Why Does America Have So Many Prisons?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:01

This week, as Trump promises to make America great again. Again, I want to find out more about the prison system.

In some states, up to 10% of budgets are allocated to correctional facilities, and yet incarceration rates and the costs continue to rise while issues around systemic racism and politics continue to plague its reputation and put question marks over its effectiveness. So in this episode, I want to know, why does America have so many prisons? Welcome to America, a history podcast.

I'm Niamh Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, the and the events that make the USA what it is today.

To discuss this, I am joined by a historian of the 20th century United States at the University of East Anglia, researching race, internationalism, and transnational activism. He's a regular on the show, so he doesn't need any more of an introduction than that. Welcome back. Nick Grant.

Nicholas Grant: 00:01:17

Hi, Liam. Thanks for having me.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:19

Great to have you back on. I feel like you're like buses. We haven't done this for ages and now we've done like two or three in a row.

Nicholas Grant: 00:01:26

Yeah.

And also I feel like the person that I've been paired with, with Heather today and Jean last week or whenever that went out, I feel again, massively underqualified, but very delighted to be here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:38

Oh, you are doing yourself a disservice, Nick.

the Attica prison uprising of: 1971

And if she's good enough for Hollywood, I figure she's good enough for us, too. Welcome to the podcast. Heather Ann Thompson.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:02:04

I'm so glad to be here with you both.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:06

Yeah, really great to have you on this podcast, particularly talking about what we're talking about.

But I just figured before we get into the nitty gritty of this, I wonder if you could give us the historical origins of the prison system and how it sort of evolved over time.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:02:23

Yeah, well, the very long story short is that we've had prisons, of course, in the United States, really from its very beginning. And those prisons have always been racially disparate, and they've always held way more poor people than people of means.

But what is really extraordinary is that over time, we really began committing to those institutions in a way that was pretty extraordinary considering that we had longer histories as well of resolving harm in other ways. And indeed, people with means continued throughout the centuries.

To avoid prison when things would go wrong in their families or there was addiction, or even really harm and wrongdoing.

But really, after: 1970

But really, in the last 50 years, 50 plus years just doubled down on it in a way that was both historically unprecedented and also, of course, internationally unparalleled.

Liam Heffernan: 00:03:47

It feels to me like prisons, a sign of an effective prison system is when you actually don't need as many as you have.

And yet America seems, according to some statistics, have the most number of incarcerated people per capita than any other country in the world, which says to me that it's really not working. Is it?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:04:13

Indeed.

I mean, can you imagine any other public institution with such a high failure rate that it literally a school that can't graduate anyone, city services that never deliver water or natural gas or whatever people need? I mean, it's really extraordinary.

We committed to and remain committed to a system that doesn't work and indeed actually makes people less safe and creates immeasurable social harm on the ground. But of course, it's incredibly popular and it removes from society those who, again, I focus on people with means, but I'll be more specific.

Overwhelmingly white people with means find incredibly useful, you know, makes places. You know, it makes places more expensive, nicer to live, and indeed removes people from the voting booths and from places that.

That they can challenge the existing economic and social relations of this country.

Nicholas Grant: 00:05:15

Just to jump in on that, I think that that's 100% right. And I think, as you're pointing out, Liam, like, this system has failed and is failing people in this failing society.

So you've got to ask, why is it still going right? And, you know, mass incarceration.

Incarceration rates have kind of dropped a little bit, and there have been some reforms, but it's still a massive problem. And you just got to look at the statistics.

And I think African Americans and Latinos make up around about 70% of the prison population currently, despite making just up about 30% of the total American population.

rates start declining in the: 1990

Be Tough on crime is really driven by these long standing racial and economic inequalities in the United States and a way of reinforcing those as well and policing those, literally policing those as well. So, yeah, I think it kind of gets to the core of what kind of society America is and its racial politics and its historical racial politics too.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:33

Though some people might argue that if crime rates go down as incarceration goes up, then surely the right people are being put in prison, Right?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:06:42

Well, we studied this, actually. This was so much of an argument that people both wanted to believe and were told that.

I was on this massive sort of blue ribbon panel to just figure out the origins and consequences of incarceration.

And this panel, which was a very politically diverse panel and methodologically diverse panel, was just unheard of, unequivocal that the crime rate fluctuates. It goes up and down over time.

And to the extent that we can understand it, we do understand there's a correlation between desperation, addiction and crime, economic desperation in particular. But the incarceration rate is disaggregated and always has been in this country, really, from that.

And when we see it spike, interestingly, is in the wake of social disruption, challenges to the social order far more than quote, unquote, rises in crime, which of course, is its own historical concept.

Not that harm is historically constructed, but that what a crime is and how we count it and what we consider to be out of the bounds of society is, you know, it fluctuates, it changes over time.

Liam Heffernan: 00:07:58

Okay, so to wrap some context around this, Heather, I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your book, Blood in the Water. You know, what's it about and what inspired you to research this?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:08:11

Well, it's connected to this discussion we're having pretty profoundly, which is to say that there is this moment when we take a turn, we take a policy turn and decide that prisons are places that are not meant to sort of be way stations or be limited time away, but actually became kind of institutions that were permanent and particularly brutal. And we knew that this happened in the wake of the civil rights 60s, but kind of unpacking the ways in which that happened, I was very interested in.

I was also a civil rights historian.

was an event that happens in: 1971

So I kind of came to it not really knowing what the question was, but just wanting to tell this story, which is a story of extraordinary state violence and Abuse, but one that seemed to have a political impact.

And what I discovered was that events like this, Attica was ground zero, I believe, but also Kent State massacre and, you know, violence at the Democratic national convention in 68.

All of these moments, which were moments of extraordinary state violence against challenges, in this case, challenges to the idea that prisoners weren't human, was responded to really aggressively, first of all, but also narratively spinning that something really different had happened.

So at Attica, the state comes in and shoots 128 people, some of them six, seven times, kills 29 people, civilian employees, guards, prisoners, everybody, and then says, this is not what happened. The prisoners did this. And that narrative, it went out on the front page of the New York Times, the LA Times, the ap, everywhere around the world.

And it was a profound moment of narrative hijacking that said to a nation that was actually against the death penalty, was moving away from prisons, was liberalizing criminal justice, oh, my God, we need to lock up these animals.

So I told the story narratively of this moment when we get sold a really, frankly, a pack of lies that had profound policy implications, I think, in this country.

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:33

Attica wasn't the first prison riot, nor was it the first act of, you know, incited by the first act of mass aggression by, you know, white men on minorities and people of color. So what was it about Attica specifically that was so important?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:10:49

Well, I think it's exactly when it happens. This is at the height of the civil rights movement more generally, and of course, there had been, you know, real significant inroads.

And the American population, you know, core pieces of it, always resisted this, but there was this kind of.

Kind of grudging movement towards, you know, expanding democracy and liberalizing a lot about the nation, you know, making America what it said it had always been. I mean, that was kind of the trajectory. And so when you.

When you see this moment, which is, by the way, highly televised, the media is there, and you see people living in this desperation and what they're saying to the media and they're. They're negotiating, and they're basically saying, you know, we don't want to get out. That's not where we're negotiating.

We're negotiating for basic food. We're negotiating for, you know, to be treated as human beings. And that really captured a lot of people. This played out. And then.

So when it has ended so violently, that could have had a different outcome, right? People could have said, you know, we need to rein in the police in this country. This thing is out of control.

Or after Kent State, you know, unarmed students get shot down. We need to what the hell's the National Guard doing? But instead, the narratives are spun in such a way.

I mean, it was a battle for the hearts and minds of the nation and narrative history that mattered how we came to understand it, I think.

Liam Heffernan: 00:12:15

Yeah. And actually, just to clarify here, I mean, Nick pointed out that a majority of incarcerated individuals are non white.

Was there a clear demographic split between the officers and the inmates at Attica?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:12:31

Well, there was because the, you know, prisons in the United States are always in these rural areas that are overwhelmingly white. And because of hyper policing of black communities, the prison population is overwhelmingly black or Latino.

But in this case, what was really interesting was the rebellion was a multiracial rebellion. It was people put aside their differences.

These were, you know, black prisoners, white prisoners, Puerto Rican prisoners, and at the end of the day, it was spun as this is the black uprising. Everybody should be terrified. Of course, that was the way all the uprisings were spun. Simply wasn't true in this case.

This was a multiracial uprising for human rights. And that's why the stakes were so high in these decades, and that's why the pushback to it was so severe.

And part of that pushback was to then lock everybody up. There is explicit links to this.

For example, after Attica, the superintendent, the warden of that prison, began calling for something that he called the maxi maxi prison. The place to put away the worst of the worst. And what he meant by that was really the most militant and politically worst of the worst.

We didn't get maxi maxis, but we certainly got super max prisons, and we got. And state legislatures would use Attica. They would evoke Attica as we will never, ever let these animals get out of control like this again.

And so, you know, you see what the consequences of this were.

Liam Heffernan: 00:14:05

Yeah, I mean, Nick, sort of thinking about this from a racial point of view here, it feels like we've talked about this on previous podcasts and we've seen it just throughout history in the US that the response to events that are incited by poorer people, by non white people, tend to be far more aggressive than the response to events that are incited by white men.

I just wonder if there's a racial factor here and if events like the Attica uprising are just indicative of this kind of gross inequality, not just in the prison system, but in America as a whole.

Nicholas Grant: 00:14:45

Yeah, I think absolutely.

So I think first I'd encourage anyone listening to, if they haven't already, to kind of look up Heather's book and to read it, I think just before I get on to answering that, I think it's the middle section of the book where kind of talking about how the prisoners kind of band together, forge this multiracial coalition, thought about their demands as well. Like I talked earlier about how mass incarceration is kind of a result of all these historical racial and economic inequalities in America.

And it's a way of kind of viewing those. But also that that part, particularly in the middle of Heather's book, is about how people might struggle together collaboratively.

And the emphasis on prisoner agency is really, really important as well.

So I just kind of wanted to flag that up, I think, because I think that's a really important part of the story about how social movements kind of think about mass incarceration, policing the criminal justice system, and use that to articulate demands as well. And yeah, absolutely. I think in terms of how the state responded to it, the kind of racial dimensions are really, really crucial.

I don't know, kind of get ahead of ourselves a little bit.

But thinking historically, going back way, kind of before the Attica prison riot, there's obviously a really close link in America between policing and racial violence and white supremacy. This is something that kind of, I think, has entered the public conscious since Black Lives Matter in particular.

But the historical links between the Ku Klux Klan and police forces to think about the ways in which, like post Emancipation in the American south, vagrancy laws and black codes, legal codes were used to kind of think about, you know, rounding up, incarcerating African Americans to reassert white control over their freedom of movement, over their labor.

There's a really good book by the historian Alex Lichtenstein that looks at called Twice the Work of Free labor, which looks at the kind of emergence of the chain gang system essentially and looks at how incarceration was used to then kind of reassert control over black labor and to profit from, from. To use the kind of badge of criminality to profit from, from black labor in the, in the 19th, late 19th century and into the early 20th century.

So there's these long, deep seated practices of policing and kind of legal practices in the criminal justice a system which explain why this kind of discrepancy in terms of the prisoner population and the racial demographics and kind of, I think, go a long way to explain what Heather's talking about in terms of how the state responds to the uprising in Attica and does so in such a barbarous and kind of brutal way because of this close association between blackness and criminality that's built up over time in the United States.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:17:35

I will just jump in and say also, you know, while the United States is the poster child for this and is the.

trangeways prison uprising of: 1990

And the response to it is very similar, which is who's going to own the narrative of what really happened and what really caused it. And rather than responding to the cause, as you know, look, this was a wake up call. People are in bad shape.

We are hyper criminalizing only certain communities.

Rather than that being the response, owning the narrative that the problem is the poor people, the problem is black people, the problem is prisoners, is a. This becomes a playbook across Europe, the United States and so forth.

One that I think all of our countries are reeling with and, and that story is still unfolding, sadly.

Liam Heffernan: 00:18:49

So I love a bit of true crime and my wife and I watch a lot of Netflix and, and places like Netflix with all their, their documentaries about, you know, this, that and the other.

We would have people believe that, you know, the, the whole system is absolutely ruined, that all these poor white men are being convicted for no fault of their own. You know, things like making a murderer just absolutely like blew up, for instance. And you know, it's.

It paints this really bad light of the whole system. And actually it does make me wonder if this is specifically about race or if this is more about class.

And actually over time the two have become just quite interlinked to a point where you can't really separate them.

Nicholas Grant: 00:19:33

Yeah, I would agree. I think it's about both.

I think in terms of public representations of prison, that's interesting in terms of the kind of desire to focus on issues where there have been miscarriage, potential miscarriages of justice that focus on white people, when we know the kind of disproportionate targeting of African Americans in terms of their criminalization ending up in prison.

Also black political prisoners as well, and how their stories are treated very differently to kind of other kind of stories of where that there's maybe been a miscarriage of justice as well. Yeah, I think it doesn't serve anyone well. It's about the kind of. It's race and class together.

And if you are of a lower socioeconomic status and are struggling for various reasons in America, you're very, you know, much more likely to end up incarcerated in the prison system. If you add to that that you're a person of color. If you're black, Latino as well, then you're kind of increasing your chances again.

So you can't really look at this objectively and say that in any way the system is working for anyone from a lower socioeconomic background, but particularly for people of color, very clearly. So, yeah, it's not to say that incarceration is just about locking up black and brown people in the United States.

That is a big part of it, and the statistics back that up.

But it is really about dealing with a kind of, as Heather said at the start of the podcast, like social problems, which you could think about dealing in other ways, in less punitive ways, but it's a very deliberate choice to kind of remove those people from view physically and kind of proceed as normal for more affluent Americans and policymakers, too.

Liam Heffernan: 00:21:20

I think this is the problem, though. Surely an effective prison system should be centered around rehabilitation.

It should be built around this idea that once you leave prison, you're less likely to reoffend and end up back there. And then actually, over time, the numbers come down. Less people commit crimes and less people get put in prison. And it just.

It doesn't feel like those structures are in place in the American prison system, that actually people who come out are more likely to reoffend. They're more troubled than when they went in. And actually that's a sign of a broken system, isn't it?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:21:55

Well, clearly. But I guess one of the questions that comes up just the way that you even laid that out is then what is the purpose of the prison? Right?

What is the intention of these institutions?

And if we begin with the idea that the intention is to make society safer and the intention is to improve people who are struggling or who have committed harm or that we might get some of redemption or restitution, then by that measure, it is a colossal failure.

If you see these institutions as gatekeeping institutions and institutions that are there as almost like a safety valve on disruption from below, as a mechanism to keep things the way they are for the people for whom the society, society is working just fine, then the prison system in its most brutal form is an extraordinary success, interestingly, because it means that you can go to places in New York City that are the, you know, beautiful now because you don't have to look at social desperation, or if someone is annoying you or challenging you, you can call the police and pretty well assured, depending on what they look like and their ability to. Or to not hire a good lawyer, that you will succeed in literally removing them from society, getting them out of your way.

And then that's not even talking about the prison side of it, which is that has become an enormous, an enormous industry unto itself. That is, you know, has every reason to not want people to leave.

And we know this in the United States, if anyone is skeptical of that, the entire organizational lobbying structure is the reason we have the long sentences that we do. It's the reason that we have the inability for people to actually ever escape the system.

Because even if they come home, right, they're still in probation, parole, what we call in the United States under some form of correctional supervision. So you're never escaping it. That has a, that works depending on what your goals are.

Liam Heffernan: 00:24:19

Okay, we need to, we need to talk about this because I, I have.

It does not sit right with me that the prison system is, is private because it just surely incentivizes the businesses running those prisons to make sure that as many people are locked up for as long as possible, because that means more money. It just shouldn't be about that.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:24:46

Yeah, but it is.

And even though private prisons are actually a bit of a red herring because they're only about 7% of all institutions, what is the case is privatization that you're pointing to of every service in that prison, everything that that prison does at the state level and at the federal level is privatized and profit incentivized.

And so, yeah, I mean, you know, from a, from a purely ethical and moral point of view, if you have an economy that wants someone to be harmed, murdered, raped, assaulted, you know, if that is your business model, that does seem to be morally reprehensible.

Nicholas Grant: 00:25:31

I think also just to add, and it's.

I think the thing that I often explain to students and they can't, from the UK perspective, can't quite get their head around, is that actually a lot of people, a lot of local officials, elected officials, want prisons in their district. They want prisons in their area because it's a source of jobs, economic growth, job creation, employment opportunities in a de.

Industrialized kind of area, potentially. Right. So there's a kind of real demand for prisons, often depending where you are for those reasons.

And to go back to the first point about, like, you know, whether this is, you know, a failing system by all of these kind of different standards, or whether actually it's working is the way it's intended, I think, like, and we can talk about this in Britain, too, right? It is very difficult to not be tough on crime and to become an elected politician. Right. I don't know if you.

math of Black lives matter in: 2020

But I think in the US Context, for a long, long period of time, but particularly with Nixon and the kind of start of the war on drugs and things like that, this idea that it was electorally successful to be tough on crime, Right?

And you can see that with Trump today in terms of his policy platform being tough on crime, even enhancing the increased militarization of the police. All of these things are vote winners for American politicians and play on kind of racial insecurities, play on racial fears, play on racist myths.

And that's the thing which I think is at the core of this, which, again, tells us a lot about what kind of society American society is or what kind of society Britain is when it comes to thinking about race and class in particular.

Liam Heffernan: 00:27:36

To that point, Nick, I think one of the key issues when we look at the last presidential election, and indeed, I think one of the things that's been most important to Conservative voters over the year is the economy.

And in my research for this episode, I stumbled across an article that estimated that the average cost of keeping someone in prison was around $36,000 a year.

So it seems a bit counterintuitive to me for conservative voters and even politicians to jump on this platform of being hard on crime and throwing everyone in prison when it costs so much money to do that. I mean, I don't get it.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:28:17

Well, I mean, again, it really kind of speaks at the most fundamental level to what is it that people get out of this? And by people, I mean those conservative, particularly white voters, who support prisons and are willing to pay for it.

Human beings are willing to pay a very high price for a lot of things. It just depends on how well it serves them or what they imagine that it does.

In fact, prisons make the whole society less stable, make the whole society less safe, make poor whites suffer their communities as well. But the rhetoric matters.

And if you tell people that this is going to make them safer, that this is going to improve their housing values, that this is going to.

And also if you moralize it, right, if you say that these people, the reason why you wouldn't want to spend the same amount of money to send them to college is because they are criminals, they are immoral, they are ethically and morally bankrupt. So rhetoric is key to that, this. But it's also a product in this country.

I mean, you know, in England it was Thatcherism, in this country it was Reaganism.

And it was, it's a, it's the real legacy, it's the success, the alarming success of this idea that austerity works or that, that, that, you know, you can, you can take all kinds of resources from the public sphere except for one place which is prisons and policing, and that that's going to work and that, you know, that that's going to make everybody better off.

And it's really kind of extraordinary because it made some people much, much better off, of course, changing the tax code, taking money from public coffers to privatization and so forth. But for most people it made things much, much more difficult.

So the failure in this country certainly has been the inability to connect, connect those dots, to retake the narrative of what is actually happened and also the way the economy really works and what prisons really do. And of course I'm an educator, so I have a tremendous faith in education.

But I'm also acutely aware that for some people, and those are often those who control the means of education and the public messaging, Elon Trump buying X, buying Twitter was, you know, is a perfect example of that. It feels often, sometimes like a real uphill battle. Why would people want to lock up all of, you know, undocumented people?

Like, what in the world benefit does that give, you know, ordinary people who want a job in this country, I mean, but yet they're told that it does. And that has tremendous power.

Liam Heffernan: 00:31:04

Yeah, I mean, it feels like just a big self fulfilling prophecy that, you know, people take a stand and say, we're going to be really hard on crime, let's build more prisons. And then you've got the prisons, so you need to fill them because the people running the prisons need to be paid.

And then those people go in, they come out, they reoffend and more prisons need to be built, more people go in them. And it just feels like this endless cycle of, you know, this justification of a budget that doesn't really need to be there in the first place.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:31:31

Well, and it's also in this, and I want to get back to Nick's point about, you know, the importance of race in all of this. I mean, it is absolutely true that this, you know, black and white folks alike you know, get locked up in prison.

But you just can't underestimate the power of this working and building and sustaining on the basis of deep seated white racism, the amount of violence that gets extracted, exacted in these prisons, the ways in which people are okay with locking up other people's children, okay with throwing away the key for entire communities of people. You just can't understand that thoroughly through the lens of class because it just evokes this kind of brutality that goes beyond.

We're okay with this because they were criminals. No, you don't even see these people as deserving of the same spaces in which you walk and the polity that you partake in and so forth.

So it's a deep seated American problem, isn't points out.

And I, and I just, I go back to that not as a hopelessness because of course there's been multiple times in US history when you know that has been resisted and resisted successfully. But it's profound. It is brutally profound. And I think that's, that's also true in the uk.

Liam Heffernan: 00:32:55

Yeah, but there's there are also those facilities in the US like the one in Louisiana, which is, I believe it's Louisiana that's running almost like a plantation. And it's, I don't know if that's still going, but it's certainly till very recently.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:33:09

Ebola. Yeah, absolutely.

Liam Heffernan: 00:33:11

Now, Nick, imagine if that facility was used to put a whole bunch of like white collar criminals in. I mean, that, that wouldn't fly. So why, why on earth are we accepting that when it's African Americans?

Nicholas Grant: 00:33:25

Yeah, I think it just goes, goes to Heather's point that she, she just made like one of the articles that I still teach on one of my modules that Heather wrote. She talks about the criminalization of urban space, right? Urban space being kind of coded as black space.

And then you can pick up so many other examples.

I guess I'm talking here about the second half of the 20th century in particular in terms of ideas of the narrative in the media from the 70s to the 90s of super predators, Reagan's kind of ideas, and the Reagan government's ideas of welfare queens.

All of these kind of racially coded terms and phrases and caricatures and myths about people of color and of black people in particular that were used to justify locking African Americans up in higher numbers.

So I think it's that kind of repeated myth and narrative which has these deep historical roots that people are attuned to and various kind of politicians and political advisors kind of realize that. And the targeting, as Heather says, of social movements and radicals as well.

And Nixon, I guess, kind of pioneers this a lot in the 60s, talking about the kind of silent majority and the need to kind of return to some sort of like order in American society.

Famously, one of his policy advisors, John Elricman, talks and deliberately afterwards, kind of after the fact, says that of course they knew that they kind of basically the war on drugs that he talked about was a pretext to kind of lock up radical student protesters and people of color to make that kind of political point that they were tough on crime. So you have these packaging together and mushing together loads of different historical examples.

But my point is, is that there's these kind of repeated constructions of racist myths and caricatures about blackness and criminality that play on kind of legacies of slavery and enslavement.

Racial stereotypes of the 19th century and that are still alive and well today and have been alive and well throughout the 20th century, which makes it acceptable to many white Americans or justifiable, morally justifiable, that black people deserve to be in prison. They must have done something wrong. They must be a threat to society because of these deep seated racist myths.

Now, I'm not kind of saying that all people in prison are, you know, never committed a crime or anything like that, but I think those kind of myths and those narratives mean that a lot of white people are okay with it or have been okay with it historically.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:36:00

And where the rubber meets the road on that is actually something we haven't really talked a lot about, which is in policing, you know, in order for someone to end up in a prison, they first have to have been arrested and charged with a crime.

So when you think about the way race works on the ground, who people automatically understand to be criminal, suspicious or looking like they need to be additionally surveyed or surveilled or their behavior comes under closer scrutiny, that's when you really understand how the system works.

And so, in fact, white people can commit quote, unquote crimes all the time and not end up in prison simply because they're under less scrutiny and there are fewer officers of the state watching what they do and censuring what they do. And again, as Nick says, this doesn't mean that there's not wrongdoing and harm in the society. But here's what's interesting.

If you look at communities that have means and resources, it's not that wrongdoing doesn't happen. It's not that there's no addiction. It's not that people don't drunk drive and kill somebody.

It's not that even they don't have domestic violence or sexual abuse in the family. All of these things exist, but the response to them is abolition.

In effect, it is an abolitionist framework which is we're going to figure out every possible way we can to remedy this situation.

Sure, we want responsibility taken, but we're going to figure out every way we can to call upon other sorts of resources, counseling and communication and all of these resources so that we avoid the system that we claim works for everybody else. Well, it's the everybody else piece of it that you have to understand as a framing of humanity in a very different way.

And also, who has the option to access those abolitionist frameworks?

Liam Heffernan: 00:38:05

Yeah, and it's a great point. And I think we need a whole follow up episode on the whole, you know, policing, law enforcement side of everything we've discussed today.

But I am also maybe naively optimistic that for everyone in the system who, you know, props up the faults in it and the inequalities in it, there's just as many people who do understand that those things need to be addressed that do understand that people are being wrongly victimized. So have there been any attempts to reform the prison system at all?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:38:37

Well, I mean, in terms of the reform movement, I mean, I'm at the same time optimistic and at the same time deeply dispirited by the answer to your question, which is on the one hand, when we began to see this thing, this thing called mass incarceration, thanks to scholars like Michelle Alexander, you know, Elizabeth Hinton, I was trying to do my part.

ent work, particularly around: 2012

We've done things, we've thought about reentry in new ways. But you know what?

For all of that, for more than a decade of concerted work and people seeing this thing for what it is, we still have almost 1.9 million people living behind bars. Our response still is to criminalize rather than community orient problems.

And that is dispiriting because it means that people do know and they still are willing to accept these high levels of incarceration and this response to social problems. I would not have actually predicted that. I would have predicted especially just my own experience. Right.

You Know, you tell a story, you tell them about Attica, you tell them what's really going on. People are appalled. They're appalled. And that gives me hope.

But then he said, but there is some disconnect here because when the rubber meets the road, they are still voting for these policies. And, you know, trying to understand that. It's very dispiriting.

Nicholas Grant: 00:40:37

rican prison population since: 2009

And some of those reforms have been really important and activists and campaigners have fought for those and lobbied for those. But as had the saying, like, black Americans are still imprisoned at nearly five times the rate of white Americans. Right.

So there's still this problem and this racial, fundamental racial discrepancy. And I think with Trump and, like, who knows kind of what will happen?

I know he kind of talked to, I forget her name, Kim Kardashian, like, talking about prison reform at one point in his political career, but with an authoritarian white nationalist president and the politics that he represents, I don't think that reduction in numbers is any way guaranteed. Right. Like that is going to continue along that path. And quite the opposite he's talking about.

And I expect him to do all of these things because he's saying he's going to do all these things.

Further militarizing the police, pushing for more aggressive policing practices, re incarcerating people who are currently serving sentences in home confinement, expanding the death penalty.

And his campaign declared that, you know, it's the highest priority for the Trump administration, for the second Trump administration, to restore law and order and public safety to America. Right.

And I think he's going to try and do all of those things, and the other people around him are going to try and try, try and do all of those things as well, because it's a vote winner and it reflects his authoritarian and white nationalist politics as well.

So whilst there has been hope and really positive movements and I think what's really, really hopeful, I have so many students who've seen the 13th, who've kind of, who kind of know all of this stuff.

And then when they read Heather's work, the work of Michelle Alexander or Khalil Gilbert Mohammed, they really are invested in that and they know this. So there is kind of hope, particularly from a younger generation, I think.

But the reality of the situation is that I'd be very surprised if those rates continue to fall in America during the second Trump administration.

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:42:38

Well, especially because he has signaled that you can vote for this tough on crime authoritarian state. But if you're a white working class person and you commit crimes, you will be pardoned.

I mean, this recent spate of pardoning of these January 6th criminals, which is, you know, by any definition what they were that was there could not have been a clearer message sent.

You know, we're going to get a death penalty, we're going to lock everybody up, we're going to be tough on crime, but rest assured, this is not going to apply to you. I mean, it's never been made more explicit.

Liam Heffernan: 00:43:14

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what, what Trump's arguments are when he gets rid of all the immigrants. And yet crime doesn't go down and incarceration rates don't go down, which could well happen.

And, well, that's another conversation, I guess, for Hiller. I'm sure he'll lie his way through it.

But anyway, that probably wraps up as much of the conversation as we can have in this episode, although I realise there's so much more to discuss and unpack in future episodes. And as you may be able to hear, my dogs are also very opinionated on this matter.

Thank you so much to both you, Nick and Heather Thompson, for joining me. Anyone listening? If you want to find out anything more about what we've discussed, there'll be links in the show notes for you to do that.

But if anyone wants to connect with either of you directly, where can they do that? Heather?

Heather Ann Thompson: 00:44:04

Well, I'm certainly easily found at the University of Michigan, but so far still on Instagram and, and so far on Blue sky, although we'll see what happens with social media. You might have to find me at my own university, University of Michigan.

Liam Heffernan: 00:44:21

Awesome. And Nick?

Nicholas Grant: 00:44:22

Oh, likewise. I've.

I've slightly detoxed from social media for various reasons, but I, I have an email address which if you Google me and yeah, very interested to talk to anyone interested in this, particularly from a UK perspective as well, and to make those links and those connections with, with race in the uk.

Liam Heffernan: 00:44:37

Awesome. And yet you can find me. Not on X anymore, but you can find me on BlueSky and on LinkedIn as well. Just search for my name and you will find me.

And if you enjoy this podcast, do leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening to this. And if you give us a follow as well, then all future episodes will appear in your feed.

And if you do really love the show, then a lot of work goes into it from a lot of people. So show your support if you can, from as little as $1. It helps us keep the lights on and keep making these episodes.

So thank you so much for listening and goodbye.