Mass incarceration: Michelle Alexander (audio)

David Remnick (New Yorker), Kai Wright (WNYC); Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly

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The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; although the country makes up about five per cent of the global population, it has created nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

David Remnick is joined by WNYC’s Kai Wright, the host of the podcast “The United States of Anxiety,” to talk about mass incarceration and the beginning of a movement against it.

Remnick also talks with Prof. Michelle Alexander, whose book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), which was a best-seller for nearly five years, identified how mass incarceration policies have been a disaster for communities of color.

White League and KKK in common cause to bring back slavery and the Good Old Days

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The poet and public defender Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was formerly incarcerated, reads from his book Felon. And we follow a man who returns home from prison to find a changed world. More

In 2010 Michelle Alexander’s bestselling book spelled out how mass incarceration harms communities of color and the country. Assessing its impact she looks forward and back with David Remnick.