← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children that worry us at night and those coming down the road. Here at a time of momentous change, not only in the United States, with a new government coming in, but around the world as continuing efforts are made to cope with the second worst breakdown of capitalism as a global system in the last century. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University here in New York City. I don't have a jacket today, and I wanted to tell you why, because it's 60 degrees here in New York City, which for January is another little piece of evidence that there's, if not global warming, then at least global weirding, as some folks have told me. All right, let's get right into economic Updates for today. I want to begin with the city of Detroit. Now, the city of Detroit figures often in the updates we do here because it is such a statement about what American capitalism does, or put it more honestly, what its costs are. Detroit has been a city in decline for 40 years. Its population 40 years ago was just shy of 2 million. Its population today is 700,000. Those people, 1.3 million people, voted with their feet to leave the places they were born, their families, their friends, their churches, their communities, because there was no work, no decent job that they could build a life around. Today in Detroit, the statistics are stark. 40% of the people live under the poverty line. 40%. A full 11% is officially out of work. It is a disaster that 40 years of presidents, governors, and mayors proved incapable of recognizing or doing much about. So what has happened is remarkable. This is a story with a happy ending. Well, if not ending, happy news. A whole new underground economy has developed in Detroit. And the best word I can think of and won't come as a surprise to you, is that it's a cooperative economy. People are helping one another, particularly those in the lower half of the income distribution, by doing work for one another. They have developed time banks. I'll help you for three hours with something you need, and then in a few weeks or a couple of months, when I need some help, you'll come and give me three hours. So it's an equal exchange. If I have something extra in my home that you need, I'll give it to you and we'll kind of understand each other that you will come and we'll do the reverse exchange at some later point. It's a fair exchange. Nobody is asking to get more than what they give. There's no police to enforce it. There are no courts to make it happen. And the people who are involved in this have discovered something truly revolutionary. This economy is working better than the one that failed them. The cooperative fair equal exchange economy works better than an economy driven by employers figuring out how they can use people to make money. It is a comment on capitalism born in the depths of the city that capitalism has betrayed and abandoned, perhaps more than any other in the United States. And that brings me to another story like this. Far away from Detroit, in Fridley, Minnesota, F R I D L E Y In Fridley, Minnesota, another story like this. I'm going to take you for a moment with me to a place first visited in the public eye by Daniels Wordling of National Public Radio, to whom I am indebted for this information I'm about to share with you. There is something called the Park Plaza mobile home community in Fridley, Minnesota. A whole bunch of people living in trailers grouped on a plot of land, very common in America. Tens of millions of Americans live in mobile home communities because the mobile homes are cheaper than the other kind of. And typically, here's how the business works. A company or an individual buys some land and locates a bunch of mobile homes on the land, runs electricity and water supplies, mows the lawn, keeps the driveways cleared. Individuals buy the mobile home located in the mobile home park. As I say, it's because it's much cheaper than a conventional house, also much smaller. The folks there in Fridley, however, discovered that a capitalist business running a mobile home park is no fun. The business that owns it is trying to make a profit, because that's how capitalism works. So if they can economize on keeping the roads clear, they will. And if they can economize on mowing the lawn, they will, they will. And if they can economize on the little playground for the children, they will. So that the quality of the mobile home park can very quickly deteriorate, even as the fees paid by the owners, each family, are raised as much as the mobile home management can get away with. You can see where this ends up, and many of you have seen it in mobile homes near where you live or work. But the people of Fridley, Minnesota reacted differently. Led by a very courageous young woman living in the mobile home park, they discovered that there are ways for people in this situation to get together and change Their situation in a nutshell. Here's what they did. They got help from local academics, from local political activists, and they discovered that they could, as a group, all of them together, get a loan from a bank and buy out the company that owned and operated the mobile home park, which is what they did. Here are the people consuming the services provided by the mobile home park owner operator getting together to create what is in effect a owner cooperative. They all became owners of the business, not just owners of their little individual mobile home, but owners of the land and the business that they were occupying. And it made the situation much better. The roads got better, the lawn got mowed, and the children's park was expanded. It turns out that cooperative ownership can make you much better off than not doing it. And now they've gone on to discover something else. Instead of hiring people to do the work of maintaining the park, they're going to cooperatize that too. That is, they're going to make it a worker co op to manage the whole thing alongside of an ownership co op. They're going to put the two kinds of co ops together, figuring that the benefits they got by owning cooperatively can be matched by the benefits they'll get if. If the work is done cooperatively by all the people charged with that task, rather than having the employer employee relationship. How interesting that while everybody is paying attention to other things, worker co ops and cooperative economy, whether in Detroit or Fridley, Minnesota, is happening all around us. Let me turn next to a couple of other economic updates of importance, and here what I want to do is talk first about something that happened this last week. Volkswagen Corporation, vw, as it's known, entered into an agreement with the United States government to pay a fine of $4.3 billion for the extraordinary thing that they did. Just to remind you, and they, by the way, admitted guilt for what I'm about to say. They faked the emissions measurements on their cars, particularly their diesel cars. What that means is they put in technical devices that gave a much better reading for how much pollution was coming out of the back of the car when it was being tested and for pollution than it actually put out when you drove it on the road. In other words, they faked the pollution control mechanism. So they got the ability to say to the public, our car doesn't pollute because the measurement shows that, meanwhile, the car did pollute. And the reason for that was if you don't have a device that controls pollution, you get a peppier drive from your car. So VW was able to out compete other capitalists by boasting, we have a zippy car that isn't polluting. The truth was, we have a zippy car that does pollute. In other words, the company was lying, systematically faking it systematically. And when it was caught a couple years ago, it began lying about the fact that it had been lying. All of this is made clear in the documents released this last week by the government. And meanwhile, VW issues press releases in which it blames a handful of engineers who are going to be fired or have been fired. It tries in every way, as they always do, these big companies, to paper over the underlying reality, which is what Profit drives companies to take all kinds of risks and and shortcuts. This one polluted the air, causing how many people to get lung cancer, how many people to get emphysema, how many children to have asthma who didn't need it or didn't wouldn't have gotten it so badly. The cost of what they did is incalculable. The fine is a small fraction of it. The problem isn't VW because countless other people do the same thing. That's how capitalism works. And instead of being shocked each time that we discover it works this way, it's about time for us to understand that what companies say about what they do and what they actually do is often not the same thing. And not even close. As if to underscore the point about paying close attention if you have the time or the energy or if I can boast, if you listen to programs like this, Governor Cuomo here in New York State, where I reside and where this program originates, did an interesting thing this last week. He appeared with maximum publicity alongside Bernie Sanders to announce that he has a plan Governor Cuomo does to make tuition free at public schools here in New York State, the city university system in New York City, and the state university system across the state. Appearing with Bernie Sanders, who made this kind of a proposal as part of his presidential campaign, is also clearly a sign that Mr. Cuomo sees which way the political winds are blowing. They're not blowing towards the Clintons and the center of the Democratic Party. They're blowing towards the left and Mr. Sanders and all of that. And he announced that he was going to commit $163 million to enable families who earn less than $125,000 a year to basically have their children go to a state or city university, tuition free. At that point, a number of economists, including the Bloomberg News Service, began to say, whoa, wait a minute. If it's as cheap as $163 million. Why wasn't this done 20 years ago? And when they looked into it, they discovered the following. If you look at how much financial support people in that range of income already get from existing state and federal programs like the Pell Grants and so on, it comes to a situation where the individual still pays about, if you add them all up here in New York, $2.5 billion. The government pays the rest of it. But out of pocket for people in the range of folks who get help is still 2.5 billion. So there's a problem, Governor Cuomo. There's 2.5 billion that have to be given to people if they're not going to have to pay tuition. And you only talked about 163 million. There's something wrong here. And I was just reminded of the VW story all over again. What they say and what the reality is are not the same. And. And we have to remember to be careful about it. Okay, next item. This last week, the noise began to become a crescendo. The Republicans, together with President elect Trump, are going to repeal the Affordable Care act, otherwise known as Obamacare. They are going to repeal it. There's lots of noise about why things like the government shouldn't tell us what to do in the way of medical care. A remarkable argument when you understand that Medicare has been doing that for decades. And the people who get Medicare are among the fiercest supporters of continuing it. Nor does it take into account the Veterans Administration, which is the government taking care of the medical needs of ex military people and so on, all kinds of arguments. It's inefficient. It's this or it's that. Look, folks, I'm not going to get into the debate about how successful or not Obamacare was. Did it enhance the number of people, increase the number of people who get medical insurance? Yes, it did. That's clearly one of its achievements. The United States, even after Obamacare, remains one of the fewest, among the very few industrial advanced countries that doesn't provide medical insurance as a matter of right to all its citizens. But at least it moved in that direction. Obamacare was supposed to also control medical costs for people. It hasn't been very successful on that. But that's not what I want to emphasize. I want to emphasize why Obamacare is being repealed. It isn't because it wasn't successful in cutting our medical expenses, and it isn't because it was successful in extending insurance. The answer is really very simple. The way the Obamacare system was paid for was by two special taxes that were passed to raise the money to provide for the medical care exchanges, the subsidies to low income people, and the other parts of Obamacare. And those taxes only apply to people earning over 2, $200,000 a year as individuals or $250,000 a year as married couples. In other words, the cost of the Obamacare program fell on those most able to pay the people at the top who earn a quarter of a million dollars or more and they don't want to pay. And the Republicans and Trump look at those people and say, those are the people that fund us as a political party. Those are the people that give us the money that enables us to be a political party, to run for office and to capture the government. In short, killing off Obamacare repealing. That is simply the payback paid by the Republicans and the Trump folks for the support of the rich who put them into office. There's no mystery why we're getting rid of Obamacare. It's to save money. And it means, for example, that if you take the top 0.1% of American income earners, those earning $3.8 million a year or more, and that's 1/10 of 1% of our people, the repeal of Obamacare will save those people an average of $195,000 a year. Now you understand why the repeal of an extension of medical insurance to millions of people is on the agenda for the new government. As if to stay with this question of medical care, I want to answer a question that one of you asked me to respond to. You asked me to tell you which industries pay their executives the highest amount of money. And very fortunately, there was recently a study done by the Bloomberg Financial News Service, one of the most respected sources of financial news in the United States, and clearly a source that is not troubled by the political approach that we take on this program. And I like to use those sources for just that reason. So they recently did, literally within the last week, a study based on Numbers, as of December 31, 2016, the top 10 sectors of the American economy in terms of how much is paid to the top executives, the CEO, the CFO, and all the others at the top 10 industries. I'm going to give you just a sample. The number one industry, which is what you asked me to find out, the industry that pays its executives the most is the health care industry. What does that mean? Hospitals, doctors, drug and medical device producers, and medical insurance companies. Those are the four industries within the sector called health care. They pay their executives the most. Why is this interesting? Well, the United States is an outlier observation, an outstanding example of how to overpay for medical care. We spend a larger share of the gdp, the total value of production in America, the total income we earn as a people, we spend more of it, roughly 18% for medical things than any other country in the world. In fact, the number two country is almost half of what we spend. Other countries who have, by the way, better health outcomes than we do, they live longer, they spend fewer time in the hospital, lose fewer days at work. Work, they're healthier than we are, spend way less than we do. We spend more on health care than people anywhere else. And I want you to know why. One of the reasons, there are several. One of the reasons is we pay the executives in the health care industry a much higher salary than we pay in any other industry. So, for example, who ranks number two, information technology, number three, energy, number four, financials. That's banks and insurance companies and so on. But number one is medical care. So when you discover how much you're paying for medical care, maybe you can take some pleasure in knowing you're helping to pay the highest executive salaries in the United States. And that's been the case for a long time. The last update we have time for today before we turn to our wonderful guest that I'm going to introduce a little bit later has to do with a growing fight across the world against inequality. Country after country, and I mean countries as different as the United States or Scandinavia or China or India or Brazil are experiencing a growing gap between, between a tiny number of extremely wealthy people and average people. The inequality inside these societies is widening so far so fast that it is providing now the basis for a backlash for angry people living in these societies. To be critical, and you might be interested in a whole host of international actions starting on the 14th of January and going for about a week, a global effort to fight. And you can look on the web@fightinequality.org and get a great deal of information about it. And obviously, this is something we talk about on the program a great deal, something I am very interested in. So I want to end this first half of the program with a comment on it. To fight inequality requires you to understand where it comes from, what its causes are. Otherwise you will treat the symptom, the gross inequality, without dealing with the cause. And inequality can be handled in one of two ways. You can try to deal with it by redistributing the wealth. That's a fancy way of saying taking it from those who have a lot and giving it to those who don't. That's a way to try to cope with it. But as you can imagine, this produces an awful political struggle. Those who have do everything they can to avoid losing it. Those who don't have Lord knows what they can do to prevent all of this from happening. So far, obviously this struggle is being won by those who have because they've been getting more and more. There is an alternative. Rather than distribute wealth unequally, income unequally, and then fight like crazy to redistribute it, maybe it would be smarter not to distribute it so unequally in the first place. And here I'm reminded of a lesson I learned as a parent with my second child, my daughter, when she and my son would go out with us and we would buy ice creams. You could of course buy an ice cream for one child and not for the other. You could then tell the child you bought the ice cream for to share with his her sibling. This is a very dangerous way of managing things. Much better to buy each of them an ice cream at the first point because then they don't have to struggle about redistributing anything. And the way you do this with income distribution is not distributed unequally in the first place. Capitalism cannot do that. It has a tiny group of people at the top who have all the power. They distribute income to themselves. A worker co op would be different because everybody in the business would be getting together to decide how to distribute the income and they would never do it as unequally as capitalism does it. As a matter of course. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. This is a good time as any for me to remind you that we maintain two websites that are available 247 at no charge whatsoever that provide you with more information, more background, ways to contact us to tell us what you'd like us to cover, ways to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These are resources we maintain and update every day, repeatedly. There's a blog that collects now all kinds of information on on worker co ops that I think you will find interesting. Such as the story about Fridley that I did earlier today. Make use of this resource we provide. One of the websites is called democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second one, rdwolf with two Fs.com that's me. Both of these websites are connected to one another, but provide you with ways of communicating to us and provide you with ways basically to partner with us, to share what we do with your own network of friends and associates and thereby to expand the reach. If you like this program, which is probably why you're listening, then make it available to others. You can do that better than we can, and therefore we ask you to partner with us to do that. Please stay with us. We're going to have a short break and then we're going to come back and talk about something extremely important going on in the American economy today with our guest. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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For a second there I thought you disappeared. It rains a lot this time of.
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Year.
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And we both go together if one falls down I talk out loud like you're still around no, no.
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And.
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I miss you I'm going back home to the west Coast I wish you would have put yourself in my suitc I love you Standing all alone in a black coat I miss you I'm going back home to the west coast and if you shake her hard enough.
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She will appear.
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Tonight I think I'll be staying here and you never didn't like this town I talk out loud like you're still around no, no.
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And.
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I miss you I'm going back home to the west Coast I wish you would have put yourself in my suitcase I love you standing all alone in a black coat I miss you I'm going back home to the west Coast Come on everybod. Pack up the bags to beat back.
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The club.
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Do not let us sleep. Should I wake her up? You said both go together.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. I am proud and pleased to welcome today to this second half Dr. Kimberly Westcott. So I'll call you Kim since we know each other. Welcome to the program, Kim.
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Thank you very much.
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Let me tell you a little bit about Kim and Kimberly Westcott before we jump into the topic for today. She is a graduate of Yale University, of the Rutgers School of Law in Newark and of Columbia University. She is thus both a lawyer by profession and at Columbia she earned her Master of Social work and her PhD in social welfare policy and Programming. She's currently an associate counsel at the Community Service Society in New York City. That is a 172 year old anti poverty organization which has a long and well deserved good reputation here in New York City for all that it does there. She works in the legal department to remove barriers to employment and advance full participation for persons with conviction histories sometimes also referred to as people who were formerly incarcerated. She currently teaches at Columbia University School of Social Work, and there it's an interdisciplinary course on race and the evolution of the criminal punishment system here in the United States. I am proud to say that recently Kim and I together authored an essay called the Full Participation how to Guarantee a Place for Everyone, which is particularly devoted to Kim's concept of community supported worker cooperatives. If you would be interested in this essay, which I would urge you to read, you can find it on the blog@democracyatwork.info the website that we maintain. Okay, so Kim, let's get right to it. The United States, by way of preface, has the distinction, if that's the right word, to imprison more people as a percentage of its population than any other advanced country in the world. A dubious distinction, to say the least. But it's also an extremely expensive proposition. And it is also one whose effect on the society as a whole is, at the very least, open to question. So let's begin. Tell us a little bit from your research and the work you do. What would you call the social and economic costs of this American system of mass incarceration as a way to cope with our crime problem? Give us your sense of how that works.
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Sure. Thank you very much for the question. So mass incarceration is really a late 20th century product of an American punishment system that's been gradually racializing since its inception in 1790. And really, the harms are incalculable when you think about this. But there are ways to measure the size, which are immense, and also the cost. And so I'll just give you a few numbers. The United States has 5% of the world's prison population. Forgive it has 5% of the world's population.
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Right.
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And it incarcerates 25% of the world's prison population. So what this means is per year, the US incarcerates 2.3 million persons. And when you include persons under supervision, we're talking 7 million people. And this is including probation and parole. So this.
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That's what supervision means. That is.
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That is. And so it's a very large number. And so when you think about costs, we know known costs. And these would be the operation of the prison system itself. And the US spends about $80 billion a year.
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80 billion.
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$80 billion a year operating its prison system. And also, for example, New York State, their budget is $3 billion per year. What we also know, which is quite remarkable, is that since the Nixon administration, the costs for punishment and Enforcement are estimated at about a trillion dollars. And so this doesn't even include. And this is the part that I think is incredibly important, the cost to the individual, to the families, and to the communities. These are just costs about what has been invested.
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Just the dollar amount?
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Just the dollar amounts. And so in terms of how to quantify it, who knows? But there's been a report that's done. Washington University in St. Louis did a terrific report, and it attempted to quantify some of the social and economic costs. And they came to the conclusion of that the cost to individuals and to families and to communities was $1.2 trillion per year. And the kind of cost that would be included.
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Yeah, I was going to ask you some examples.
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I'll give you some examples. Absolutely. So if you think about it in terms of the person who's incarcerated, you've got lost opportunity for human capital development or social capital development. You're not getting the kind of education or training that you need. Lost connection to family, lost direct health and mental health costs because it's a violent and sometimes a very negligent system. There are just a whole slew of costs while you're incarcerated. Then there are the barriers to returning. You've got people based on the norms that we have in our laws that experience a great deal of discrimination upon return, based on their conviction history and often also intersecting with the racial background. And so you're looking at high rates of unemployment. You're looking at difficulty finding housing based on conviction history. This disrupts children's educational opportunities for the family, lost income to the family. This then accrues to the community level. And when you think about looking at communities and you see high rates of unemployment and high rates of poverty and just violence and different sorts of other measures, including high substance abuse rates, this flows from the kind of harms that come from incarceration.
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And so this study at the University, Washington University in St. Louis at least made this effort to put some numbers to it, and it goes into the stratosphere. Over a trillion dollars a year is a major portion of our economy. And so we are spending ourselves into extraordinary costs for having more people in jail than any other society comes even close to. So tell us a little bit, how did we get to such a situation?
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I want to even say that doesn't even address the fact that it's racialized. There's more to the story than just a straight operation of crime and punishment. We know that mass incarceration disparately impacts people in communities of color. And so just Some straight numbers. I mean, just to give you a.
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Give us some of the basic numbers.
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So the United States blacks and Hispanics are 37% of the population, 36 or 37% of the population, and amount to over 60% of the US prison population in New York State. What we know is it's 37% and that they amount to about 73% of the incarcerated population in New York State. Now, when you talk about the.
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So the African American and Hispanic American population is roughly twice as big a proportion of prisoners as it is a proportion of the general population.
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Absolutely. And then when you look at the intersections and you think about how this creates exclusions, massive exclusions based on race and also on the operation of punishment, then you could see, for example, we know that between 40 and 60% of the persons who've just been released from prison are unemployed for about a year at least once they're out. So we're talking a very large group of people that are excluded from the labor market. And then we also know that about 30% and probably more of persons with conviction histories are in homeless shelters. These are the kinds of costs that are just. Why is this. Yes. And so the question for me is why would we continue. Why would any society continue to invest in a system that damages people and pays to the tune of 1.2 trillion or 60, 70 billion or $3 billion a year for a system that damages individuals and families and communities? I simply. I don't get it.
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I also wonder because I've read these reports that indicate in most conditions of our prison system, the problems of a human being going into the system absolutely are less than the problems of that same person coming out. In other words, this is not a system that has figured out how to help people to become different and solve their problems in a different way. It actually adds to their problem. So not only doesn't it solve the problem, it actually makes, quote, the problems worse. How do you react to this observation?
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Well, I would actually agree. And you could look at other systems in other parts of the world and just take a look at the kinds of outcomes for people in Norway. Now, I know that these are very different countries, different populations, different racial histories. And I'd like to address the evolution of the punishment system because of our racial history. But just noting that.
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Give us some idea of some different systems.
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Well, just Norway, for example, or Germany or the Netherlands. These are European Union nations that seem to subscribe in some part to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And they have a wonderful document that they Also sort of go by as the European print prison rules. And these provide some affirmative protections that you might see in terms of the right to visits from family, the right to be able to develop in prison, to be able to have education, to actually have the minimal deprivation of liberty, because they still view people in society and they treat people with a mind to develop them so that they are going to return to society and knowing that they're really not out except to help them manage the issues that brought them there, with very few exceptions. That's a very different model, our model here. Historically, if you just think about the evolution of the punishment system, I mean, just as you say, the punishment system, like the economic system, it's mutable, it's changed in the past and it's going to continue to change. And it bases itself on its condition socially and economically. And here we were a system that basically evolved from Europe and from England. And what we know from history, and we know from Foucault, is that this was a system that developed as far as inflicting harm on the body until about 1790, when the walnut street jail happened. And this was in the United States, and they brought punishment inside. And you could say that basically all those other systems dealing with shaming the body in public and mutilation, they transformed that to a penalty that was for time and deprivation of liberty.
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So in the old days, when I remember learning this in school, the stocks, you remember in colonial America, you had to put your hand in this wooden device and it was in a public place, and you would be shamed and you would be kind of. Your body would be constricted.
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That's right.
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So this then changed to bring the punishment indoors and to make it less about a physical abuse and more about just isolating you in a cell.
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Yes, but it's interesting, when you say limiting physical abuse, that was the idea. That didn't actually happen in many respects, but at the beginning, yes. I mean, after the American and French Revolution, some people think, huh, this public display of power may not be such a good idea. With people thinking about liberty. Maybe it's important for us to bring people inside. We have an industrializing economy. We're concerned about the sense of chaos. And so at the time people were brought in, there were variations on the prison which became the penitentiary. And their operative theory was mostly you're going to lock someone in solitary and give them a bible and basically expose them to work. And this system did not work for many reasons, although people invested a great deal of money in it and Ultimately, what we found in terms of violence is that there were. There were such frustrations with the investment of money and the lack of result that there were all kinds of beatings and. And violations in the prison that ultimately.
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Were reported that then caused the frustration of a system that didn't work, was taken out on the inmates.
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On the inmates, because who knew. Who knew what was going on in there? And this is in the north, for the most part now, when you talk about how the system is racialized and you think about how economically exploitive it has been, and I just want to be clear that in the penitentiary, there is work and there is congregate work for the prison to defray the cost of the prison. So there's always been the use of work to be able to actually operate the.
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To save money on the prison. You make the prisoners themselves do the.
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Work and say that it's discipline and say it's good for you and make it part of the theory of rehabilitation. However, what you see in the south, which is very notable, we know the United States, we had slavery, we had a civil war. And so after 1865, and we dealt with a massive dislocation of labor for an agrarian economy in the South. They're confronted with, well, how do we operate our plantations? How do we run our system? They didn't have money for prisons, even if they had.
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And they didn't have the slaves anymore.
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C
They didn't have the slaves. And so what happened there is after the 13th Amendment and the exception clause and all these things, it set up the ability legally to create laws that basically criminalized conduct that was really targeted to black people and minimal conduct, where you get a sentence of five or 10 years, like loitering, vagrancy, theft of a pig. And then what you got is people were. Then they were meant to be fined because they didn't have a prison system that was up and running at that time. And so to defray that fine, which no one could pay, a local planter would say, I'll take this guy, and he can work it off. And so that was how they got into the same jobs they basically performed as slaves. But then the states, like Georgia, most of the south, they corporatized this. And in its worst extremes, in the 1870s and 80s and 90s before people thought it was so barbaric and then embarrass them, they sold bodies, 300, 400 and 500 of them a year, to corporations with the worst form of industry, like turpentine mining, building the railroad, where basically There was a high death rate. In fact, most people suffered and died in this system. And it was primarily a black population, at least 85%.
- [44:53]
A
So I mean, to be blunt, you could maintain the slave system even after slavery is outlawed, by imprisoning, by making all of these laws that would allow you to throw the former slaves into jail for X years and then basically make them available to the folks who didn't have slaves anymore. So you kept the slave system going without calling it that, by using prisons as the mechanism for doing it.
- [45:26]
C
Absolutely. That was the convict lease system. And that ripened into the chain gang system, which was really a form of state use where that's how most the southern roads were built. You had guys chained up together. That's where they came up with the chain gang they formally shamed so that people could see it working on the roads, working on state plantations, and that was to take the labor for the state state. Those systems continued, believe it or not, through the 1900s. In fact, they've tried to bring them back periodically. So when we look at that, we see the evolution and the exploitation of racialized labor, then we have to look at the social forces just very briefly so we can mark this so we know that. I don't know if I'm rambling on.
- [46:07]
A
No, no, no, please, no, no.
- [46:09]
C
I just want to get real excited about this. It's. Once you had the emancipation and then you had reconstruction, what you're also looking at were formalized segregation that started again. And so we saw that really formalized with the Supreme Court decision of Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896. That was good law until Brown versus Board of Ed in 1954. And so we're looking at that. We're looking at violent, terrorist, Klan physical brutality. We saw arsons of black towns that had acquired some wealth. This was. This was a system that was hostile to black people. And basically you saw this continue with exclusions formally for the social welfare structure. We see this with Ira Katz Nelson and Ta Nehisi Coates when they talk about how black titles, farmer and domestic were largely excluded from the Social Security act because this was a problem for the South. And so we're looking at 60% of black people that could not get during the Depression or afterwards for considerable period, period of time. So old age pensions or protections under that act. And so that was no accident. Redlining. These are institutional aspects of it. We're talking about inability to avail yourself fully of the GI Bill. So by the time we got to 1954 and the Montgomery bus boycott. And we saw the civil rights movement moving sort of in earnest and then seeing other movements come together, you know, the anti war movements and all of these things, there was a considerable backlash. You saw this from persons like Barry Goldwater in 1964. All of this dislocation created a call to law and order, which is what we're hearing today. We see it with Goldwater, we saw it with Nixon and Reagan and Bush and even Clinton. It was tough on crime. And then we see it with a guy like Giuliani, and we see it with Trump. And now we heard it from Sessions the other day. We are looking at a notion for law and order that is about containing black people and brown people. And the way they did this was they changed the laws. And you saw this in the early 70s with criminalizing drugs. You saw mandatory minimums. You saw taking discretion away from judges. You saw the three strikes and then also the restrictive parole. So you had a population that went from about 300,000 in terms of the imprisoned population to what we see today, which is about 2.3 million. That's how that worked. And it disproportionately impacted communities of color. And this was selectively targeted with things like stop and frisk. So that's kind of how it worked.
- [48:35]
A
It's a wonderful historical summary, Kim. Really wonderful. It pulls, you know, it's good history. It pulls lots of different things together. So you have a sense of a process developing. Let me ask you a question that occurs to me listening to you.
- [48:49]
C
You.
- [48:50]
A
If you disproportionately imprison black and brown people, and then they have all the problems you've already mentioned, of getting a job when they're done with their sentence, of getting housing, of reconstructing the families that have been stressed and strained, then of course you're going to have a community with all kinds of difficulties which will allow the authorities to come in and find them in violation of one or another law and throw them right back into the. So you have this, and then you can justify imprisoning because of the difficulties of a community, because you don't face the fact that the imprisonment is part of the reason the community is dysfunctional. How do you break out of a cycle like this that has brought us to the crazy numbers with which you began?
- [49:42]
C
That is a major question. What you're describing in terms of how people like to frame the issue is recidivism. And they like to frame it and they're.
- [49:50]
A
Define it for everybody.
- [49:51]
C
Sure, absolutely.
- [49:52]
A
Recidivism.
- [49:52]
C
Well, it has multiple definitions. And the way social scientists like to speak about recidivism is different from the common term and that's where the different remedies come from. So social science often refers to recidivism as a period of time after which a person leaves prison where they would be reincarcerated or rearrested, often within a three year period. So you would measure recidivism rates and there could be theories based on the factors you follow, depending on your discipline, if it's psychology or sociology or criminology.
- [50:20]
A
So it's how many people who are let out of jail end up back in within a three year period and how long. Basically it measures how long before they're back, how many of them come back, how many of them are hopefully never coming back, etc.
- [50:36]
C
That's right. But then the common notion of recidivism is one that kind of reflects the whole tension in terms of how we as a punitive society, we inflict retribution on people. And that's the idea that it's the tendency, it's almost like the proclivity of someone to re. Engage in criminal activity. And so you're thinking about, well, how do we get that person to not reengage in that criminal activity? You know, and it becomes very punitive. But again, when you think about it.
- [51:03]
A
Blames the individual again.
- [51:05]
C
Absolutely.
- [51:06]
A
Yeah. It's amazing this culture that does this. Okay, I know that you have been working on as part of CSS and as part of your own interest, how to address this in a new and different way. Tell us a little bit about how you think this country can break out of, of this vicious cycle that recondemns a whole part of the population to an endless cycling in and out of prison.
- [51:36]
C
Boy, it's so difficult based on the norms in the society and what we're seeing today. But I would say this. It's critical to think about a prison system and the community as not being separate systems. If you're going to deal with a problem, you have to deal with with all of the conditions and they're really interrelated. I'll give you just two examples, one of which is a sociological theory they refer to as cumulative disadvantage. And that's really recognizing that there are certain systems that have a disproportionate quantity of negative conditions. Violence, unemployment, all sorts of issues that make it hard for a person to fully participate and function. And that's often what we see when we look at the negative costs that are associated. You can take those Negative costs that came based on, out of that report. And you can say these are the exclusions, this is the problem, these are the barriers. And so for communities that are overburdened by that, you know that there's, how are you going to, how are you going to, where do you go and what happens? The other piece of this, and this comes from a man named Eddie Ellis, who is a great anti prison activist, wonderful individual and he highlighted the issue of social tuberculosis. And that's basically if you've got a system and this is not about condemning a community that's under resourced, it's just recognizing if a community is under resourced and segregated. And let's assume even that the prison did what it was supposed to do and it doesn't. What do you expect when you send someone back in and you know, and they are then dealing back into the community, into the community where it doesn't have resources, where it doesn't have opportunities, jobs, all this stuff, you're going to have a situation where you're going to deal with this cycle. And so I think the most important thing is to deal with the issue of resourcing what people need to live almost on a human rights level in terms of what do you need and making sure that you have personal development in the prison that actually allows for people to target and enter meaningfully back into the community. And it doesn't just mean jobs, it means all the things that people should be working on if you must be incarcerated. And so one of the things that I had been very excited about was trying to develop meaningful in prison training that would lead to direct career pathways with living wage work coming out, direct linkages so people don't have to deal with that gap of all the discrimination. The other thing that was deeply exciting to me was the idea of a worker cooperative and a cooperative economy in communities of color and low income communities. Because this is a way to resource communities. It's a way to give people opportunity for training, for stake in their own work. It's just the kind of thing that I think a community would need and it would be a terrific asset.
- [54:11]
A
Yeah, and it's a little bit interesting that earlier in the program we talked about, or I talked about how folks in Detroit are finding their way to similar understandings for themselves. It's also crystal clear to me, listening to you, that any society with a genuine desire to do something about its prison overload would have long ago created mechanisms to help the reintegration of people. Special job tracks, special housing arrangements in order to break the cycle. So it suggests that in our culture, there may not be the desire, the willingness to break that culture. And that goes to Michelle Alexander and other people's notions that there's a social benefit for some people in having other people cycling in and out of jail. You can bemoan it at your academic conference, but the social mechanisms keep it going and are not designed to end it.
- [55:12]
C
That's correct. I believe it 100%.
- [55:15]
A
Well, Kim, I have that sad duty each time to tell you that we've run out of time. You have been almost poetic in your experience. Explanations. I appreciate your pulling all these different things together. We haven't begun to tap all of the issues on the economics of the prison system and the social consequences of it, but it is a very important part of our economy. It is not to be swept under the rug the way so much of the story of our imprisoning people is. So I hope you will come back and we can continue this conversation.
- [55:47]
C
Thank you very much.
- [55:48]
A
I love thank you very much for coming, Kim. We've come to the end of our program. I want to thank you all for listening. It's a pleasure to bring folks like Kimberly Westcott here to talk with us about aspects of this declining economic system that we have to face if we're ever going to change it. I also want to take a moment again to invite you to be the partner that we need to expand the reach of this program. Interviews like you've just heard. Use our websites rdwolff with two Fs com and democracyatwork, all one word, democracyatwork.info info. These are websites that you can use to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They are ways for you to bring other people into an awareness of all that we do on those websites, on these programs, and so on. Please partner with us, share with us, join with us in these ways of spreading the word, and don't hesitate to use the mechanisms on both websites to contact us. Tell us what you like, don't like about the program, what you would like to see us cover. We can't respond to all your requests, of course, because many of you are responding to this invitation, which we're happy about, but we read every single one and we use it to organize and plan these programs. So thanks again for your partnership and I look forward to talking with you again next week. Your time now, baby but after a while gonna be my time my time babe they ain't gonna change. Thing gonna change yeah it's.