The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Understanding America’s Prison Problem – With Bill Keller

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

In place of Office Hours this week, we’re bringing you our conversation with Bill Keller, the author of What’s Prison For, the former executive editor of The New York Times, and the founding editor of The Marshall Project. Bill joins Scott to discuss prison reform, the role race plays in incarceration, and what most of us don’t know about the prison system. You can find him on Twitter @billkellernyc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. so the dog is still on holiday so in place of office hours we are bringing you our conversation with bill keller the former new york times executive editor the founding editor of the marshall project and author of the book, What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration. We discuss with Bill prison reform, the role race plays in incarceration, and what surprised him most about the prison system while researching his book. We'll be back with our regular scheduled programming next week, so please send in your questions about business, big tech, investing, career pivots, or whatever else is on your mind. You can do so by sending a voice memo to officehours at profgmedia.com. Again, that's officehours at profgmedia.com. Okay, here's our conversation

with Bill Keller. Bill, where does this podcast find you? Finds me at home in Southampton, New York. Good for you. So let's bust right into it. It's no secret that the U.S. loves locking people up. We rank ahead of El Salvador, which is the world's or has the world's greatest homicide rate, and Cuba, an authoritarian regime that imprisons people for pre-criminal dangerousness. That's an exact quote. So Bill, how did we get here? Well, it's interesting that for most of the 20th century, we weren't here. I mean, we had a relatively high, but not outlandish level of incarceration. It was about 100 people locked

up for every 100,000 population. That all changed in the 70s. By about 1990, it was five times that rate. And it's a combination of factors. There was rising crime. There were politicians who were making an opportunity out of rising crime. There was press sensationalism, but there was also the Black Empowerment Movement, which had a lot to do with the intensity of the backlash. There are lots of factors that go into how many people we incarcerate and what the crime rate is. But it was sort of a perfect storm of political opportunism, white backlash, and some actual increase in crime. My understanding is it was sort of a bipartisan effort,

that it was Nixon who felt like, he was just angry at people of color. And then the Clinton administration, the crime bill felt like a popular thing at the time. But this hasn't been, I mean, this is, and then the profit motive, right? It feels like it's just been the perfect storm that's taken us to sometimes 10 or 15 times the incarceration rate. Am I missing anything other than politics and a profit motive? No, I don't think you're missing anything at all. You're absolutely right that it was a bipartisan effort. Even before the 94 crime bill, there was an 86 piece of legislation that was sponsored by Tip O'Neill in response to the crack epidemic, so-called, and established incredibly draconian penalties for possession of crack cocaine relative to possession of powder cocaine, which was more of a white man's drug.

So let's talk about race. You can't talk about incarceration without talking about race. Can you speak to this? Yeah. Black people make up about 13% of the population of the United States. They make up 40% of the incarcerated population. That's got a long history going back really to Jim Crow. The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, had a loophole in it.

It abolished slavery except for people who've been convicted of serious crimes. And so, particularly in the South, they took advantage of that to create crimes along the lines of loitering that would make black men particularly vulnerable to arrest, and they'd send them off to be convict labor. That's no longer going on to quite the same extent, although there is a fair amount of profiteering that goes into the criminal justice system. Your book does a great job explaining what goes on behind the scenes of the nation's prisons. Can you share what you've learned about what goes on on the inside?

Yes. First thing that I learned that I think everybody who spends any time in prisons is struck by is the incredible waste of human potential. There are obviously people who deserve to be locked up who are dangerous criminals, but the number of people who, if they just had a sense of purpose, which could be productive citizens is really shocking. And we locked them up for 20 years and made no effort to equip them to be citizens in the free world. Too little training, so they emerge with no skills. They're alienated, brutalized, and stigmatized. The number that shocked me most is that upwards of 600,000 people are released from prisons in America every year. It just seems to be such a stark choice. You're going to release them as brutalized and stigmatized individuals with no skills, or you're going to try to make them be good neighbors and citizens. And what are your thoughts, if there were two or three things, if you, I imagine you're hearing from elected representatives who want to talk about prison reform, what are the two or three things you would suggest would have the biggest impact?

Education is one. That's one where the data is just unmistakable. The Rand Corporation has done periodic surveys of recidivism rates for people who have various levels of education while they're incarcerated. And the numbers are startling. So education would be high on my list. So education programs while in prison, taking class, getting certification. Yeah. And is this just general? Is this just the benefit of taking classes and learning, or is it getting some sort of certification that increases your economic viability post-prison? It's both. It's a significant portion of the people who are incarcerated are functionally illiterate.

So a lot of it is just getting basic GED education. But the data shows that the higher you go in the educational totem pole, the less the likelihood that you're going to commit another crime or be arrested for another crime. So that would be one. And I write in the book a lot about these experiments that are based on Norway and Germany. And, of course, we're not Norway. They're a homogeneous, oil-rich welfare state.

But there's a philosophy that goes into the more enlightened European incarceration systems, which is that your punishment is that you're deprived of freedom. Your other rights stay intact and you make a conscious effort during the time somebody's incarcerated to address whatever issue it was that made them commit a crime in the first place,

whether it's lack of skills or mental illness or drug addiction. And you start with that the minute somebody arrives in prison and you try to send them back out into the world equipped to deal with the challenges that life presents. And what do you think of prison release programs? What would happen if we took our, I don't know if it's 2 million, and took a third of our prisoners that were convicted of drug crimes, nonviolent criminals, and had some sort of massive prison release program. Yeah, that doesn't solve the problem of what you do with them when they are incarcerated.

But if the basic problem is mass incarceration, and it is, we're many times what other developed countries do in terms of the population. Yeah, we could reduce the population by a third, I would think, without a great deal of difficulty. But it would require political will, transition services for people who are getting out, and money. You can't really fix the prisons by defunding them, much as that slogan sounds appealing. You have to invest in training staff to treat inmates as human beings and citizens, not as numbers or menaces. We'll be right back. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates

their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin?, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners, and managers. Listen in as I talk to coworkers facing their own challenges with one another

and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin,ored by Klaviyo. So you mentioned Norway. How does incarceration, not only incarceration rates, but how does incarceration, what actually happens inside the prison,

differ across the world? Well, the most progressive countries, which would be the Scandinavians and Germany, first of all, the prisons are not quite so obviously cages as they are in the United States. They're more likely to be like college dormitories. The biggest difference of all is the staffing. To become a corrections officer in a United States prison, you're probably going to get a few weeks of training, mostly to do with crowd control and self-defense. In Germany, to become a correctional officer, which is a prestigious and desired job,

you do two years of college-level education that includes some courses in human rights, law, and psychology, and your job is to make them better. Talk a little bit about the difference between men's and women's prisons. Well, 90% of the people who are incarcerated in this country are men, so probably only natural that that's the template for designing prisons. Women's prisons tend to be offered less robust academic programming, and it's likely to be stereotype beautician training or things that are sort of stereotypically's work, if they have programming at all. One of the things that struck me, whenever I talked to women who were incarcerated or who had been incarcerated, I would always ask them about what they thought of Orange is the New Black, which is probably the most common American source of information about women's prisons.

And they said that, you know, that's television, it's trauma, they emphasize the lurid and the sensational. But one thing that Orange is the New Black gets right, according to women who've been there, is that while men's prisons tend to organize along racial lines or gang lines or self-protection, women's prisons tend to organize along racial lines or gang lines or self-protection. Women's prisons tend to organize along family lines. You create a sort of prison family to study with, to commiserate with, and that becomes very important to women and it gives the authorities a lever. They can punish you by removing you from your family and putting you in isolation or transferring you to another prison, which tends to be a way of enforcing order in the prisons.

The most striking thing, women have babies, and there are studies suggesting hundreds of women have babies in prison every year. In most cases, they're separated from their children at birth and sent either to family or foster care. And that means that both the women miss the opportunity to develop their maternal skills. The babies don't get the kind of bonding that's essential in the first year of life. There's a place outside of New York, Bedford Hills, which has a nursery where women can keep their children with them for up to 18 months. And there's some

pretty compelling research that shows that this is healthy for both the mothers and the children. Bill, in five years, if your book had a real impact, what would you hope to see happen? What are you hoping to accomplish with this book? I'd like to have people be talking about it, not the book, but the situation in prison. We had around the Obama years, birth of a conservative prison reform movement, which led to some, not sweeping reforms, but made it safer for a politician to advocate humane treatment, education programs, college funding, and so on. And now everything in Washington and state capitals as well, It's polarized and paralyzed. I'd like to see us get past that and get back to where we were in the earlier part of the century,

so the Obama years, where there's a bipartisan acknowledgement that you can lower the recidivism rate by paying attention to what people do while they're in prison and what is done to them. And what was the biggest surprise when you were conducting your research? What was sort of the myth or the preconception that you had that was dispelled? I think there were two things that surprised me. One of them, which I've already mentioned, was just the waste of human potential.

I taught for a little while at Sing Sing as a volunteer, and I had 16 students in my class. And I was just blown away by it. They all had a sense of purpose. They were thoughtful. They were engaged. They followed the news. Now, not everybody in prison is so evidently redeemable, but I just kept thinking, you know, if these people had been given an opportunity to become entrepreneurs, they would have been really good at it. The other thing that struck me was how many people there are who are trying to fix things. I talked to top corrections officials in several

states that have been trying to experiment with different ways of rehabilitation. I regard them as fairly heroic because they do it against budget and political challenges that are almost insurmountable. Bill Keller is the author of What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration. He is also the founding editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, an independent nonprofit news organization focused on crime and punishment in the U.S. He previously spent 30 years at The New York Times as a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, editor, and op-ed columnist. He joins us from his home in Southampton. Bill, thanks for this important work. It's something that really demands or really

warrants more attention. It feels like it's a stain on what is America over the last 50 years. So thank you for your good work. Thank you. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will

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