Incarceration Nation + The Prison Industrial Complex

Program #ALEM001-DAVA006.

First program: Michelle Alexander - Incarceration Nation

From the auction block to the cell block there is a trajectory from slavery to Jim Crow to the Drug War. The latter has resulted in mass jailings characterized by deep racial disparities. About one-third of young black men are likely to go to jail. The criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control.  Millions of people, primarily poor people of color, have been swept into the nation’s prisons and then relegated to a permanent second-class status in which they are stripped of the basic civil and human rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement. The numbers are numbing.  In all, 2.3 million are behind bars and another 4.8 million are on probation and parole. The more people locked up, the more profits for the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison owner and operator. 

Second program: Angela Davis - The Prison Industrial Complex

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in prisoners, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second. More than one in 100 adults in the U.S. is locked up, an all-time high that is costing the states and the federal government tens of billions a year. Some states spend more on prisons than they do on higher education. Additionally, some five million people are on probation or parole. The conservative "Economist" magazine says, "Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little."

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