full of middle-aged and up church people, you know, who are frankly socially conservative. The old civil rights establishes. Absolutely. So how did that idea start filtering out, whether it was a black community or beyond?

Well, what happened was, been jealous comes out, start saying that? Michelle Alexander writes a book that says we have to fundamentally rethink about this. And in fact, Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, which came out in 2010, didn't make a big impact for another couple of years after that. Well, not broadly, but within the circles of people who were thinking about this stuff, people who were thinking about racial justice and civil rights already, this book and been jealous and a few other thinkers, they started to reshape the conversation. I'm talking today with WNYC's Kai Wright, who's the host of the program, the United States,

of anxiety. We mentioned Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, which has really been one of the most influential books of the last decade, and it's spent five years or so on the bestseller list. Alexander helped a lot of people understand mass incarceration as an issue of social justice. Cornell West called the New Jim Crow a grand wake-up call in the midst of a long slumber of indifference to the poor and vulnerable. I spoke with Michelle Alexander at the start of 2020 before the pandemic, the presidential election, and the killing of George Floyd. Alexander is currently a professor at Union Theological Seminary. When the New Jim Crow came out a decade ago, you said that you wrote it for the person I was 10 years ago. So take me back to those times, to that Michelle Alexander

and the work you were doing for the ACLU. What were you finding out? So that would have been 20 years ago from today. And back during those years, I was working as a civil rights lawyer. And I was well aware that there was bias in our criminal justice system and that bias pervaded all of our political, social, and economic systems. That's why I was a civil rights lawyer. But what I didn't understand was that a new system of racial and social control had been born again in America, a system eerily reminiscent to those that we had left behind. In fact, you know, I was heading to work my first day at the ACLU directing the racial justice project. When I happened to notice a sign posted to a telephone poll that said in large bold print, the drug

war is the new Jim Crow. And I remember thinking to myself, yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in a lot of ways, but doesn't help to make comparisons to Jim Crow. People just think you're crazy. And then I hopped on the bus and headed to my new job. So it was really as a result of representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality that I had a series of series of experiences that began, you know, what I've come to call my awakening. What was that awakening like? What were you seeing in a very specific way in your work where the scales were falling from your eyes in a way? Well, there were a number of incidents, you know, partly it was beginning to collect data and coming to see how the police were

behaving in radically different ways in poor communities of color than they were in middle class, white or suburban communities. I mean, this wasn't shocked to me in any way, but the scale of it was astonishing. You know, the seeing rows of black men lined up against walls being frisked and handcuffed and arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering or vagrancy or possession of tiny amounts of marijuana. But there was one incident in particular, and it involved, a young African-American man who walked into my office one day and forever changed the way I viewed myself as a civil rights lawyer and the system I was up against. He walked in my office carrying a stack of papers a couple of inches thick. He had taken detailed notes of his encounters with the police. And at the time, I was interviewing people for a possible class action suit against the Oakland Police Department.

And I thought, wow, maybe we have finally found our dream plaintiff. Maybe this is the one we've been looking for. And then he says something that makes me pause. And I said, did you just say you're a drug felon? And we knew we couldn't put someone on the stand if they had a felony record because we'd be exposing them to cross-examination about their prior criminal history and turning it into a mini trial about a young man's criminal past rather than the police conduct. And so I'm looking at him saying, okay, you're a drug felon?

And he gets very quiet and says, yeah, yeah, I'm a drug felon, but let me tell you what happened. And he starts telling me this long story about how he'd been framed and drugs have been planted on him. And he becomes more and more agitated and upset. And then finally he becomes enraged and he says, what's to become of me? what's to become of me and he starts explaining that he had just taken the plea because he was afraid of doing the time and that

they told him that if he just took the plea he could just walk out just walk right out with just felony probation and he said but what's to become of me he's like I can't get a job anywhere because of my felony record he's like do you understand I have to sleep in my grandma's basement at night because I can't even get into public housing

with a drug felony. It's like, how am I supposed to take care of myself? How am I supposed to take care of myself as a man? He's like, I can't even feed myself. He was like, do you know I can't even get food stamps because of my drug felony? He says, good luck finding one young black man in my neighborhood they haven't gotten to yet. They've gotten to us all already. How conscious was that? How would you argue that it was a conscious decision to establish a successor, in a sense, to Jim Crow, and what came before Jim Crow? Well, there were mixed motives. And, you know, one of the things that I laid out in the book was the history of the Southern strategy, the deliberate political strategy of divide and conquer,

of using get-tough racial appeals in order to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were fearful of and resentful of the progress that had been made by African-Americans since the civil rights movement. That Southern strategy was in part about turning the clock back on racial progress. So the drug war was in part politically motivated strategy, a backlash to the civil rights movement. But it was also a reflection of conscious and unconscious biases fueled by media portrayals of drug users. And those racial stereotypes were resonant with the same stereotypes of slaves and, you know, folks during the Jim Crow era.

Michelle, some of the scholars that have been in dialogue with you about your book have taken issue with your focus on the war on drugs and nonviolent drug offenses. John Faf in his book Locked In says that only about 16% of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges. And very few of them, maybe about five or six percent of that group, are both low level and nonviolent. It is true that roughly half. of the people who are held in state prisons today have been convicted of offenses that are labeled violent. But one of the main points of the new Jim Crow, what I hoped to get across,

was that the system of mass incarceration is not simply about who is behind bars at any particular moment. It is this much larger system, a system that begins when a young person is swept off the street for a minor, nonviolent drug offense like possession of marijuana, branded a criminal or felon, and then released into a permanent second-class status. There are twice as many people

on probation or parole today than are locked in prisons or jails, twice as many. And that is the new Jim Crow. Now, there's been a lot of energy around criminal justice reform and attempts to change the system. But one of the big roadblocks has been the fact that a huge number of prisons, 70% in fact, are located in rural communities and go a long way toward bolstering the economies of those places. Yes. You know, the profit motive is significant. And very often people think about the profit motive simply in terms of private prisons making money off of caging human beings. However, you know, as the book Prison Profiteers points out, there is a very large range of corporate interests, private interests that make enormous amount of money off of our prison system. You know, everything from private health care providers to

taser gun manufacturers to, you know, companies that are now creating these electronic monitors. E-carceration, you call it. Yes. You know, this is one of the most concerning developments to me, the emergence of the system of e-carceration or digital prisons, as many activists now call them, where people are now being forced to wear electronic monitors, GPS tracking devices. and it will be cheaper to surveil and control millions of people electronically than through old-fashioned brick-and-mortar prisons. What do you say to people who argue that these technological solutions

are somehow more humane than prisons and jails? Well, you know, certainly most people, myself included, would rather have an electronic monitor, a GPS tracking device attached to my ankle than to be sitting in a literal cage. However, I find it very difficult to call a system of e-carceration and the emergence of digital prisons as progress. Progress would be decriminalizing our communities. Massive investments in education, in drug treatment, in health care, in trauma support. That's what our country. communities need and deserve not new high-tech means of monitoring, surveillance, and control

for larger and larger segments of our population. Finally, I hope you don't mind if I ask what seems to be a personal professional question. Your main teaching post has been at an institution that has religion and faith at its center, the Union Theological Seminary. Does that choice represent a change in your thinking on criminal justice or, or in your own life? As I see it, the crisis of mass incarceration is not simply a legal or political problem to be solved, but it's a profound spiritual and moral crisis as well.

And I think ultimately these questions of what does it mean to be in right relationship to one another? who belongs in a community, in a nation, how should we treat the least advantaged? How do we repair harm in a constructive and responsible way? Are these questions at the center of a next book? Yeah, they are. I'm working on a book that is very different from the new Jim Crow. It's much more personal and is about my journey going from a liberal civil rights lawyer who was tinkering. With the Machine, to someone who now believes that much more revolutionary change is required, but it's not simply a political revolution. A moral and spiritual revolution is also required of us now. Michelle Alexander, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

That was Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, originally published in 2010. Our conversation first aired last year. We're taking the entire hour today to look at the past and the future of mass incarceration. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over a decade ago, Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, opened a lot of people's eyes to mass incarceration as a failing of social justice. Today, we're rebroadcasting an entire hour from 2020 looking at the state of mass incarceration. and I'm joined by Kai Wright, the host of WNYC's program,

the United States of Anxiety. Kai, a while ago you spoke with the writer and poet, Reginald Wayne Betts. How do you guys know each other? Well, we met while I was making a previous podcast called Caught, which was a look at the juvenile justice system through the lens of the kids in it, and Duane really walked us through that system together. What was his story?

He, at age 16 in Maryland, He went with a group of friends to a mall. A guy came out of a mall, got in his car, and they put a gun to his temple and carjacked him. And it was, Duane tells the story that he decided to hold the gun because he was scared what would happen if somebody else had it. But he nonetheless put the gun to this guy's temple. And they got caught. And he was locked up for nine years. Many of it spent in solitary confinement.

What happened when he got out? Well, he got out. He became a lawyer. that was itself a journey because he has a criminal conviction, and that was something that he had to overcome in order to pass the bar and be admitted in Connecticut. And he became an author, a very celebrated author. He wrote a memoir and a number of books of poetry most recently.

He has published a book called Felon. And so I sat down with Reginaldain Betts. We started with him reading a poem called Essay on Reentry. And in this poem, he's telling his young son about his past and admitting that he'd been in prison. Essay on reentry. At 2 a.m. Without enough spirits spilling into my liver

to know to keep my mouth shut. My youngest learned of years I spent inside a box, a spell, a kind of incantation I was under. Not whiskey, but history. I robbed a man. This, months before, he would drop bucket after bucket on opposing players. The entire B-Draggle bunch five and six,

and he leaping as if every layup erases something. That's how I saw it. My screaming, coaching, sweating, presence recompensed for the pen. My father has never seen me play ball as part of this. My oldest knew. Told of my crimes by a stranger. Tell me we aren't running towards failure

is what I want to ask my sons. But it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off the dream in the comfort of his room. The youngest, despite him seeming more lucid than me, just reflects cartoons back from his eyes. So when he tells me, Daddy, it's okay. I know what's happening

is some scragling angel lost from his pack, finding a way to fulfill his duty. lending words to this kid who crawls into my arms wanting more than stories of my prison, the sleep that he fought while I held court at a bar, with men who knew that when the drinking was done. The drinking wouldn't make the stories we brought home any easier to tell. Can you tell me about that conversation? What was this poem about?

Yeah, so it was wild, right? So I don't think I've ever told anybody by this story. A few months before, like the summertime, before I got admitted to the bar, I was on the phone talking to somebody that was locked up. And my youngest son heard me say something or something. And he came down and he was like, did you just say he was in jail? I was like, not. I didn't just say that. I had absolutely just said that, right?

Because you had kept it from him. I had kept it from him. But I guess I don't even think I had said that, but I said something that allowed him to infer that I had been locked up, right? And I finally get admitted to the bar. So after I get sworn in, you know, I turn around, I look at my mom, my wife is there, my sons are there, my grandmother's there, my uncle's there, my aunt's there, like the same people who were in court when I got sentenced were there. And I said, you know, the last time I was in a court like this, I was sentenced to nine years in prison. My youngest son gets up, sits on his brother's lap, whisper something in this ear, and I'm like, oh, damn. I really just told him. So afterwards, you know, we had a party, but I stayed out late though. I probably came in like,

two in the morning. And then in his poem is what happens next. Why had you been reluctant to tell him in the first place? I mean, when do you introduce that kind of knowledge to somebody? My oldest, Mackay, he once told me, Dad, you know, I'm not like my classmates. And I was thinking, shit, why not? I mean, I got a Yale law degree. You know, like, I don't understand what you mean. And I was like, your mama got an advanced degree too. You know, I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, we some, like, degree black folks, right? What do you mean you're not like your classmates? And he's like, well, you know,

they didn't have to learn when they were fired that their dad went to jail. And I just hadn't, you know, and this is my oldest. And I just hadn't thought about the fact that that was a, I ain't sound naive really to be like I hadn't thought about the fact that that was a thing. Because I knew it was a thing when it happened. And he was crying and I had to talk to him. Yeah. That's why I was reluctant. I thought I might be able to say, my youngest son, something. I don't know. You know, like, you know, I might get pardoned or something.

I mean, like, I'm going to hold off until, like, something happens that makes it more platable. You know, like, I mean, you don't ever want your children to feel bad for you, right? It's like, that ain't what you're in the world for. Like, you're not in the world to hurt for me. You know, I'm good. I'm supposed to help deal with whatever pain that you have to experience in this world. I'm supposed to protect you from all of that pain. I'm not supposed to, like, add to.

it in this way. Well, your record almost kept you from becoming a lawyer in Connecticut. I wonder if you can tell me about that. You got a letter from the Connecticut Bar Examining Committee that said you had to prove your, quote, good character before you could be admitted. Yeah, it was, you know, it's wild, too, man. It's like I had to prove my character in fitness, and that was one of the struggles, but also the struggle was just recognizing, again, I'm being reminded that, okay, how fast you run, you're not going to outpace the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. And you will not run fast enough where that thing won't still be in your orbit. And that's what it reminded me of.

It also reminded me of something else, made me aware of something else, that I had to get these letters, right? You get letters from friends, and it was a blessing to get all of these letters because it showed how many people supported me. But it was kind of tragic to feel like they had to put all of that on display. for a body that should have admitted me on GP. Yeah. You know, and it makes me think about what does it mean if you,

because I'm like gregarious. I'm like loud, you know, I'm like in the mix. But what if I was like an introvert introvert? You know, like I'm like an introvert, extrovert. But what if I was like an introvert, introvert? And I didn't make these friendships, not because I didn't want to, but because I didn't know how to, you know. What would it have meant if I hadn't written full books?

because I could say I hadn't been hiding from prison. I mean, look, I just wrote all these books about it. But what if I hadn't necessarily been hiding, but I just didn't want to make my life a long conversation about incarceration? I might not have gotten admitted. And that is... You shouldn't have to be exceptional. Yeah, well, I don't know if I'm exceptional.

But, right, you shouldn't have to be exceptional. You know, I'm decent, but I got a nice jump shot. It's hard to avoid a sense of hopelessness, I guess, isn't really the word. but it feels a little hopeless in some of these poems. They're such heavy circumstances, and I know that's quite the opposite of how you feel about the work. How do we deal with the grim reality of this emotionally, thinking about the future and how we move forward?

Well, I would first, though, argue that maybe it's not as hopeless as, like, even essay on reentry. You know, I'm there. You got a poem in which the speaker is a father who was grappling with telling his child that he was incarcerated, but the speaker's also a coach. The speaker's also figuring out ways to talk to his son about this really difficult thing.

The speaker's actually thinking that it matters and clearly he has some friends who he could talk to. You know, even the one about the for a bail did not. I mean, I still think a poem that centers a mother's pain and says, like, this mother is watching this, right? And she said, I'm going to be a voice of protest in this moment. It's actually also something hopeful because when I got locked up, people weren't even having this conversation, right?

And I know that when I got locked up in the era of 16-year-old teenagers, 15-year-old kids, 17-year-old kids been called Super Predator, there was nobody. Like Bernie Sanders could say whatever he want about what he felt about the crime bill, but I will say that nobody was standing up and saying, listen, this is my child. This is somebody in my community. And yes, we need to deal with violence and we need to address violence, but you will not talk about my children this way. And so I feel like, you know, these poems try to point those things out. And I think that that's the hopefulness, right? I think that these poems are a series of occasions in which you got a man trying to figure out how to save himself. It's a collection of these men, you know, telling these stories.

And they say that, you know, I am somebody here and I deserve to be seen. Duane, thank you for this collection and for your work. Thank you. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. It's cool. Reginald Dwayne Betz, talking with WNYC's Kai Wright early last year. Betts's collection of poems is called Felon. You can hear him read another poem called On Voting for Barack Obama in a Nat Turner t-shirt at New Yorker Radio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for listening today. And join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC. and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avey Carrillo, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With additional help from Priscilla Alabi and Harrison Keithline.

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