that's all for now i'm chris hansen. for all of us at msnbc news thanks for joining us. >> hello from new york, i'm chris hayes. new york city officials are vowing to investigate the death of ramarley graham. early this morning, police dressed in riot gear entered the occupy d.c. encampment in mcpherson square. there are no reports of violence. republicans voters are preparing for today's party caucus in nevada where polls show mitt romney holding a commanding lead.

i am joined by joan walsh, msnbc political analyst and salon.com's editor at large, karen hunter, msnbc contributor, formerly of the new york daily news editorial board. jodi kantor, author of the book "the obamas." and washington correspondent for "the new york times," baratunde thurston, joining us for the first time. great pleasure. author of the book "how to be black." co-founder of the political blog jack and jill politics. and director of digital for the onion. great to have you here. >> great to be here. >> the big news on friday which we weren't going to do a block about this and then the job numbers came in. on friday, the labor department surprised forecasters when it estimated that the economy gained an impressive 243,000 jobs in january. bringing unemployment down to 8.3%. u.s. stock market rallied on the news with the dow jones industrial average closing at nearly 13,000, its highest level since may 2008. all this appears to be more than a temporary uptick in job growth. check this out. in the past five years the economy has added -- in the past year the economy has added almost 2 million jobs. you can see it there, 1.8 million.

more than in any year since the recession started going back to 2007. throughout the past year, republicans had a lot to say about the why the economy is not improving. >> the uncertainty that too many employers already have -- >> the uncertainty coming out of this administration. >> uncertainty in the marketplace. >> the obama era regulations -- >> we eliminate all the regulations. >> job-killing regulations. >> $2 trillion a year deficit. >> deficits do matter. that's why we're here today. >> trillion dollar deficits. >> it appears it actually may be improving. republicans still blame those same factors and they've not yet landed on a coordinated response to the increase in hiring. >> the president's policies have failed to get our economy moving again. as a matter of fact, it's the president's policies that have actually made our economy worse. >> we have good news this morning on job creation in january. i hope that continues. we get people back to work. >> president obama himself wasted no time laying down his

marker on who is responsible for keeping the economy growing. >> the most important thing congress needs to do right now is to stop taxes from going up on 160 million americans at the end of this month. i want to send a clear message to congress, do not slow down the recovery that we're on. don't muck it up. >> i like don't muck it up. i thought it was interesting the republicans did not seem to have a coordinated response yesterday. john boehner gave this press conference, he was talking about -- he was very dower. 8.3% is high. the economy right now in itself is not in a good state at all. it's in a bad state. but the trend is promising. one of the reporters said to john boehner, we talked about this in the editorial meeting. if you were john boehner, why wouldn't you come out and say, look, we got elected to congress, we got the debt ceiling deal locked in, that took away the uncertainty. the now that we know the deficit

is going to be reduced the jobs are coming back. >> stop taking my ideas. >> i don't think the good speaker watches our program. i was surprised they didn't do that. the reason to me, points to the fact they are in a place where they just can't give the president -- they can't have anything good happen in the world and think that it's not going to help the president who they want to see defeated. >> it will. who said the foolish consistency is the hop goblin of little minds? they're so stuck, they're not nimble enough to move when the numbers move and they don't have the brain power to come up with an idea that would support their agenda. >> other frustrating thing to me is, it's not just that they're against the president. they're betting against the american people when they do this, too. >> right. >> you're not allowing for people -- you don't let people feel good about a positive change. this is an objectively positive trend. it's not the end of the resurgence. it's not a full recovery but it's clearly in a positive direction.

if you can't allow and acknowledge that, then the people will see that, wait a minute, you don't have my interest at heart either. >> you don't really have any ideas. >> right. >> mitt romney did, let's remember, i think just last month, talking to our friend laura ingram, was confronted by the fact that it was already getting better, again, not good enough. >> it gets better. >> he's like, no, no, it doesn't. >> not on my watch. >> he conceded that it did. >> it's going to be a perfect sound bite for the campaign for november because it was like, yes, of course the economy is getting better. he's like, well, do you have any better ideas for me, laura? he said that. he was stuck. >> poor baby. >> romney is the one to watch, i think. he's essentially built a single issue candidacy. >> absolutely. >> it's sort of like a table that only has one leg and the leg is -- >> yep. >> there is something i can do for this economy that barack obama either doesn't know how to do or refuses to do. and you know, just as a

political reporter chronicling this race, once the obama people or the jobs numbers undercut that leg, i just don see where that candidacy goes. >> i think that's a great point. i actually have in some ways, i think, counterintuitively, i thought romney was a stronger candidate than people on the left were giving him credit for. we focus on his gaffs. the fact of the matter is, the discipline, the mono maniacal, near robotic inhuman discipline he's shown on campaign trail, staying on that message is useful. a long campaign requires a level of discipline that is indeed inhuman that is really difficult. but that makes a really good point. the double-edged sword of that discipline is the fact that he has no defense if the economy gets better. >> no alternative, no flexibility. >> should we be worried that he's going to do something to ruin it? he obviously has the money to mess up the economy. >> all of a sudden his trust is liquidated and massive shorting of the dow jones industrial

average. >> here's the problem with coordinating any political message, either the president's or the republicans with the job numbers. they've been going like this for a long time. watching this presidency, watching obama with the jobs numbers every month, it's been like watching charlie brown with the football. because there have been so many times when it's looked like the economy was getting better and then the football gets yanked away from him. so when i look at the clips you just played, some of the tentativeness that we see in some of the politicians' statements seems to me like an acknowledgement that we don't really know what the numbers are going to look like in the next month. >> 23 straight months of job growth. >> it seems to be a consistent move in the right direction. i don't think the football has been snatched away at all. i think we're moving progressively away from the titanic which was amazing that we just scraped it, didn't hit it and now we're moving in the right direction. that's going to take time. it's taking time.

but it's going in the right direction every single month. >> i do think they're careful because they did make the mistake of calling whichever summer it was recovery summer. >> tim geithner op-ed and that was after they got initial job numbers and they went negative after that. >> they're going to be cautious about this. >> right. >> there is something to talk about now. >> the europe situation. >> exactly. >> it's still totally unclear, one thing that obama aides chuckle almost, you know, almost with a kind bitter humor about is they say, in 2008 when we were running if you had told us we would have been worried about the greek pension system -- >> right. >> and whether elderly greek people were going to keep their commitments to the retirement system, they had no idea that this is what they were going to be dealing with. >> i was talking to some people on wall street yesterday, analysts about the jobs numbers and said, you know, what's your story for why this is happening now? and one of them -- one of them made the point, you know, the japanese tsunami had a huge

affect on global supply chains, on inventories. it was hard to kind of for all of us to get our heads around it. i remember hearing the white house talking about it and think it was excuse-making, frankly. well, i don't know. but actually it had a big affect. there's almost a jobian story to the economy. every time it seems to turn the corner there is the debt ceiling and the tsunami. if europe implodes in the next six months, we're back to square one. >> that's out of his control. >> tensions with iran are going up right about now. >> right. >> i think there are two levels of uncertainty, overall economic influence on uncertainty, how much can an executive branch control the economy. >> that's exactly it. >> we put a lot of faith and expectations. presidents love to take credit and love to blame the past when it doesn't. there's the unpredictability of all this. we are so highly connected that the elderly greek people and their politicians do affect us, what happens in france and germany strongly affects us. >> yes.

we've done shows where it's -- right now the european central banker, mario draghi and bb netanyahu in israel have as much say over the re-election of the president. >> we should have him over for coffee. >> i think it's interesting, obviously obama can't do this but what i find interesting is the disparity between what the administration says in public about jobs and what they say in private when you go to report at the white house? >> what do they say? >> well, continually, right, they've announced jobs, jobs, jobs. we're going to focus on jobs numbers. if you go there and have interviews with economic advisers, they totally acknowledge this fallacy that the president can create jobs. >> right. >> there's an old joke about how there's no lever in the basement in the white house that you can pull to create jobs. >> isn't that one of romney's other problems? >> yes. >> he's categorizing himself as a washington outsider. one of the issues that president barack obama had coming in is

i'm in this race because i care about americans. i'm not concerned about the very poor. we have a safety net there. if it needs repair i'll fix it. you can focus on the very rich. that's not my focus. you can focus on the very poor. that's not my focus. >> that's mitt romney.

that's a very strange, awkward, id owe sin cattic form of class politics. >> interesting start. >> yes. we have polling in nevada just so people are clear on what that is looking like as we go towards the caucus today. mitt romney polling 20 points up on newt gingrich. i don't think there's a whole lot of indeterminacy there. >> i wonder what's going to happen. >> stay tuned all day here. minute by minute. i'm not saying that ironically. >> i think the story this week is that finally, i don't want to prematurely bang the gong. >> i will. >> it does appear that the odds of a romney nomination have passed a kind of 80% threshold in my mind. >> i agree. >> wouldn't you say? >> yes. we were joking about this before. i think that for a while you have to pay attention and the longer these other guys are in the race, the more chance there

is they will do serious harm to him. i guess i would take issue a little bit with you about his robotic consistency, the animatronic quality to his campaign. i think that gets him in trouble. i do think that the very fact he can't be unscripted or when he is unscripted he says idiotic things like i'm not concerned about the very poor or i like to fire people. corporations of people too my friend. >> or why would he sing a week after obama sang. >> to pre-upstage yourself. >> downstage. >> when he has to kind of respond to new conditions, he does so with this character of somebody who's pretending to be a person. >> yes. >> who's watching baratunde. >> he's watching me? >> yes. in preparation for the campaign he is reading "how to be black." >> that's why you wrote it. >> you know what really

surprises me about the way romney comes across? i did a story a couple weeks ago about his time as a student at harvard business school and law school. i spend weeks talking to his old classmates. the descriptions of him they gave totally different than the person we see on public stage. >> he enjoyed himself. >> listen, women and men, republicans and democrats in the class, described him as an extremely nice guy. >> yes. >> very eager to help other people. came from a famous background but was not a jerk about it. genuinely eager to help and do favors for people. and you know, genuinely likable. his classmates are really fond of him. so i write about politicians all the time. and it's made me wonder, is this a reaction that romney is having, the robotic quality you're talking about, is that a reaction to the pressure he's under and also what is it about public life that makes people seem so much less likable than

they were back when they were regular human beings? >> we saw it with john kerry, who is profoundly caricatured. and hillary clinton. i know people that work for the secretary of state. and you know, people would take a bullet for her. that was clear during the campaign, the fierce loyalty to her but -- >> she's also supposed to be hilarious. >> yes. >> getting to know this cold image. >> the person she is actually through people that i know who now work for her was that same experience of there being a tremendous mismatch of my conception of her as a public figure and -- >> there's a cumulative effect around mitt's personality that he accidentally reinforces. >> and keeps reenforcing. >> their one percenter is their standard there. he has to bear that flag unwillingly. >> sometimes willingly. >> sometimes willingly. >> but awkwardly right now. he doesn't seem comfortable with himself. he has this defensive attitude. i'm sure he's generous.

he does seem like he's nice. to me he seems uncomfortable with himself. >> i think it happens to barack obama. >> does it? he's one of the most likable -- >> he's often described in washington as remote, as being somewhat cold. >> but the american people don't see that. that's what we're talking about, the translation of a person's personality. barack obama comes off as somebody who showed up at the apollo theater and belted out a line from al greene and people are like, whoa. >> that's one side of him. there have been other times during the presidency when he's been much harder to access. if you look at who he used to be. one of the stories i tell in my book is him during the senate campaign. he skipped out on a fund-raising meeting and nobody could find him. one of his aides tracked him down, a white aide track him down at his barber shop. obama comes into the office a couple hours later and he's comically bellowing at the aide. he says your punishment for disturbing a black man at his

barbershop is to watch the movie "barbershop" and to watch the sequel, "batcher shop 2." >> that's good. >> there is a relationship between a black man and his barber, it's sacred. >> that's true. quick aside speaking for all black men which i occasionally do. it's true. >> it was so refreshing to see this looser, funnier barack obama making a joke about race which he can really never do in presidency. >> let's be honest, though, all these people, they are crucified for the slightest misstep, slightest misstatement. >> absolutely. >> slightest gaffe, slightest revelation of something they really believe. we are part of the process that punishes them and keeps them from letting their hair down. >> i like that moment of self-awareness. >> i want to talk about mitt romney, you brought this up, the candidate of 1%. to drill down past the personalities into the iceberg of money -- >> would you trademark that? >> the iceberg of money that will sink the ship. >> that will sink the ship,

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innovation for the planet. innovation for all. personalities and gaffes are the individualsual part of the election, the largely part of the election is the money. >> the iceberg. >> the iceberg as i was saying. we have fcc filings which i thought were fascinating for a number of reasons. one is what we suspected about the institution of the superpac, the new kind of campaign organization that has been created in the wake of citizens united and another supreme court decision first cropped up in 2010, being leveraged in 2012. here is what it looks like in terms of what percentage of the donations come from donations greater than $100,000. $100,000. not a lot of people that can write a $100,000 check. 86% of the donations in the

superpacs were in donations over $100,000. i'm sorry, this is romney's superpac. >> this is romney's. >> restore our future superpac. 86% of the donations were over $100,000. >> some of these quote, unquote disclosures and filings are contradictions in terms. because it turns out there's no information in them. >> right. the labels and the names are kind of these prop organizations. and so these so-called filings don't always show who's actually giving the money. >> sometimes it's a corporation with a p.o. box that gave $1 million in provo, utah. >> "the new york times" story was awesome about that. it was transparent. we tracked down this p.o. box and we went there and waited for someone to show up. not really. they but they talked about the difficulties of finding people. they call it disclosure but really even trained campaign

reporters looking at these things don't have any idea what a lot of them mean. >> i think it's so remarkable to think about what -- we are in the midst of seeing something that's a seismic shift. i don't think you can overstate. the only thing restraining us right now are habits, status quo and old norms that will fall by the wayside as the campaign ramps up and people start writing more and more of these million dollar checks. >> so it's clear we are going to have an ol gark -- oligarchy. i got to see, he says to me, the money is the problem. we have to get rid of it. >> right. >> they have to fund raise just as -- the kinds of ways they have to fund raise. and this is indicative of where we are right now. if we're not outraged by this, this should be something all of us should complain about. it means we're now powerless, the regular people the american people. the power is in the hands of the people who are rich.

we're powerless. >> i loved when you looked at me when you said outraged. get mad, america. here's the other premise we heard time and time again that money is speech and we have to allow it to be free. we've made a bargain in this country that transparency comes with it. okay fine the if you want to write a million dollar check okay that's cool. but we know who you are. we can follow the agenda. >> also democratic donors do not seem to be attracted to this form as much as republicans are. the democratic superpacs are lagging way why wind -- behind. >> the president's super pac raised $4 million or the ifot associated superpac thatw3 is working on behalf of getting president obama re-elected. here's something interested, too, in the numbers in small dollar donations. one of the interesting cycles that happened, we had watergate and the post-watergate creation of campaign finance reform. we saw the slow dissolution,

destruction of that system. howard dean campaign, and then the obama campaign. here is the small dollar donations as a percentage. romney has 9% of his donations raised from small dollar donors. barack obama -- >> they're doing fine. >> barack obama, 47%. >> that's exactly the point. what we're seeing is another chapter. where the promise of the democratization of the small dollar donor is now up against people writing million dollar checks in the superpac. >> also, i think we have to look behind the scenes at the small dollar donations because there's this kind of mythos of people reaching into their pocket to scrape together the $5 donation. that's not the way small dollar donations work. there's a giant telemarketing machinery behind this. >> are you about to ruin -- >> in order to get those donations -- >> that was the reality in 2008 with president obama where people were reaching into their wallets and pulling out five and ten dollar bills.

>> i saw a kid myself take five dollars and do it for america. >> it's a really big. it's a huge business. the obama campaign has to invest millions of dollars into this massive organization that then calls all these people around the country, et cetera, et cetera and solicits the donations. >> the other thing you have to note is that even if you take small dollar donations which is defined by the fcc at the $200 limit, above which you have to disclose the name of who's doing it, below which you can do it anonymously if you're giving it directly to a campaign even people giving small dollars. $100, $150, the percentage of the population that gives any money to any candidate ever is tiny. is very tiny. it is a very -- when we think about american democratization in toto, the broad citizenship of the country, it's democratizing for the 10% of people who give to campaigns.

the overwhelming majority never give a dollar to campaigns. >> why should we? what are people getting for a dollar. >> when i think of the small dollar donations, the thing i can shake from my head is listening to john edwards in 2008. >> excuse me, who was that? >> john edwards telling the story of a little kid who sold his bike to send $25 into the campaign. and then flash forward 18 months and we're hearing about the payments that he made to his former mistress who made these quote, unquote campaign documentaries. i'm thinking -- >> that kid's bike, give that kid his bike back. my story of week, coming up next. not financially. so we switched to the bargain detergent and i found myself using three times more than they say to and the clothes still weren't as clean as with tide. so we're back to tide. they're cuter in clean clothes. that's my tide. what's yours?

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hey, can we stop spell talking now? ok. a-y. [ male announcer ] buy a waterproof pantech element for $249.99 and get a 4g burst smartphone free. only from at&t. my story of the week democracy in cages. by now i'm guessing you've seen this instantly infamous interview of mitt romney the morning after he trounced newt gingrich. >> by the way, i'm in this race because i care about americans. i'm not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there. if it needs repair, i'll fix it. i'm not concerned about the very rich. they're doing just fine. i'm concerned about the heart of america, the 90, 95% of americans who are struggling. i'll continue to take that message across the nation. >> romney tried to spin himself away from his self-created mr.

bur burns caricature. our democracy seems dysfunctional and diffuse. the central genius of democracy is that it provides a constant mechanism of feedback in those in power. it forces those with power to listen to those without it. if you've ever followed a candidate around the campaign trail, you see how this works in person. the congressional candidate sheepishly going table to table at a local bingo hall getting an earful from cranky seniors, the county fairs and diner conversations. campaigns are when politicians are most forced to listen. question is who do they listen to? for one thing, voters in a few states. the early primary states of iowa and new hampshire get endless, obsessive attention to their every worry, concern and once the campaign turn to the general election, candidates focus on almost exclusively about a dozen swing states. what this means is that my 1.4 million residents of the bronx are ignored while the 1.3 million residents of new hampshire are lavished with personal attention.

this wide variety is not just geographic. let's return to mr. romney's class definition. running for president is an expensive undertaking. and raising the necessary funds depends on getting those very rich people you claim not to care about to write you very big checks. as we just noted romney raised only 9% of his campaign's money from small dollar donors. compared to 47% for the president. and disclosure filings said that 86% of the money it raised came from just 90 people who gave over $100,000 each. candidates of both parties need to court the very rich for their money and they need the actual votes of the middle class which means those who don't fall into those two categories can scream and moan and complain all they want but no one will hear them. this includes the very poor that romney so honestly dismissed. marginalized populations like the noncitizens languishing in the deportation bureaucracy.

and perhaps most scandalously, the 7 million people in the incarceration process. in 1980 there were 220 people per 100,000 behind bars. by 2010 that number was 731. according to analysis by a project, that puts us ahead of rwanda, reeling from prosecuting a genocide at 595 people per 100,000. way ahead of other industrialized nations such as pain at 154 and germany at 87. the money states spend on prisons have risen. at six times that of public education. if california emptied its prisons today and sent every inmate to a university of california college, it would save $7 billion a year.

every year, an estimated 70,000 rapes take place in america's prisons, more than half of all rapes in the entire nation. and because the majority of rape in america happens behind the walls of the penitentiary, we collectively shrug our shoulders or worse, turn it into a joke. if this were happening in any other population it would be an outrage and scandal. victims of their families would be giving their elected representatives an earful. demanding hearings and action. can you imagine if there were 70,000 rapes a year in iowa? do you think the candidates would be forced to address it? there really are no elected representatives for our prisoners. 48 states felons lose some or all of voting rights. rendering them subject to state power rather than full citizens. for the majority of americans, particularly say republican primary voters mitt romney is now courting the upper middle class independence he'll start courting soon, the upper class archipelago may as well be the moon.

they know it's there but they have never paid a visit and aren't too keen to take the trip. there has been more attention paid to the actual moon, than the millions of souls locked inside our very own prisons. the ugliness of mass incarceration, the gruesome stories from behind prison walls are not new. a new way of addressing this american problem is a moral and fiscal imperative. what we're lacking is the political imagination to make it so. all right. so -- prisons -- >> that was inspiring. >> this is one of those things, it was like climate change a few weeks ago, you sit and look at the week's news and the news cycle and you think about what are the stories of the week we're going to talk about. you think about what is important and what is not getting talked about, particularly in the campaign season, who isn't being represented or whose voices aren't being heard and you have to find a way to talk about it. there's never going to be a hook

for the fact that we just continue to warehouse millions of people in america's prisons. there's going to be no gaffe on the campaign trail related to it, right? no one's going to have to -- it's never going to -- >> the prison voters won't have their pac come together. >> yes the prison superpac. >> yes, the supermac superpac. >> it's not funny. and our political system seems imcapable of dealing with this. we spent all this time parsing about what romney meant about the very poor. you are the only person that i've seen make that connection that a lot of the very poor are locked up. and that he genuinely -- we do this stuff about what is he really like and barack obama is nice and romney's generous. when somebody has never spent a moment of their lives thinking about this and they don't have anyone in their family or extended family or their

extended family's family -- >> that's exactly right. >> who has to deal with this, that's what he reflects. it's not that he's not a generous person, these things are not in his reality. >> i'll tell you a funny little known story about barack obama and prisons showing he is very different than that, that he has spent time in prisons. >> visiting. >> visiting. >> propaganda mill. >> where are we going with this one? >> breaking news. >> hold up, america. >> this is a favorite old story of mine. when he was in law school, he played a lot of pickup basketball with other students and a bunch of students decided that they were going to go to a massachusetts penitentiary and play some basketball with some of the inmates. they did it for exactly the reason you're mentioning, joan. they said they didn't want to seem like they were harvard law students, like they were indifferent. to what was going on in prisons. they put together this group,

six harvard law students go to the local penitentiary. very brave. they go to play a game. they get there and situation is a little scary, because they're told by the wardens what to do in case of a riot. the game is downstairs. there's kind of no escape. the prisoners are saying to them, i have two packs on you, man, you better perform. they played this intense basketball game against a bunch of inmates and they lose. which a couple of them later said they thought was a good thing. in the end but they said they were doing it as a sign of respect and connection to show that even though they were privileged law students, they had a sense of what was going on in the prisons. even though this was way back in the past, barack obama i think does have that connection. >> barack obama is coming from the south side of chicago -- more than any other president, because of the color of his skin and where he worked is coming from a world in which that invisible universe in our midst. i say our as someone who -- >> right. >> i'm going to leave this show

and go home to my family in park slope, i'm going to walk in the park. i had this thought, i'll take my baby for a walk in the park yesterday morning, while i was listening to who was going to be up next, michelle alexander and talking about the prison industrial complex. watching everyone walking their dogs and the sunlight filtering through the trees. there's another universe happening in our midst that i'm never going to visit or even see. >> you should be applauded. outside the most popular show on this network "lockup," and it is, for you to do this, you need to be applauded. reverbative effects on our society, while we may think it doesn't have impact on those of us who go home to park slope or wherever you live -- >> it does. >> it's so powerful. >> i want to talk about how that reverberates through society with michelle alexander who wrote a book on this topic. right after this break.

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the war on crime will only be won when an attitude of mind and a change of heart take place in america. it's time, too, that we acknowledge the solution to the crime problem will not be found in the social workers' files, the psychiatrists' notes or the bureaucrats' budgets. >> to deny bail to a defendant posing a threat to the community, to make prison sentencing more certain, to end abuses of parole. retribution should be swift and sure for those who prey on the innocent. >> ronald reagan laying out some of the foundational logic of the american criminal justice system such as it is. i'd like to bring in michelle alexander, law professor at ohio state university and author of a fantastic book called "the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness." good morning, michelle. >> good morning. >> michelle, this is a fantastic book. i hope people read it. one of the things i think that's interesting in the book is you

talk about your own experience of coming to recognize what the system was doing and what we are in the midst of. as someone who came to that realization, before we get into the details of what the system looks like and what it does to people, to talk about this political question of how do we go about creating the conditions under which this becomes a political issue, the way that we bridge the gap that right now means that it's consigned to the margins and communities that are experiencing the criminal justice system and it's not on the campaign trail in iowa. >> well, i think it is a huge challenge to put this near the top of the agenda. when prisons are out of sight, out of mind, and so many of the mainstream voters who hold so much influence in elections aren't directly affected by the system of mass incarceration and some of them don't even know people who are. so finding a way to really put this on the agenda is challenging.

and i think it requires those of us who do care, those of us who are conscious, to begin to dispel the myths about mass incarceration, the myth that the explosion in our prison population has been driven by crime and crime rates, dispel the myths that people of color are more likely to use or sell drugs than whites. it's not true. to dispel the myths about the reasons for the explosion of our prison population and to begin to tell the stories of those who have been locked up and permanently locked out of american society and allow them to share their stories. until we come to meet these people in the media, and through journalism, really meet them, hear them, and understand their stories, i think it would be easy for us to continue to demonize them and to view those populations as largely disposable. >> one of the myths you talked about, i think, is a central one that i want to grapple with.

a whole lot has gone wrong in america the last ten years. one of the bright spots particularly someone raised in new york city is the dramatic decrease in crime in the country. the crime rate has plummeted markedly and it's something you experience particularly as a resident of a large city. there is a myth, i think, that, you know, the two trends one cause the other, right? we have locked a lot of people up and the crime rate went down. what is your response to it that? >> well, you know, as numerous sociologists and criminalologists have shown in their research, there is in -- in fact, what we have seen in states that have not increased their incarceration much, there have been as steep declines in the crime rate as states where there

have been enormous escalations in the prison population. a lot of debate what has caused the crime nationwide. what is clear is simply building more prisons and filling them does not reduce crime. unfortunately what we've seen though in many communities, particularly ghettoized communities of color, is the rise of a visitor yule police state where hundreds of thousands of people in a given city are stopped, searched, frisks, you know, treated like potential suspects and enormous numbers are shuttled into prisons and jails, often for you know nonviolent, relatively minor drug offenses, the sort of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency in college campuses and go largely ignored.

once you're branded a criminal or felon, you're trapped in a permanent second class status for life. >> that branding you talk about in the book in the way it -- i want to discuss more about that after the break. it's the little things in life that make me smile. spending the day with my niece. i don't use super poligrip for hold because my dentures fit well. before those little pieces would get in between my dentures and my gum and it was uncomfortable. even well-fitting dentures let in food particles. super poligrip is zinc free. with just a few dabs, it's clinically proven to seal out more food particles so you're more comfortable and confident while you eat. so it's not about keeping my dentures in, it's about keeping the food particles out. [ charlie ] try zinc free super poligrip. in your breakfast cereal, what is? now, in every box of general mills big g cereal, there's more whole grain than any other ingredient. that's why it's listed first. get more whole grain than any other ingredient... just look for the white check.

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michelle alexander, law professor and author you the new jim crow and its effects on american society and politics. you just said something before the break in the way you're being arrested, prosecuted, pleading out marks you permanently. >> yes. >> i want you to talk about this. one of the things that happen is even in the discussion about mass incarceration, we talk about the physical structures and the people inside them and one of the revelations of the book to me was thinking more broadly about how anyone who circles through at any given moment, then bears a kind of permanent mark on their record that completely alters what part of society they can be a part of. >> yes. this system is really dependent more on the prison label than on prison time. once you're branded a criminal or felon, you're relegated to

a permanent second-class status for life. you may be stripped to the right to vote. you're deemed ineligible for jury service the rest of your life and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits. you can be denied even food stamps if you're a drug felon in many states. many people, i think, have this general sense, yes, when you get out of prison, life is hard but, you know but if you apply a certain measure of self-discipline and pull yourself up by your boot straps, you can make it, but the reality is that for the rest of your life, you've got to check that box on employment application asking the dreaded question have you ever been convicted of a felony? hundreds of professional licenses are off limits to people who have felony records. in ohio, you can't get a license to be a barber if you're convicted of a felony. many people say they could get a job at mcdonald's but actually getting a job at mcdonald's is no easy feat if you've been

convicted of a felony. you can be barred from public housing based on an arrest record. people returning home from prison, their families risk eviction if they live in public housing if they allow their loved one to come home to them. just basic survival is extraordinarily difficult for millions of people who have been swept into the system through the war on drugs and the get tough movement, both of which have been concentrated in poor communities of color which, you know, would have benefited from a massive infusion of investment in education and economic investment in job creation but, instead, we spend a trillion dollars on a drug war and a prison building boom. >> you talked about checking a box on employment applications. i should give a shout out. naacp and others have been waging a campaign to get large employers to stop putting that box on applications because it acts as a very easy screen for these folks that are trying to

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