Assessing Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States | Cold Call

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0:58Reshmaan Hussam:1865 was a momentous year for the United States. Citizens witnessed the end of a devastating civil war and the abolition of slavery, and they mourned the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It was, by the account of many historians, a critical turning point in the history of the republic. And many criminologists might agree, because 1865 also triggered the nation's first prison boom, with surging numbers of black Americans being thrown into prison, fueled by a wealthy white class unnerved by a sudden shortage of labor and pending post-war recession. It's no coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865.

1:36Reshmaan Hussam:The black codes or laws enacted across the southern states in that year would see black people thrown in prison for such offenses as walking without a purpose or walking at night. So how have things changed in the past century and a half? We'll take that up next with Professor Reshma Hussam discussing her case entitled Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States. I'm your host, Brian Kenney, and you're listening to Cold Call on the HBR Presents Network.

2:10Reshmaan Hussam:Reshma Hussam is a member of the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at HBS, what we affectionately call the Biggie Unit. Her research explores questions at the intersection of development, behavioral, and health economics. Reshma, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. It's your first time on the show, so we'll try to make it painless for you so we can get you to come back at some point in the future. I know you've got some other very interesting cases. Let me ask you to start by telling us, what would your cold call be to start this case in class?

2:40So it is a little bit funny that I'm on a cold call podcast because this is one of those very few cases in which I don't have a cold call.

2:48Reshmaan Hussam:That's okay. Oh, I mean, you know, one of the reasons that is, is just quite a heavy case and a heavy topic. And so, you know, I try to avoid more nervousness or tension than is necessary. So the question I ask is, what are the social and economic roots to the racial disparities we now see in mass incarceration in the US, really to probe how each moment in history is kind of a measure or a signal of racial disparities in that moment that are then persistent and why that persistence really exists. What prompted you to write the case? How does it relate back to the work that you do as a scholar?

3:24Yeah, it was a little bit circuitous, actually. I mean, I had a personal interest in this space, but in terms of my research, most of my research is based in South Asia. And in particular, I'm doing a bunch of work with the Rohingya refugees who left from a genocide in Myanmar and are now in Bangladesh. And I had written a case on that. And my goal in that case had been to help our students think through the processes of dehumanization that can end with something as stark and terrifying as genocide. My goal beyond understanding those processes had been to get students to think about how this not only happens in other places in the world, but how this also can happen in your own backyard.

4:11When we taught that case, those students were very invested in the context and the question. I don't think they were quite making that connection that these sorts of steps of dehumanization, in fact, can happen right in your own backyard. And in fact, we can be party to those processes of dehumanization. And so that's really what pushed me to write this case on race and mass incarceration, because it illustrates quite explicitly how those things that we think only happen, you know, half the world over are in fact something that has happened within our history and within our current context as well in the U.S.

4:46Reshmaan Hussam:You can really see that unfolding as you follow the narrative of the case. There's a protagonist in this case. Can you just tell us about Alexis Jackson and her background as the protagonist? This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome.

5:17Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Yeah, I'll do my best. She's fantastic, Alexis Jackson. She's a second year and EC student now at HBS.

5:58and she was just kind and generous and courageous enough to share her story with us. Alexis grew up in Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, and she had a father who was incarcerated for several years while she was young. So she described to us how it was that he came to be incarcerated and her experiences with her father in prison. So her father was, in fact, the first in his family to attend college. His name is Al Caldwell. And when he came out of college, he struggled quite a lot to find a job. He ended up working at a gas station. And part of trying to make ends meet to provide for his family meant that he became involved in drug selling.

6:42And so he was caught with possession of drugs and sentenced to a few years in prison. That's how it came to be that she would go with her grandmother twice a month to go visit him in West Virginia. And she describes it strikingly as quite a normal thing, not something that was very jarring. I mean, she certainly missed him. She was very close to him. But she just remembers playing Scrabble with him in prison. He would send the very little money that he could accumulate home to her on her birthdays. And eventually he got out and was lucky enough to find a job with a company that accepted individuals who had been formerly incarcerated.

7:22I think it's worth it just to read one line of what she describes about this experience, which is she basically said it was normal. And I was lucky I had a dad who was active in my life. In our neighborhood, we used to accept the idea that by the time you're 21 as a black man, you're either in jail or dead, which I thought was quite powerful. The other thing I'd like to mention about what she shared with us is that her brother was also tangled with the carceral system in quite a different context, which is that he had been suffering from depression and mental health challenges for quite a while after the death of his grandmother, who was his main caretaker.

8:03And then he became incarcerated for having an unregistered firearm. And as Alexis describes it, she saw that he needed mental health help, but instead what he got was prison. And she saw it as a cycle. He was incarcerated, He eventually got out. But then again, because he didn't have the right therapy, he found himself back in prison. And it was through the experience of her brother that she really saw that prison is not a rehabilitative place and is not a place that was able to deter crime. In fact, it was only punishing her brother when what he actually needed was mental health.

8:42Reshmaan Hussam:Very powerful stories. And, you know, you talk about Alexis saying that this felt normal to her. And I think what's happened in the United States is that it feels normal to people who aren't in the prison system to just assume that, you know, everybody that's there belongs there. And, you know, this is how it's supposed to be. And your case really illustrates why that should not be the assumption. Let's just dive in a little bit to some of the numbers in the case. How do U.S. incarceration rates compare with incarceration in other countries? it's quite striking i think in fact it's maybe the most striking statistic in the case that the u.s is a leader in incarceration in the world so the next highest incarceration rate in 2012 was rwanda the u.s incarceration rate in 2012 was 707 for 100 000 and rwanda is 492 per 100 000 unbelievable now i checked more recent statistics and i think el salvador is now in the 590s and the U.S.

9:36has dropped into the 690s. But still, you know, that is a massive margin. And in fact, you know, we shouldn't be comparing ourselves to Rwanda or El Salvador. We should be comparing ourselves to comparable Western European democracies. And if we do that, then the U.S. is about...

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10:42Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Seven times the average incarceration rate of comparable Western European democracies.

10:53Reshmaan Hussam:Unbelievable. So it's striking. If you look at the numbers that you just described, you know, those are astronomical numbers. We don't want to be leading that way in the world. But it hasn't always been that rate. The case describes a turning point where we entered this kind of modern era of incarceration. What was that turning point? So if you look at the numbers on incarceration rates, there is a clear rise, a rapid rise, what you would call a turning point from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. And we can talk about why that is. You know, there were certain legislative changes and changes in funding and also changes in crime rate that arguably led to this deep rise of what we call this era of mass incarceration.

11:35Even though we see these numbers rise rapidly during those few decades, I think it's very important to think about what were the social norms, kind of the desires of the population, the expectations of the population that allowed, that permitted that sort of legislation to pass, that permitted that sort of funding to be diverted to what we call the criminal justice system. And that, you know, that deeper social dimension, I think, was fostered and nurtured for centuries, not just in those few decades before.

12:07Reshmaan Hussam:You know, so one thing that I didn't ask you before, Reshma, has to do with the percentage of blacks that are in the prison system versus whites. Is it safe to say that, you know, on a percentage wide basis, there are many more blacks being incarcerated than whites or even Latinx? Absolutely. Both Black and Latinx communities are clearly disproportionately represented within the carceral system. And as just kind of a base measure, if we think of these minority communities, Blacks and Latinx as representing 30 % of the U.S. population, they represent 60 % of the prison population. So it's a massive over-representation.

12:43Reshmaan Hussam:Massive. And it gives us a sort of a stepping off point to look at the history around this, because that number has been fairly consistent, even going back to 1865, what I sort of teased in the beginning of the show about the Black Codes. Can you describe a little bit about the incarceration system at that time? And I loved the way you described the origins of policing, which I had no idea those origins began in the Deep South. Yeah, the first arguably state-sponsored policing were slave patrols, individuals who were tasked with finding runaway slaves and punishing them and incarcerating them and returning them also to their slave masters for further punishment.

13:24And yeah, I think that's quite important that the origins of the carceral system as one of retribution, as one of punishment, is something that scholars now are articulating can be traced back to this institution of slavery. And arguably, I should say, this case doesn't go back a little further, which maybe we should, and scholars do, which is to the genocide of Native Americans. That might seem like quite a different phenomenon. But in fact, Bryan Stevenson, who's part of the Equal Justice Initiative, makes this really powerful point, which is the reason that the carceral system evolved to be one of retribution is because it's much easier to punish those who you think of as less human.

14:09Now, how do you come to this place of thinking of someone as less human? Well, you know, within our own history in America, the starting point was with the genocide of Native Americans, where we otherized this population, this large population of Indigenous peoples, to a point in which we could think it's okay if they are eliminated effectively. And that sentiment was echoed in the process of slavery and in the ways in which we thought of and conceived as slaves, which was not as human. And so you can see this process of dehumanization really through both the way one treated slaves and then, as you said, after 1865.

14:49This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work?

15:22It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. With the black codes in which individuals were punished for doing very normal mundane human activities, how do we understand the legal mandate that comes from a popular, from a social desire to segregate, to really think of the black community as less than and polluted, as Isabel Wilkerson describes in her amazing book, Cast.

16:07So then you had the Jim Crow laws that was accompanied by this social activity, one would say, called lynchings.

16:15Reshmaan Hussam:Much more prevalent than I realized until I read the case. It's a phenomenon we've all heard of, right? That individuals were lynched. But I think that it's really important for us and our audience to sit with this event called the lynching, which again, like I said, it was a social activity. Lynchings happened when a community thought that the functioning criminal justice system, the court system, was not going to really deliver the justice that they, what they called justice. That's powerful. And the case has a picture in there where you have little children watching a lynching and smiling at the camera.

16:51It's really hard to articulate these ideas, but we should articulate them and we should recognize that they're well within our own lived and remembered history. To think of a black body that was murdered even outside the court systems was something to celebrate.

17:07Reshmaan Hussam:In a truly barbaric fashion. I couldn't help but think about when I read that blacks could be arrested for things like walking without a purpose. You know, you think about the phenomenon today of driving while black or doing almost anything while black can bring you under suspicion. And we've seen this play out time and time again. So very sadly, it feels like not a lot has changed from that period of time to this period of time for the black experience. Let's bring it up a little bit more to modern day and talk about the 1994 Crime Act, because it seemed in the case like that was really a turning point that fueled things as well.

17:43Reshmaan Hussam:Can you describe the impact of that? I think one of the important things with the 1994 Crime Act is that it reflects the bipartisan nature of this phenomenon of mass incarceration. The Crime Act was brought up under Bill Clinton. It was championed by our current president, Joe Biden, who has since acknowledged that it was a mistake, as many others have. But it's, again, really worth recognizing that this was championed by Democrats. It was advocated for by Hillary Clinton using the idea of super predators, which was this idea that was popularized by a then Princeton professor that there was going to be a massive group of dangerous, quote unquote, super predators who are young teens looking to pillage and destroy communities.

18:34And the image was of young black men. Now, the Crime Act was part of a several decade long trajectory of being tough on crime, which was a very popular political position to take at the time. And what it led to were much, much higher rates of imprisonment following conviction, far longer sentences, and a much greater proportion of time served on those sentences rather than, for example, on probation or parole. In addition, it tied up much more federal funding in the carceral system. And one of the reasons this is so significant, besides the bipartisan nature of it, is that these things are very hard to roll back, right?

19:15Once you say you're tough on crime, nobody finds it politically popular to say you are light on crime or weak on crime. So the tough on crime is kind of this ratchet effect. And the Crime Act maybe was the pinnacle of that.

19:29Reshmaan Hussam:There were also huge disparities in sentencing, right, between whites and non-whites back following the implementation of the Crime Act. Not just following, even prior to, but yes, following as well. So maybe some statistics will be useful in the end. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense?

20:04There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on PLUS and PRO plans. In the 1980s, Blacks were arrested at four times the rate of whites, despite the fact that the Black population is less than a fifth of the white population.

20:49In particular, this was especially disproportionate with drug crimes. The rates of drug use among Blacks was consistently lower than whites, as were rates of drug selling. I think those two statistics are things that are not understood or recognized in popular culture or popular media. And yet, despite lower rates of drug selling and drug use, the proportion of blacks arrested and convicted and jailed was far, far higher than for whites. By 2010, we were in a position where one in every three black men could be expected to be incarcerated in their lifetime.

21:24Reshmaan Hussam:That's remarkable. And the case describes sort of firsthand what it's like to be in prison. I think everybody just assumes it's no picnic and we see it depicted on TV and in movies. I would say, having read the case, it feels to me like it's a little different than what we see in the movies, but it's just as horrific in different ways. Can you describe a little bit about what that is like? One of the common themes is the material constraints, things that you and I just take for granted to be able to do, like read a book, often costs an exorbitant amount of money to do in prison. Make a phone call, again, an exorbitant amount of money.

22:03And of course, these are for individuals who are lacking that very thing. They're lacking cash. Often they were the breadwinners of their family. It's quite ironic that not only are they being charged far, far, far higher than you or I would be for either of those things, but they don't have the cash to even pay for that. But I think what was most powerful to me as I wrote this case was learning about the psychological constraints. And again, this harkens back to the social desires that create what we think of as a carceral system now, which is one, again, of retribution, of punishment, rather than of rehabilitation.

22:38And so the prison is designed to always punish, to punish in a deep way, again, you know, as I described in this way of dehumanizing. If I might just read a quote from a fantastic podcast, a very, very short series of recordings called The Zoo, which is slang for for the prison. But there, one of the things they say is it's a collection of formerly incarcerated and incarcerated individuals who describe prison as the life of a prisoner is not a life at all. It is nothing short of a bleak, pitiful existence within an inhumane artificial environment that is scientifically proven to degrade an individual's sense of humanity to base levels.