[Piano instrumental]
Sean Worsley, a veteran, sentenced to 5 years
in prison in Alabama for using medicinal marijuana he'd
been *legally prescribed* to treat a traumatic brain injury
Fair Wayne Bryant, 63 years old,
sentenced to life in prison for stealing a pair of hedge clippers,
because 18 years before he'd been convicted of robbing a taxi driver.
Kalief Browder, a 16 year old held in prison for 3 years in New York
for allegedly stealing a backpack.
Charged, but never put on trial.
Beaten by prison guards and placed in solitary confinement
for two years, he attempted suicide twice in prison.
Still traumatized, he committed suicide at his mother's
home after being released.
[Cell closes]
These are just 3 drops in a sea of similar stories all across the United States
Why are these stories so common?
One of the ugly truths about our country is that
In fact, we imprison more people than any other country, period.
We are the biggest prison in the world.
We have a significantly larger prison population,
2.1 million people,
than China, a country with 3x our population
Why does the United States lock up so many of its' people?
More than the entire population of New Mexico.
Where did this wholesale imprisonment of *HUGE* groups of people,
what we call mass incarceration,
come from?
Let's go back a few decades.
Starting in the 1960s,
many companies, looking to cut costs,
moved production out of big cities like Detroit,
Milwuakee,
Cleveland,
or simply automated away big chunks of their workforce.
Their employees were left jobless,
and manufacturing was ripped out of great cities
that used to be synonymous with industry.
After 1970, unemployment for non-college educated men soared,
especially Black people, who were just then entering the middle class.
People who could leave the cities, mostly middle class whites,
fled to the suburbs, a phenomenon we call "white flight."
This led to a vicious spiral.
Cities lost tax revenue,
schools lost funding,
houses lost their value,
local economies collapsed,
job opportunities dried up.
As urban poverty rose, crime rose with it.
And the arrival of crack-cocaine in the 80's,
helped along by U.S. foreign policy in Central America,
made the problem even worse.
By the 1970s and 80s, there was a full blown social crisis in American cities
resulting in a steady increase in crime.
Now, American politicians *could* have responded one way
they *could* have confronted the root causes of crime
by reinvesting in hollowed out cities,
building a healthier, cleaner, more prosperous society
[music winds down]
But that is not what they did.
[music changes]
Instead, they unleashed
They chose to lock up millions of people
rather than accept the type of broad redistribution of
wealth, jobs, and power, that a real solution would've demanded.
Mass incarceration is expensive,
But for the well off, it turns out to be a lot cheaper than actually solving the problem.
So the U.S. government decided to combine the harshest penal state in the world
with the stingiest welfare state.
This carceral approach was also effective politics,
with white voters terrified of rising crime from increasingly non-white cities,
Republicans and Democrats alike saw a way to
exploit racist fears, and get cheap votes.
It started with Richard Nixon's promise of
in 1968.
Ronald Regan vowed to get
in the 80's.
By 1996, a DEMOCRAT like
Hillary Clinton was warning of young
with "no conscience," "no empathy."
People who must be
Over those decades, politicians from both parties
and at all levels passed harsher and harsher laws
feeding the prison system.
The war on drugs started in 1971.
Cruel mandatory minimum laws came in the 1980s
3 strikes laws arrived in the 90's.
You could be put away for life without parole
for stealing a pair of socks if it was your third offense.
"Tough on crime" prosecutors and judges gained office across the country.
Huge sums of money were spent on building new prisons,
which housed millions of people.
As a result, incarceration rose DRAMATICALLY.
In 1968, America's prison population was
was 102 per 100,000 people,
in line with other developed countries.
By 2005, it had risen sevenfold, to 737 per 100,000
The highest in the world.
Even as crimes fell,
with murders in New York dropping 90% in the 90s,
mass incarceration kept on growing.
Why didn't prison populations fall once crime started declining?
it's because prisons are by no means only "about crime,"
they're also about keeping the least advantaged people "in line."
Prison has become the place to warehouse people with mental illnesses,
people experiencing homelessness,
and people with addictions that the system is not designed to help
Instead of solving these problems, we use prison
to disappear the people who have these problems.
With this surging population, prisons are crowded and violent.
People in prison are robbed of their humanity,
often brutalized by guards,
and without real rehabilitation, or
good options for re-entry into society,
are sometimes turned into the hardened criminals the system believes them to be
that's why academic evidence suggests that
including prison!
and it was poor and non-white communities that were the hardest hit
Hurt by deindustrialization AND THEN criminalized by the state,
Black men born between 1965 and 1969 have been
more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college.
Less educated people in general are victim to this.
A white man without a high school degree has
a 25% of being imprisoned in his lifetime.
A Black man without a high school degree has
a 70% chance.
to our communities,
our families,
our children
and to the millions of people caught up in it
Mass incarceration cannot exist in a healthy society
It is an intentional humanitarian disaster.
Mass incarceration is a choice
but it's their choice, not ours
This is Chase Madar, professor of law, for the Gravel Institute
[soothing instrumental]