We Built It, We Can Tear It Down
Over the past few years, many people who decry mass incarceration have coalesced on certain tenets of collective wisdom. First, as the title of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow suggests, that mass incarceration is a form of racial domination that shares essential elements with the regime of Jim Crow. Second, that the massive increase in incarceration since 1970 — from about 300,000 people behind bars to 2.3 million people imprisoned today — is essentially the product of a backlash to the gains of the civil rights movement. And, finally, that this massive increase has largely been fueled by the drug war. You hear these beliefs repeated in President Obama’s speeches, in articles in liberal magazines and at bars in Brooklyn. It’s a nice pat narrative. It provides us with convenient villains, a tidy moral, and an easy answer for what should be done — let those nonviolent drug offenders go free! There’s just one problem. It’s wrong. Not totally wrong, of course, but certainly incomplete, and in some ways misleading. To read Matt Wasserman´s full article go to http://bit.ly/2w3VcAZ To subscribe to Indyaudio and get our recent episodes go to apple.co/2wwtyh5 Illustration by Brian Ponto