states. they examine different trends in prison structure and inmate control from the early days of the republic to modern times. they also discussed the issue of race in the prison system. the national history system hosted this event. it is a little over an hour. >> let's get started. good afternoon. my name is dean kennedy. i'm the director of the national history center, which is associated with the american historical association. i want to welcome all of you this afternoon to this congressional briefing on the history of incarceration. preface, thiss a is part of an ongoing series sponsored by the national history center that brings historical perspectives to issues that currently confront congress. the center is strictly nonpartisan and the purpose of the program is not to advocate

for any particular policy or set of policies, but rather to provide the historical context that can help inform policymakers and the public as they deal with difficult issues. i want to acknowledge first off the financial support of the mellon foundation, which has made this program possible, and also the work of amanda mooney's, the assistant director, and frankie lyons for organizing today's event. the history of mass incarceration, the us you of ofs incarceration -- issue mass incarceration has reached a critical mass of attention in the last six months or so. there have been initiatives that have been launched obviously by the senate just this week. and in various other venues as well. all of them calling for reform of the system of incarceration,

and what is interesting is that this has been a bipartisan initiative involving democrats and republicans. it is a response to what is clearly a serious problem. i just want to offer a few brief statistics to highlight this. the united states incarcerates about 2.3 million people, a larger proportion of our population than any other nation on earth. has 5% of thetes world's population but nearly 25% of the world's prison population. is, how did the united states become what the economist magazine recently referred to as "the jailhouse nation." have three leading historians who will tell us how we got where we are to get a -- today. next to me is allen

lichtenstein, interim director of the american storm review, author of various work on the history of prison labor. the political economy. it was one of the first works 2.2 the link between the growth of incarceration -- first works to point to the link between the growth of incarceration. the newthe director of york public library. he is the author of "condemnation of blackness." he is also contributing author 2014 national research council study, the growth of incarceration in the united states. last not least is heather thompson, professor of history at the university of michigan

who has written widely on the issue of mass incarceration, and .as a book coming out she sits on the board of the prison policy initiative and she to recently served on the national academy of sciences blue-ribbon panel on the consequences of incarceration in the united states. we have a great panel here this afternoon. what will happen is that each of them will speak for about 10 minutes and then we will have a few minutes for questions, answers, discussion, and the like, and we have about an hour in total. >> thank you, thank you all for coming this afternoon. and theu to dane national history center for arranging this. it is an honor to be here with khalil and heather, who i know well. my task is to talk about the deep 19th-century.

looking at that period makes me skeptical and cautious. we are poised on the edge of prison reform. the current system seems too many people on both sides of the aisle to be cruel and unusual. the latter, because it is in fact unique in the contemporary world and its intensity and as -- unprecedented history of its scope in the united states as well as around the world. i know they will speak to how we moved from a system to -- a system of incarceration to mass incarceration over the past century. systemminal justice's reliance on incarceration, we can all agree that it is simply fiscally unsustainable at this point. i think that is the reason for bipartisan concern with reform. said, thess, as i history of prison reform makes me skeptical when i hear

enthusiasm or new ideas. more often than not, the history of prison reform has been the history of new forms of brutalization and human exploitation of the incarcerated. when charles dickens visited the showcase president of the united states, the model for the rest of the world at the time, the eastern state penitentiary in philadelphia in 1842, he observed and wrote that "in its intention i will conceived that i am --tentiary -- but those who designed the system do not know what it is they're doing." tickets recognized -- dickens recognized the prison which confinement,litary laid in the first generation of american penal reformers.

in doing so, they built a prison that they thought was adequate to the needs of a virtuous new nation. this is in the first decades of the 19th century. in doing so, they hoped they would improve over the ability to states punish and torture wrongdoers. it arose as an explicit reform. when dickens condemned the penal experiment, he acknowledged a new system had already risen to take its place, the so-called auburn system. named for a prison in new york which still stands. i think heather has led wars there. -- tours there. it was called "probably the best prison in the world, a model worthy of the world's imitation." instead of confining prisoners

to isolation, the auburn congregate system as it was called, brought them together into a single space so they could engage in common labor. in essence, the auburn system turned the prison into a factory. it was probably no accident auburn systeme began to displace the philadelphia system as the model prison at the very moment in the 19th century that the factory had begun to replace the art is all workshop as the main site of industrial production. this innovation was most certainly touted at the time as a reform of the existing solitary system in philadelphia, whether because of its allegedly more salutary effect on the prisoners. it is hard to say. whatever the originally been assistant attentions were of the auburn -- that assistant

intentions were of the auburn system -- produced a work program efficient enough to be leased out to the highest that are. bidder.r -- they produced clothing, carpets, homes, furnaces, furniture, even rifles. essentially all of the commodities of a growing industrial and consumer economy in the 19th century, much the way goat cheese and farm raised to let be a part -- tilapia are today. this system of the prison factory does seem somehow to be regarded today as a potential solution. -- inon i put" marks quote marks. in any case, when progressive penal reform or thomas osborne

day,ted the prisons of his he pointed to none other than the auburn prison which loomed over his hometown in new york like a medieval dungeon, where he spent a voluntary week to study conditions as a prisoner. osborne pointed to auburn as the preeminent example of a cool system that did more to brutalize and hardened prisoners and to reform or rehabilitate. the previous generation's reform was the next generation's example of brutality. the 19th century south lagged behind the north in penal in the -- innovation. many of the people normally subject to the penal discipline of the state were instead disciplined by their masters. they were slaves. emancipation in 1965 change that, thrilling 4 million new citizens into the labor market potentially the critical -- terminal justice system.

many whites in the south turn to the shares badge and judges gavel. the south was poor. there was no money to open or build new prisons so the solution was to release the prisoners out to the highest bid der, having them make railroads and bricks, and whatever work the entrepreneurs thought was necessary. wasconvict lease system simply a new system of slavery or a barbarous throwback to a darker error -- era. system, even if the leasing of that labor to place outside the prison walls instead of inside them. system one think the should be laid solely at the feet of the southern democrats,

the party of white supremacy in the south at the time, in fact it was the republicans of the reconstruction governments who wanted to rebuild the south, who pioneered the system as a potential reformist system. this can be seen as a penal innovation and a reform in its day. which came tog, represent the most brutal aspect of southern punishment, only fell under bad odor in the south when a more progressive penal system began to take its place. that was the chain gang, the symbol of --argest replaced convict leasing. a used penal -- offered helpful, outdoor activity to keep prisoners busy, that is how it was sold as a reform.

yet fell gang itself into disfavor journey great depression when it was exposed by films. the 1930's, not only was the chain gang condemned as brutal but there's convict on the roads were seen as taking jobs from the needy. let me put it this way -- every the 19th and early 20th century chronology, the auburn factory system, the convict lease system, the chain every single one was advertised by its advocates as a been assistant and necessary assistant and necessary reform. even in our own era, i suspect the notorious super max prison returning to isolation of the earliest prisons, even though as early as the 1840's doctors are

pointing out that extended periods of solitary confinement group -- drove people mad, even the super max was developed with a benificent idea. each brought new horrors. i do not recount this history to dissuade anyone from reforming our current system which is so , obviously in need of change. as far as i can tell this is about the only thing the democrats and republicans in congress can't agree on right now, that we need some kind of penal reform. as a historian i want strike a cautionary note. i want to suggest that we need to pay much more attention to why we punish and incarcerate and who and how much and for how long in addition to how. in thinking we can improve the latter, that is the prison system, perhaps as a society we avoid wrestling with the more

difficult questions about who is sent there and why. let me wrap up my comments with 18kens' own conclusion in 42. " there is surely more than sufficient reason for abandoning a mode of punishment attended by some little hope of honest and fraught beyond dispute with such a host of evils." thank you so much. [applause] >> to director kennedy. thank you for inviting me to join this very important panel to discuss the history of incarceration. both small and large. millions of people in our institution represents the nation's most urgent threat to democratic governance, the principle of liberty, and in fact inequality. constituents of the federal government thank you for joining

, us this afternoon. i am honored to share this space with my colleagues. building on his key point i want first emphasize the deeply historical nature of racial discrimination as a pillar of incarceration. in short, how the very notion of punishment assumes a citizen and noncitizen type. constructs which were fundamentally tied to racial and social categories, white and free, black and enslaved, indigenous and colonized. it serves to remind us that there is no moments in north american history with crime and punishment have not been shaped by these ideas. in light of what alex noted about the history of the jim crow south policies and practices as a punishment reggie custom tailored to serve the ideology of white supremacy and new economic development, the criminal justice system that was neither backwards but the

modern, but in fact a crucial forward-looking innovation. i will link the progressive policy is the punishment in the south to the urban north in the early 20th century. this will show -- throw in sharp relief how contemporaneous are our ideas and practices in the 21st century as compared to a century ago. humanitarians and religious leaders designed as an alternative to brutal and punishmentorms of such as branding dismemberment , and beheading inherited from old world europe. it was intended to be a rational instrument of social control. early prisons sure many comment features such as solitary confinement. they were also overcrowded with men of european ancestry. they were conceived in opposition to slavery. according to one scholar. slavery was the great national scandal of the antebellum age of

-- and the reformers who built the 20th century belongs to anti-slavery circles defined their institution against the brutality of the plantation. they represented the discipline of slavery as a dehumanizing violence and their own punishment by contrast, a set of refined chastisement that prepared the convict for freedom and self-governance. the enslaved black and indigenous native american populations remained outside the gate, subject to brutal and capricious physical punishment. by today's standards, this wasn't a problem. did prison demographics change so past two centuries? if the earliest prisons were not yet defined by huge disparities in incarceration it was not , stigmatized by black people is

prone to reality. the idea of black criminality is embedded in the cultural dna of the nation. during the earliest days of the nation, the idea of aryan freedom was born in contrast. as early as the 17th century, leading. 10 ministers equated blackness -- puritans took seriously the conventional image of the black and black and character of a virtuous. the demons who possessed young white girls during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692 were described as black. the devil himself was called the black man. this is not an isolated incident or literary metaphor divorce of the actual situation. and 1800, they

identified 33 published execution in reference to the criminal offenses. the racial criminalization of blacks has been a common theme from the colonial. --colonial period until the helped to lay the cultural foundation for distinctive treatment against african-americans. much current research turns on racial disparities as a measure of punitive punishment policies. american drug and crime policies have disabled poor young black men from successful participation in american life and thereby damaged not only them but their families and communities. the racial disparity data notes are legion. the democratic consequences of "erican crime control state

it is now common in scholarship the news and even congressional , debates to note the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal justice system. " bruce weston, another renowned scholar adds that the novel social experience is wholly outside of mainstream social life. from estimates of how many black babies born today will go to prison to how many citizens indicatete, these data unparalleled gray space punitive this. the literature was not always this way. for much of the past, it was not read automatically. there instead evidence of pathology. bad behavior produced racial disparity. disparity data drove down policy.

as once noted harvard scholar of the late 19th century, statistics will lead the way to a new understanding of black people's true racial capacity. one of the earliest promoters of the use of racial disparity data in the 1890's. near the turn of the 20th century, this scholar and many built antion's enduring framework for how to study, discuss, and debate racial disparities between blacks and whites. frederick kaufman, the leading expert on homicide rates outside census reports in the 1930's established black crimes is to six as evidence of group destruction. as he noted in his well read and in the statistics

of crime and the data of illegitimacy, the proof is furnished that neither religion nor education has decreased to an appreciable degree the moral progress of the race. several leading social scientist lead, carrying forward the nothing works approach of the last half-century, essentially using the disparity of punishment as evidence that there was no point in helping these people. in the following example i will sketch a relationship of white criminality in the early 20th century, like white incarceration in colonial america is a use of racial crime data. words, to note nonpunitive racial responses to one of many avenues on the way to mass incarceration. children are dying in chicago. the young and old are afraid to walk the streets of some neighborhoods. gangs and drugs have overtaken

many neighborhoods. mothers and ministers are organizing anti-violence campaigns. juvenile delinquency experts are working together to stop the bloodshed. in the words of one community activist those of us who live in , chicago are obliged. lester they were arrested and brought into court. the year is 1909, not 2010. no politicians were calling for the national guard to intervene in chicago's most troubled communities. advocates were anxiously awaiting the supreme court decision on the case of the donald versus chicago, a landmark case that overturned 20-year-old handgun bans in chicago. crime and anti-violence prevention was still compassion,

not fear. nativeborn whites and european immigrants were still the face of inner-city crime, not lax and latinos. obviously much has changed, but not killings. blackefore the late-model drug dealer or gang banger became public enemy number one, well before al capone gained a reputation for being the most violent place in america. young white drug pushers terrorized law-abiding resident. the most influential social worker witnessed white on white violence daily for decades. the violence,ng he wrote, this tale could be duplicated on most every morning.

white teenager, she added, a transplant from a little farm in ohio has shot and killed a policeman by resisting arrest and was now awaiting the death penalty. chicagoans grew heartsick over the mounting tragedies just as we do today. how did this happen? that the circumstances of chicago's white on white problem could produce ultimately the air -- the era of rehabilitation 1970's, undone in the on the heels of the great migration of 6 million black people moving from the south to the north. in many ways what is less than -- less known is that the modern architects of social policies left inner-city black folks out of the decision. based on his age-old notions.

prison rehabilitation in the urban north continuing through most of the 20 century, was for whites only. even then, equal opportunity reform was often halting and short-lived. the war on poverty quickly devolved into the war on drugs. white working-class and immigrant criminals sympathetically. they were victims of the dehumanizing effects of poverty and isolation. a great army of unfortunates. by contrast, the blacks were called self-destructive and pathological, their own worst enemy. progressives deemed white criminality problems and told blacks to work out their own salvation. let me then close with the era of rehabilitation which brought

forth a number of prison programs, baseball diamonds, movie theaters, trustee systems, an actual cap on the incarceration rate. not so much in the science of sentencing but in a generalized understanding that reasons could not be the solution to social problems in american society. indeed for a very short your peer of time, the ability of mass perspiration developed during the prohibition era when the series of law enhancing only positions of use of guns and other weapons as well as multiple strikes against felons resulted in a mandatory life sentence or four strike convict. that ended in 1933 with the repeal of prohibition, precisely because it was a recipe for mass incarceration. in that era, the face of criminality, those behind bars were in overwhelmingly white

population. from that moment to the next it opened up the era of the new deal. the moment itself that thought deeply and progressively about crime prevention and how to put young men to work who only a generation before had been shooting at each other on the streets of chicago. thank you. [applause] >> good afternoon. i will try to keep my remarks brief so we have a chance to open this up. i really want to thank the american historical association and also the national history center for bringing us here. it's a wonderful day indeed when people ask the question of what matters in history, it makes us very happy. we are all very glad to be here and i'm glad to see that we have other historians in the room that work on this. we are here to get the broader history of this and for that i'm

very grateful for alex input. we are also here fundamentally because we would love to know how we got to this particular mass today, most immediately. i think what i like to do is synthesize some major points that we might take away about that. you have heard from my colleagues about the american criminal justice systems earlier -- criminal justice system's earlier history and also about , how that history has very consistent themes throughout it. firstly that it's always been shaped by economic concern as well as political desires. you've also learned that this is a system that has consistently dispensed justice not blindly, but very much in terms of very specific economics and demographics. from the civil war onward the american criminal justice system has police arrested and

incarcerated our nation's poorest systems as well as nonwhite citizens in ways wholly on the with you actually breaks the law and indeed the law but under that system were themselves deliberately criminalized the actions of an -- and spaces inhabit it i people of color disproportionately and specifically. so that was true through the civil war and all the way through the new deal. it has always been the case that these criminal justice system has been informed by political concerns and economic interests, and policy decisions far more than determined by something called the crime rate, which of course has fluctuated throughout that time period. those are the tools i think we need to think about, or at least look critically at how we got to the highest rates of incarceration that we have today, rates that are historically unprecedented but also internationally

unparalleled. i would want to make the case that indeed all of the groundwork laid by alex and timel. perhaps it no has that been more obvious than in the four decades that followed the civil rights 1960's, including up to today. complexins of that are and i will not pretend to speak for all of us in the room. what i would like to do is disabuse us of what those were not. we often assume that we got mass incarceration because crime rates were historically unprecedented and that we might not like what we end up with. but that there was a historical imperative that led us here. i think we are beginning to learn as a nation that was not the case and in fact when we begin the war on crime which is really in 1965 earlier than we

think, historically primates -- historical crime rates were not particularly historical room -- historically remarkable. indeed they have been higher than reiterated that higher at other points in american history area eventually crime is going to rise. to understand why we do this later, when the last four decades have been devoted to incarceration i would like to bring us back to what dr. lichtenstein talked about, which was this moment right after the civil war when there was a massive change in the political system. the freeing of 4 million human beings from bondage. the moment that he described in the american south where particularly white settlers with power and some without were deeply worried about the newly freed folks would be. there would be a new demand from the policy and a new desire that people would have for housing and voting and so forth, jobs.

they responded to this in a waser of ways, but one way by criminalizing the spaces in which african-americans lived in wholly new ways, making things illegal that had not been illegal before, making things that had been illegal have much greater penalties. overnight, institutions became all-black, not because white folks stopped committing crime and black folks lost their mind with freedom, but because the policies changed. they were driven by political and economic considerations and concerns. something eerily similar happens after the civil rights in the 1960's. notably, southern politicians have long thought that civil rights protests were merely criminal behavior. the northern politicians are at least for a while willing to make a distinction and willing to come to southern states into enforcing rights law. as the civil rights movement

moved north, northern politicians begin much more prone like their southern counterparts to equate dissent with criminality. start to seely, we northern politicians and federal politicians starting to use the crime rhetoric before crime becomes particularly remarkable and it is again very racialized. we get the apparatus for the war on crime in 1965. with the law enforcement administration, and we get the ability to wage war on crime before the crime rates really become remarkable. we create the apparatus lyndon johnson but every president s and adds toeate this apparatus. the war on drugs is accompanied by efforts on the part of certain political interests to take votes from people who are incarcerated. also to re-access slave labor.

during the new deal, people have largely been barred from this. just like after the civil war we criminalized african-americans faces, we overwhelmingly lockout -- lock up black communities. we take away the right to vote and we put people back to work. we do so in the criminal justice system through the criminal justice apparatus. eventually there many things going on because eventually communities do suffer from the war on drugs, eventually violence increases, eventually people start to clamber for more police and prisons. it was very much a political and policy choice. it was a choice that was bipartisan and it was the choice that we chose in every moment in our history. this is important because as historians, we can see that that policy choice very much shaped the latter half of the 20th

century and the beginnings of the 21st century. it caused enormous crisis in cities across the country, in poor rural areas across the country. it undermined the economy by making so many people permanently unemployable. it disturbed our democracy by taking away the right to vote for people who had been incarcerated, but also shifting roles so that people in prison could not use their vote. thatd made a policy choice had dire repercussions for the 20th century. historians, we are beginning to trace out exactly how responsible changes in criminal justice policy were for what happened across the nation in many different communities thereafter. i do want to mention, one of the other things that happens is intensification and violence in

communities that are already the most fragile, already the least able to exercise their rights to vote. as historians we can look at that and not be particularly surprised because one of the things we know, for example during prohibition, when we made alcohol illegal and criminalized those spaces very quickly, there were hired gun deaths and a lot more violent. people in those communities suffered vitally. wecan chose at that time -- un-chose and we might be at the moment where we are un-choosing it again. historians would offer a bit of a cautionary tale, if every bit of our criminal system has been tendency the abiding

toward the criminalization of people of color in general, that as we move forward when we look for political solutions to this economic solutions, that we bear that history in mind. thank you. [applause] >> we are open for questions, comments. anyone? everyone is free to. yes. i am very taken by the example that she used of how in the 30's they repealed prohibition. the government can make a difference so when the government, things can happen, things can change. let's yourself speculate for a moment, what would government actually look like today that

would alleviate the kinds of conditions we have been talking about, you have been talking about? i would like my colleagues to jump in. the of the reason for using example is to say to congress and part that we set ourselves trade by simply focusing on how many people are in prison. if we are not also having a conversation about pro social interventions in the very communities that have been targeted for incarceration. togethero be thinking about the role of government in addressing social disadvantage, which is a common theme perhaps as long a running theme as the racial story that i told. we dealt with social disadvantage very differently starting from the colonial period all the way through the 20th century.

i appreciate the question because that is not something in awe are rallying around bipartisan debate, about how many people should be in prison. if we are not going to put people in prison, we should not. it was always a toward that was discriminatory -- discriminatory in its intent and impact. we should be speaking with government about the role of how we treat this advantage and poverty in society. >> i would like to add to that halil isnd what kb saying, mass incarceration is a government program. it is essentially the government program that we collectively have chosen over the past half-century to deal with the problems that we are talking about. i do not think it is an idea of saying, we could have government programs or mass incarceration, it is saying that mass incarceration is a government program and is not working. points, with all those

and i will say that one of the interesting things about the current discussion, the current bipartisan, very welcome discussion on the carson ration arceration is that we need to focus on more than just the numbers. if we do not ask these questions we canhe government, look in models anywhere to see how does the government deal communities, communities that need resources, education, all of the things and all the data that we agree reveals makes a difference, improves peoples circumstances. deci hope that bipartisan arceration discussion will shift itself outside of the criminal justice discussion because we

are still talking about fixing this problem within the system. i think if anything that this history tells us, if we really want to change this, if we really want to address this crisis, we cannot do it within the system. these are not criminal justice problems, but we have given criminal justice solutions to them, and the best example is the drug war. we used the criminal justice system to deal with drug addiction is no history is very clear that this is a public health issue, not a criminal justice issue. thank you for that question. >> i would add, if by some miracle the prison incarceration rate cut in half in the next year, it would still be 3-4 times its historic rate. we are talking about a problem that is on a scale that is simply saying, we let half the people out will not solve the problem. that would still be mass incarceration by any definition.

[indiscernible] >> and the privatization of prisons, would it be as exceptional as it seems? is it causative or simply coincident within it? >> i would jump in really quickly, it is not new. even after the civil war, as alex's work reveals, private interest were always deeply involved in criminalizing lack faces and profiting -- black faces and profiting from the criminal justice system, that is not new. what is important about the current level of incarceration we have is that this is now national, it is not just southern. , originsow bipartisan

are bipartisan at a much deeper level, and people can make a whole lot of money, not just again from the building of prisons or use of prison labor but really from every element, from tampons to tasers to telephones, from bricks to mortar it is a huge apparatus. we think the scale is exceptional but this idea that private interest would withdraw from and fueled the criminal justice system is not in all new. >> i would add, certainly it is not new. i would say it is not causative. it is not the privatization of prisons, is not causative. there really was an incentive to capture people in the system to profit from them. i think that privatization is unfortunately a symptom, a response to the idea of, here is a quick fix, we can farm this

out to private enterprises. when you look at the actual numbers, the number of prisoners who are incarcerated in private it is maybe 7% of the total prison population of the united states. that makes it a number almost as large as the total population 40 years ago. i think heather is right, if you want to follow the money. from the is profiting prison industrial complex who is selling all the goods and services to this massive juggernaut of a system, that is really where the money lies. people that go visit have their own conventions with a count all of the security -- tout all of , they arety and food making money hand over fist. saying, youbably are going to let out 6000 federal prisoners, that is 6000 less beds then we have to sell

you sheets for. add, thisquickly question of causative, alex is absolutely right, prison labor is hardly driving us. ofis worth noting this nexis politics, the most important forces driving some of the most akoni and sentencing laws -- draconian sentencing laws and some of the most investment in the prison system in general, that is political and it was not just private prison companies. it was private companies in general that very much put their money where their mouth was, supporting bills that would lead to much larger sentences. the 1990's is rife with this. there is numerous political document that directly increased incarceration that were not just politicians.

there was also money behind those politicians and lobbyists. everybody is very upfront about that. >> what is great about being on a panel is there is so much ground to cover and we can count on each other to fill in some of those blanks. one thing that none of the said, the circumstances of convict leasing in the early 20th century south is really a course , a profit driven model about extraction, and it was causative. when of the things we have to keep in mind, it emerges at a moment it is converging with global policies of the industrialization of shipping capital. first moving from northern industrial thrust out -- built to the southern -- industrial thrust belt to the southern belt to the border. eventually it has the circumstances of excess labor,

and so isndancy, almost a reversal of the actual economic forces that we turn to a government program to deal with people we cannot employ or exploit. employee being the most generous way to put it, exploit being what happened in the 19th and 20th century south. i want to frame this in terms of employment problem, if you look at men's wages over the past 40 years, they are flat. chicago andrk in you just look at men who had nothing to do, nothing. the jobs were gone. people are going to figure out a way to make money to take care of family, so i watched. it used to just be an open air

drug market. crazy. the people in the projects are saying, we need help, the men are selling drugs, we need help to take care of our families. this, jobs at all of moving out, we have no manufacturing base like we used to. to earnyoung men do now a living who just graduated high school? >> we are moving past when our say,e was but let me just i do think history is a guide here and i want to say that is sort of a powerful statement for both with the national history center and american historical association do, because we are surrounded by historical narratives. i wrote a few for this point. strict constitutional interpretations, all of which are predicated on some historical reading or

interpretation of the past. never let anyone say, why would you carry about -- care about the history of mass incarceration. reentry for graham is better than that one. in some ways, this history is a history of denying the historical resonance of its past. i just want to say that because i think that is very important, and when response to your is, we chose to deal with the recipe for mass incarceration in the 1930's by establishing new deal programs to put people to work, because that was seen as not only a job stimulus act, a crime prevention act, but an act to literally save our economy because the alternative of socialism and communism were around the corner. we have more socialist mayors elected in this country and in 19 hundred and 19 20's.

the new deal project which extended to g.i. benefits and veterans benefits, essentially established america's middle class based on government programs that were in response to the potential of mass disorder, as poverty, mass criminalization, and all of the things that you describe on a scale much greater for a predominant and majority white population. >> that is so crucially important because it means that we do know how to deal with exactly what you described. but there has to be the will and there has to be the policies in place to effect that. the pressing things about history is the ways in which we keep seeing the same narrative that is not that optimistic. there is incredible evidence of using the government in ways that literally creates an entire

middle-class. i am a historian also. [and discernible] the question has been set up nicely with alex's point. thinking about this long history where we have this institution about control, coercion, tally, and punishment, and these reformers who periodically come through and want to think about reformation and rehabilitation and treatment, now in the policy world i am involved in i see people wanting to move away from punishment. i think they really overstate the extent to which the folks they are talking about are broken and damaged and in need of treatment, because that is the alternative model. answered half of

the question, to think of an alternative outside that binary but i was hoping that heather could speak to this. to help usry critique that treatment model a little bit more, because we had moment in time where prisoners themselves have offered really nice critiques about what is wrong, coming at this problem with a framework that has rooted in it, goes to the pathology and all these other things. >> absolutely. every bit of the history that is told here at this table today illustrates that trying to reform the criminal justice system within that system tended to generate more criminalization of color, more problems just in different stripes. a different wrapping. but what we were just talking example, newy for

deal programs, does or not criminal justice solutions. we have to think about this as how do you solve the system not by reforming the system. i am not talking about abolition , i am literally talking about how would you address poverty or address the need for jobs or address the need for child care health care or whatever, but not through the criminal justice system. unfortunately right now, so much of our discussion, is only happening in doj circles. that is not a criticism wonderful, except we need to be talking in other circles as well. ways, this should be happening and maybe it is, at the level of hhs as well as dha. >> it is not a doj problem. >> i heard something slightly

different and i'm going to respond by saying that either all of these people are crazy or our society is crazy. we are opting to, these people are crazy. they may have done things wrong but we feel better thinking they have mental health problems so we are going to try to figure out how to address their craziness when we are not asking the question, is there something in the air we breathe or water which rank? -- water we drink? and their pain and suffering, we can confine it were medicated. that is my response -- we can't confine it or medicate it. that is my response to your question. >> any further questions? yes. >> gw history department alumni. i previously some taught -- taught six years in selfies d.c. and saw the effect of the --

southeast d.c. and saw the effect of the school to prison pipeline. do you guys play any role in prison reform? as a young historian, do you have any advice for someone who wants to be politically active and try to make a difference, but also not having their work brushed off as trying to patent an agenda? heather, you have written about this. >> this issue of the school to prison pipeline, which now we throw that turn around and it is very flip because it is so regular. again, to the extent that people are trying to deal with it, i often again see that happening within the criminal justice system. for example, one of the reasons we get police in schools historically, they are not always there.

we did not always have police in schools. most districts do not get police and schools until after the 1960's, and they are first in schools with a lot of civil rights unrest. police are in the schools all the time so some of the meetings i have been in, maybe we need a different police agenda in the schools. inre is a proposal philadelphia that maybe we need to have police officers conduct classes for the kids on the law and knowing more about the law and knowing your rights. is trying to reform the school to prison pipeline assuming the police are already in the schools. i hope what we will see is the department of education thinking about new ways to invigorate education independent in that sense from the department of justice. >> they can develop a new test. i can only say that because arne

duncan is on his way out. i think it is very simple, good history makes good politics. bad history makes that politics. if you do your work and write with honesty and good evidence and good research, you should feel free to say whatever you want to say. if you have the evidence, there is always -- only so much people can say. educators have a responsibility to take on criminal justice issues, to name the problem in their classrooms both in relation to the students they serve, administrators have an obligation to inc. about issues like achievement gap and college readiness and relationship to a criminal justice system that is all too ready and willing to either uneducated or educate behind prison bars. i'm going to give an example from the past because it is exactly this kind of voice that i do not hear enough of, particularly in harlem where we

have a lot of discussions about the criminal justice system and educational reform, and rarely do those come together. this is a quote from an african-american high school prisoner in baltimore -- high school requirements so thousands of dollars are spent to make them architecturally beautiful. but black schools, he complained, are often do levitated and unfit for further use. like baltimore schools, black neighborhoods also suffered from malign neglect. the police frequently locked up boys with, quote, hardinge and depraved criminals when a reprimand would have served the purposes of the law. they have taken away their shame and self respect. this is from 1905. i use the example to make the point that that kind of voice i don't hear coming anywhere out of -- and this was published in

a liberal journal 100 years ago. so if educators would begin to study these issues as it relates to the young people and began to speak to the relationship of that world and what they do in the classroom, i think we would have a lot more ally ship around these issues. >> yes. alex's original comment about the reform. there is a certain depressing sense that comes from all of this. the one thing that seems to be extraordinary at this moment is the bipartisan conversation about doing something about mass incarceration it that's where the consensus -- incarceration. that's where the consensus ends. any form -- reform is predicated on not just dealing with mass

incarceration, but implementing other kinds of social programs that will deal with urban decay, loss of jobs, poverty, and the like. and that is the conversation that is not exactly happening. so these two things are now split could you have consensus on one thing and you have no consensus on anything else. if we see progress quote unquote on one front, does this balance the sale without consensus on the other? well, undertein: the bernie sanders regime -- sorry. [laughter] if there is going to be reform, it has to be aiming at the sort of reforms you are pointing out rather than making a better prison. the reform that is about to be initiated is the car summation of 6000 -- de-carceration of 6000 prisoners. they could say let's build some

new and better prisons, but that wasn't the bipartisan consensus. is atpartisan consensus least beginning to flow in the right direction. then the hard work comes. for right now, it is the moment of opportunity precisely because the conclusion was: let's de-car cerate people, not build more cellblocks. mr. muhammad: and i think we all politicsmr. muhammad: is politics. to me, one example is the removal of the confederate flag in south carolina. is the didn't talk about future aspirations of nikki haley as a future candidate. we didn't talk about governor bentley of alabama preemptively removing the confederate flag there because he was concerned about the business community of carmakers, which is to sick is

the world a better place without the flag like flying over state grounds? yes. i'm a looking for to either one of them having -- [laughter] the point being that i think people who have responsibility of governing this nation have responsibility of doing both. dr. thompson: can i maybe help us to think about this on a more upbeat level, which is -- yes, there is a lot of discord about what the next step would be after de-car summation -- de- carceration. there are many formerly carson cerated people in this discussion now. yes, eric holder was on the stage and, yes, the koch brothers were on the stage, but there were also formally incarcerated folks on the stage

really talking about what needs to be happen and not just about because relation -- not just ceration-car immediately paired -- immediately. we, historians, to this woman's point who is a phd student, i think are increasingly trying to push at these discussions and say we do know quite a bit about what works and doesn't work. and ways in which we could shape this next discussion. and at least so far, we keep getting invited back. [laughter] and i think that that is a very positive thing. in other moments in history, for example, prisoners -- former prisoners were not -- not speaking in washington dc about what happened after the incarceration -- after de-carceration. mr. kennedy: on that relatively upbeat note, i --

think this might be time to bring this to me letting conversation to an end. >> [applause] >> [indistinct chatter] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] "american history tv" this weekend. boundaries,ut political boundaries, state boundaries, community boundaries for the future, and for this territory going for. announcer: lectures in history with iowa state university professor carl on the 1787 northwest ordinance, to organize and govern newly acquired territory. and our new series, wrote to the white house rewind. >> who is on my side?

no, no, i missed. let them have it. >> all, i see. >> i don't know if you made -- [indiscernible] [laughter] >> i just do what i'm told. announcer: a look back at the 1992 presidential campaign of bill clinton during a visit to franklin high school in new hampshire. america -- ," world war one. >> i had landed in my captain was a new captain on that job. he said -- [indiscernible] again, it was one of those times when somebody reached out. and i was left.