On the August 17th edition of Your Call, we’ll kick off a week long series about the prison industrial complex. From 1970 to 2010, the number of people in state and federal prisons went from 200,000 to more than 1.6 million. Roughly one in every 107 American adults is behind bars. How did we become the world’s leading prison nation? Are we at a turning point for prison policy in the United States? Join the conversation on the next Your Call, with Rose Aguilar and you.
Guests:
Steven Raphael, professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and co-author of "Why Are so Many Americans in Prison?"
Marc Mauer, Executive Director of one of the country’s leading experts on sentencing policy, race and the criminal justice system, The Sentencing Project. He has directed programs on criminal justice policy reform for 30 years, and is the author of some of the most widely-cited reports and publications in the field.
Web Resources:
Jacobin: It’s Not Just the Drug War
The Hamilton Project: A New Approach to Reducing Incarceration While Maintaining Low Rates of Crime
AlterNet: So Much for Reducing America's Prison Population: Latest Figures Show Increase in 2013
The NY Times: In the U.S., Punishment Comes Before the Crimes
Salon: How the prison-industrial complex is corrupting American elections
The NY Times: How to Cut the Prison Population
Think Progress: Why So Many African Americans Get Stuck In Jail, In One Chart