Race and Mass

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Professor Reshmaan N. Hussam and Holly Fetter (MBA 2020) prepared this case. Funding for the development of this case was provided by Harvard Business School. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. Copyright © 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School.

R E S H M A A N N . H U S S A M

H O L L Y F E T T E R

Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States

It was 2002, and ten-year-old Alexis Jackson (HBS ’21) waited impatiently in the car for her grandmother. The two of them were taking their twice-monthly drive from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Montgomery, West Virginia, to visit her father Al Caldwell in prison. She liked to go see him; they played Scrabble together, and he made her smile. “He understood me the best, so I missed him,” Alexis recalled. Caldwell had been the first in his family to go to college, but had difficulty finding a job. “In my dad’s family, more people went to jail than to college. So in the end it was easier for him to transition from jail to society than college to society,” she reflected. While working at a gas station, he was arrested for dealing drugs and sentenced to five years in the Morgantown Federal Correction Institute. Every missed birthday, she got a card from him with $50, saved from his job inside making $2.50 per day. Her brother, father, and most of her uncles had been incarcerated. “It was normal,” she shrugged. “And I was lucky: I had a dad who was active in my life. In our neighborhood, we used to accept the idea that by the time you’re 21, as a black man, you’re either in jail or dead.”

Mass Incarceration and Calls for Reform The late 20th century saw a dramatic shift in the criminal justice system of the United States. While

incarceration rates had remained stable at approximately 100 per 100,000 U.S. residents from the 1920s through the 1960s, this rate doubled by the mid-1980s and quintupled by the 2000s [Exhibit 1]. By 2020, nearly 2.3 million individuals were locked up in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers.1

These numbers were exceptional relative to the rest of the world: in 2012, the U.S. incarceration rate of 707 per 100,000 population exceeded that of the next highest nation, Rwanda (492 per 100,000), by 44%. The U.S. rate was seven times the average rate of more comparable Western European democracies [Exhibit 2].2

By 2020, a wave of calls for a fundamental rethinking of the prison system in the U.S. arose from a wide range of organizations, thought leaders, and policymakers, even going so far as to call for the abolition of prisons. The criminal justice reform movement gained advocates from both sides of the political aisle, aligning the famously conservative Koch brothers with the progressive American Civil Liberties Union.3 As reported by the New York Times, mainstream Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential election were promoting criminal justice policies that would have been seen as “radical” a few years prior, reflecting “a seismic shift in how the American public views criminal justice issues.”4

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Many of those calling for criminal justice reform stressed the ineffectiveness of incarceration in rehabilitating prisoners or deterring future crime, the cost of maintaining such an enormous public corrections system (estimated at over $80 billion annually [Exhibit 3]), and the disproportionality of long prison sentences for relatively minor crimes. While the threat of imprisonment was found to substantially improve the likelihood of paying fees and fines, harsher sentences appeared to have no deterrent effects on gun crimes or on the likelihood that juveniles would ultimately enter the adult criminal system.5 Bipartisan reform proposals pushed for reduced sentences for non-violent crimes, elimination of monetary bail, and alternatives to pre-trial incarceration such as the use of GPS ankle bracelets.

But calls for more radical reform stressed a structural, rather than instrumental, motivation: when critics looked closely at the U.S. prison system, many of them found that its failures were symptoms of a much deeper and broader problem with race in the United States.

In fact, a defining dimension of the U.S. prison system was disparities by race [Exhibit 4]. In 2011, an estimated 60% of the prison population identified as Black or Latinx, relative to 30% of the US population.6,7 By 2017, it was estimated that one in three young black men would serve time in prison at some point in his lifetime; in some cities, more than half of all young adult black men were subject to supervision by the prison system, including probation and parole.8 The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for Latino men was one in six, and for white men one in 17 [Exhibit 5].9

Only by carefully examining the ways in which incarceration and race interacted both historically and presently in their country, reformers argued, could Americans honestly confront the scale of the challenges they faced.

The Purpose and Structure of Incarceration in the United States Although imprisonment was no modern phenomenon, it had historically served as a prelude to

punishment: a convict would sit in prison awaiting his or her fate, whether it be lashes or death. It was with the development of the penitentiary (introduced in the 18th century in Europe and the 19th century in the United States and implemented by colonial administrations across much of the Asian and African continents) that imprisonment itself was envisioned as a site of punishment and rehabilitation. It was conceived of as a place “for reflecting on their crimes and, through penitence, reshaping their habits and even their souls.”10 Regarded as a progressive and humanist reform of the Enlightenment, the penitentiary was linked to a larger campaign in service of the rights of citizens. As such, the prison sentence rose in parallel with the Age of Reason, an era in which time was endowed with particular value through its opportunity cost in labor.11

In modern American jurisprudence, incarceration was understood as serving three purposes: (1) rehabilitation, (2) retribution, or the deprivation of liberty as a form of punishment, and (3) prevention, either through individual incapacitation or by cultivating fear of further punishment in both individuals and society at large.12 The normative legitimacy of incarceration was likewise an evolving construct, with four broad principles guiding the carceral system in theory: proportionality, parsimony, citizenship, and social justice [Exhibit 6].

In the United States, incarceration could occur in a variety of facilities, the three most common being state prisons (57%), federal prisons (10%), and local jails (27%) [Exhibit 7]. Broadly speaking, state prisons were run by state department of corrections and typically held sentenced inmates convicted of felonies. Federal prisons were run by the U.S. Government and held prisoners convicted of federal crimes as well as pretrial detainees. Local jails, overseen by county or municipal jurisdictions, held

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pretrial detainees and those serving sentences less than one year.13 In 2018, among those detained in jail, over 75% were not convicted of any crime.14 They awaited trial in jail as they could not afford to pay bail, or the judge-determined cost of pre-trial release. Other formal sites of imprisonment included juvenile detention centers (2%) and immigration detention facilities (2%).

The U.S. adult correctional system encompassed not only those in prisons and jails but also those on parole and probation. Probation allowed individuals to live in their homes under supervisory conditions in place of incarceration, whereas parole functioned similarly for those who had already served some of their sentence in prison. Probation and parole could be revoked for a new offense or for “technical violations” of supervisory conditions, such as missing meetings with a parole officer, losing a job, or failing to pay fines, child support, or service fees for probation or parole.15 The total U.S. population on probation and parole rose from approximately one million in the mid-1970s to seven million by 2010 [Exhibit 8]. Both forms of supervision were considered feeders into the prison system, as violations could lead to revocation and reincarceration. Returning parolees made up about 20% of all state prison admissions in the 1980s, rising to 40% in the 2000s.16 A large and growing proportion of these returnees were imprisoned for technical violations rather than new convictions or sentences.17

The Racial History of Incarceration in the United States

The Era of Slavery

From early colonial settlements until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, colonial America and the United States engaged in the practice of chattel slavery; that is, slavery in which people were legally considered personal property.18 The owners of chattel slaves had a legal right to slaves’ lives. From 1620 until the trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808, an estimated 400,000 people were brought to the shores of the United States as chattel; more than half of those who were captured in Africa died in transport.19 Because the children of chattel slaves were also considered chattel, the slave population grew to 13% of the U.S. population, or four million people, by 1860.20 Chattel slaves were dependent on their legal “owners” for food and shelter, isolated from broader society, and forced to labor without recompense. They followed daily routines determined by their superiors, and brutal physical, emotional, and sexual abuse was pervasive. Punishment – intended not only to enforce rules but also to reinforce slaveowners’ authority – was often capricious. As described by one slave overseer, “Some Negroes are determined never to let a white man whip them and will resist you when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case.”21 When possible, however, preserving the value of labor was important, so mutilation (such as castration, removing teeth, or amputating ears) was common.22 Pregnant women were not spared, as described by Marie Hervey, a slave: “They used to take pregnant women and dig a hole in the ground and jut their stomachs in it and whip them. They tried to do my grandma that way.”23

In the Southern United States, the earliest examples of police forces were the slave patrols that captured runaway slaves and thwarted revolts.24 Black people were imagined and portrayed as docile and submissive during the era of slavery. As David Pilgrim, sociologist and founder of the Jim Crow Museum, wrote,

Proponents of slavery created and promoted images of blacks that justified slavery and soothed white consciences. If slaves were childlike, for example, then a paternalistic institution where masters acted as quasi-parents to their slaves was humane, even morally right. More importantly, slaves were rarely depicted as brutes because that portrayal might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.25

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“Black Codes” and Convict Leasing

The end of slavery in 1865 was followed by a series of new legal systems for maintaining the old racist order, motivated by fears of uprising and designed to preserve the slave-based economy of the American South.26 Black people temporarily gained a semblance of economic and political power in the Reconstruction Era immediately following the abolition of slavery, but this relative freedom was accompanied by “a shift from Black people being viewed as compliant and submissive servants to savages and brute monsters” drawn towards crime.27 Slave codes, the laws that established the rights of owners over chattel slaves, evolved into the “Black Codes” of 1865 and 1866, sets of laws that turned freedmen and freedwomen into criminals through restrictions on, among other things, “vagrancy.”28 Vagrancy laws, enacted in nine Southern states, criminalized people lacking employment or housing. The Mississippi code prohibited Black and mixed-race people from “unlawfully assembling themselves together either in the day- or nighttime,” as well as white people associating with Black or mixed-race people.29 Other violations included “mischief” or “insulting gestures”30 and could result in arrest, fines, or, in eight states, convict leasing, in which incarcerated people – overwhelmingly Black – were “hired out” to plantations and other private enterprises for payment of criminal fines. While white prisoners were routinely sentenced to the penitentiary, Black convicts were leased; as historian David Oshinsky wrote, “[A] generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions far worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves.”31 An 1887 report from Mississippi recorded that six months after 204 convicts were leased to a man named McDonald, 20 were dead and 23 returned to the penitentiary near death; the convicts’ bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment” and were “so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.”32 Drawing from the 13th Amendment, which emancipated slaves with the exception of those convicted of a crime,33 the Virginia Supreme Court clarified that an incarcerated convict was “for the time being a slave of the State.”34 Convict leasing continued until 1928,35 and some vagrancy laws remained in place until 1972.36

Jim Crow and Lynching

You could pose with the body. You could carve up the bodies and take pieces home as souvenirs. This was a point of pride. And this was happening in communities with well-functioning court systems. These were social norms.

— Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative, HLS ‘85

In 1877, Reconstruction-era federal troops withdrew from the South. Jim Crow laws began requiring “separate but equal” racial segregation in transportation, schools, churches, restrooms, and water fountains.37 Segregation was enforced in part by lynching, or extrajudicial mob murder, usually by hanging. From 1877 to 1950, over 4,000 Black Americans were lynched in 12 Southern states.38 Lynchings of Blacks were recorded in over 37 states, the last in 1968, and an estimated 75% of all lynching victims across the country were Black.39 Lynchings were attended by crowds of families including children [Exhibit 9 shows an image and description of a lynching]. Photographers snapped pictures that became postcards,40 while other keepsakes included clothing fragments, bone shards, and sex organs.41 Alleged offenders were often lynched without a trial, and were primarily accused of murder or rape, particularly of white women.42,43 Research by the Equal Justice Initiative suggested that many of these accusations were fabricated or exaggerated in an effort to reinforce social prohibitions against interracial sex and legalized hierarchies of race.44 The events were advertised in daily papers: “Troublesome Negro Settled,” described one; “Enmet Divers, the Callaway Rapist, Meets a Just Fate … He was being taken from St. Louis to Fulton for a preliminary trial when hanged,” reported another [Exhibit 10].

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The Death Penalty

The mid to late 20th century saw a rise in legal executions with a continued racial disparity – two in three Southern executions were of Black men in the 1930s.45 Legal challenges to the death penalty began in the 1940s46 and culminated in a 1972 Supreme Court ruling against death penalties, calling them “cruel and unusual” and noting, “[I]f any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few [out of those with similar crimes] to be sentenced to death, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race.”47 However, a Supreme Court ruling four years later effectively reversed the moratorium on capital punishment.48 In 2017, 42% of prisoners on death row were Black, as were 34% of all those executed under death penalties since 1976.49

The Era of Mass Incarceration The era of Jim Crow was also the era of the “Great Migration.” Between 1916 and the 1970s, an

estimated six million Black Americans moved from rural Southern states to urban centers in the North and Midwest of the United States, fleeing the violence of lynchings and institutionalized suppression of economic and political opportunities.50 This massive migration was accompanied by significant shifts in the macroeconomic environment. Violent crime began increasing in the 1960s (a trend paralleled in many Western countries),51 and continued growing through the 1970s as technological changes and international competition brought a wave of industrial closings and mass layoffs to working-class and disproportionately Black communities.52 The shock of deindustrialization was followed by the introduction of crack cocaine, a cheap and highly addictive form of the drug that swept through cities including New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C, in the 1980s. These factors all contributed to the sharp rise in incarceration that started in the 1970s – yet continued long after violent crime and crack use began to fall [see Exhibit 1].

Longer-lasting social and political changes were afoot in the late 20th-century as well. In 1964, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation in public spaces and discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, or ethnicity. In 1965, he added the Voting Rights Act, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEEA). As documented by Harvard University professor Elizabeth Hinton, the LEEA represented Johnson’s “War on Crime” and accompanied a rise in the surveillance of the new Black urban neighborhoods that had arisen from the Great Migration. The LEEA marked the first time in U.S. history that the federal government played a direct role in local police, courts, and prisons.53

By 1968, the idea of “law and order” took center stage in Republican Richard Nixon’s winning presidential campaign. This focus was part of what came to be known as the “Southern Strategy,” an attempt to garner favor among white Southern Democrats and the Catholic blue-collar vote in big cities through a coded appeal to racial fears. As described by H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s main policy advisors: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”54 John Ehrlichman, special counsel to President Nixon, articulated Nixon’s 1968 campaign strategy: “[the] subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”55 The strategy was successful: a 1968 Gallup Poll reported that 81% of respondents agreed with the statement that “law and order has broken down in this country.” The majority blamed “Negroes who start riots” and “Communists.”56

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The War on Drugs

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan officially launched a brainchild program of his predecessor, the “War on Drugs;” drug abuse had been declared by Nixon as “public enemy number one.” 57 At the time, less than two percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most pressing challenge of the nation.58 The War on Drugs was accompanied by the use of coded terms like “welfare queens” and criminal “predators,” coming to associate poverty and Blackness with poor character and crime.59 The Reagan administration oversaw a similar steep rise in funding for crime and drug control law enforcement and fall in funding for welfare programs [Exhibit 11].60 This trend continued into the 1990s under both the [Republican] Bush and [Democratic] Clinton administrations, the latter of which further cut welfare programs.61

In 1995, political scientist and then-Princeton professor John DiIulio, Jr. warned, “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘super-predators’—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteen boys who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.”62 In an article titled “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” he claimed, “Especially in urban America, white fears of black crime – like black fears of black crime – are rational far more than reactionary or racist.”63 Though DiIulio later recanted these views, his work circulated widely through top policy circles over the decade.64

Black fears of Black-perpetrated crime also played an important role in shifting carceral policy. During the period of rising crime in the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s, majority-Black communities in Washington, D.C. actively petitioned for increased funding for drug control and harsher sentencing for violent crimes and substance abuse and dealing. D.C. Council Ward Member John Wilson, formerly a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”), described the challenge: “We have so many [guns] that we are killing, injuring and robbing ourselves to the brink of chaos.”65 Indeed, the Black homicide rate (the fraction of Black people killed by homicide) was seven to 11 times higher nationally than the white homicide rate.66 Wilson went so far as to state, “ ‘Respect for law’ can no longer be considered code words for bigotry.”67 The Black community, however, was not a monolith; class divisions were predictive of support, with middle-class Blacks actively supporting harsher carceral policy, while lower-income members of the community and the longstanding National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, pronounced “N double-A C P”) protested that such policies did not attack the root causes of violence.68

Fears of crime drove public opinion and policymakers on both sides of the aisle. A rush of state laws enacted in the 1990s began subjecting juveniles to adult sentences and prisons. In 1994, the sweeping Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act called for higher rates of imprisonment following conviction, longer sentences, and a greater proportion of time served on sentences, and further tied federal funding for state prison construction to these conditions.69 Democratic Senator Joe Biden authored the Clinton-era bill, and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton later employed the term “superpredator” in touting the administration’s policies on crime.70

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Sentencing Policies

The 1994 crime law was part of a series of legislative acts, enacted from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, that made sentences for drug and violent crimes lengthier and less flexible through three notable changes:

• Mandatory minimum sentences required minimum prison terms for people convicted of particular crimes, primarily drug offenses and violent crimes. A conviction for possessing five grams of crack cocaine required a minimum sentence of five years. Notably, the same minimum five-year sentence was imposed for powder cocaine possession only at or above 500 grams.71 Although chemically identical, crack was cheaper and more likely to be used in inner cities and among people of color.72

• Three strikes laws mandated life sentences for individuals convicted of a third offense, usually a “serious violent felony” after two prior serious offenses.73 California’s especially harsh three strikes law mandated a life sentence for even minor convictions after two prior serious offenses.74

• Truth-in-sentencing laws required that prisoners serve a minimum portion of their sentences, often 85%,75 reducing opportunities for time off for good behavior.76

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act Three tied $8 billion in federal grants for state corrections to three strikes and truth-in-sentencing laws.

Racial Disparities in Criminalization and Incarceration in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Statistics and Rationale

From the early 1970s through 2020, Blacks were more likely than whites to be arrested, jailed pending trial, incarcerated, and given longer sentences.77 While true across all crime types, disparities for drug crimes were especially stark: by 1989, Blacks were arrested at four times the rate of whites. However, the Black population was less than one-fifth that of the white population (at 13% versus 72% of the US population), and rates of drug use among Blacks were consistently lower than whites, as were rates of drug selling [Exhibit 12].78 By 2010, one in every three Black men could expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime [Exhibit 5]. Among those without a high school degree, the probability rose to 68% [Exhibit 13].

The statistics on race and violent crime (rape and sexual assault, robbery, assault, and murder) were more challenging to ascertain. The 2018 National Crime Victimization Survey, in which race of the offender was relayed (if recalled) by the reporting victim, estimated that 21.7% of violent incidents were reportedly perpetrated by Blacks (an offender-to-population ratio of 1.8) and 50.2% by whites (ratio of 0.8).79 In arrest statistics for the same year, Blacks accounted for 37% of adult violent crime arrests, while whites accounted for 59%.80 Considering all crime types, according to the United States Sentencing Commission, Black males received a 19% longer sentence, on average, than white males, after controlling for type of crime and criminal history.81

Why were Black people more likely to be incarcerated, and for longer sentences? Some 19th-century scholars proposed a biological link between criminality and race, asserting that people with certain facial features, including “the projection of the lower face and jaws … found in negroes,” were more likely to commit crimes.82 Mid-20th century scholars from the “Chicago School” propagated a “subcultural theory,” which theorized that certain cultures nurtured values and attitudes more

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conducive to crime and violence.83 This framework was popularized in 1965 by Assistant Secretary of Labor to President Johnson, Daniel Moynihan, who published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (widely known as the Moynihan Report) in which he considered how a black “subculture” informed by poverty and the deterioration of the nuclear family may lead to a “tangle of pathology…capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.”84 85 While intended to raise awareness around the economic disadvantages endemic to many Black communities, the report was blamed for racializing the nature of urban poverty through an ahistorical and primarily cultural lens.86

Other contemporary scholars pointed to a range of causes: economic disadvantage; disparities and bias in policing and the judicial system; and structural, institutionalized racism.a

Economic Factors

Some observers claimed, for example, that Black people might have been more likely to turn to criminalized activities, such as selling drugs, because they were excluded from mainstream economic opportunities. A 2004 study found that high school graduation was associated with significant reductions in criminal activity87; another in 2005 found that reductions in poverty in Cleveland, Ohio, paralleled equal reductions in crime across neighborhoods of different races.88 Such comparative studies were more difficult to run, however, as poor urban white neighborhoods that were comparable to poor urban Black neighborhoods were scarce.

Economic prosperity was certainly disparate by race in the United States. One in five Black people were below the poverty line in 2018 (the second highest poverty rate behind Native Americans, at one in four), compared to one in 10 white individuals.89 As such, Black people were also less likely to be able to afford bail, and thus were more likely than white people to spend time in pretrial detention, contributing to higher incarceration rates.90

A 2014 report on Ferguson, Missouri, found that over half of the courts in St. Louis County charged high court fines and fees for nonviolent offenses, and arrested those who could not pay.91 Fees and fines served as the second largest source of revenue for the city of Ferguson in 2013 – a total of $2.6 million for a majority-Black population of 21,135.92 In a New York Times op-ed, Thomas Edsall described the “vicious circle” of a system that effectively fined poverty and was common across the nation: “The poorer the defendants are, the longer it will take them to pay off the fines, fees and charges; the more debt they accumulate, the longer they will remain on probation or in jail; and the more likely they are to be unemployable and to become recidivists [incurring further fines].”93

Because local governments depended on fees to stay solvent, law enforcement agencies were often incentivized to engage in more aggressive policing and criminalization of residents. After the Ferguson police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed young Black man, just days before the 2014 report appeared, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice noted, “Many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenues.”94

Disparities and Bias in the Criminal Justice System

Other observers pointed to racial disparities and discrimination in policing as the main reason that Black people were more likely to end up in jail. If Black communities experienced higher police

a For more detail on institutionalized racism in this context, please refer to the HBS Note N2-620-046, “African American Inequality in the United States” by Janice H. Hammond, A. Kamau Massey, and Mayra A. Garza.

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presence due to the expectation that those communities were more vulnerable or prone to crime, Black people would be more likely to be caught engaging in criminal activity. For example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (MBA ’66) launched a program in New York City called “Stop and Frisk” that empowered police officers to stop, detain, and search civilians for weapons and drugs. According to New York Civil Liberties Union, 88% of people stopped in 2019 were Black or Latinx. In response to criticism that the program unfairly targeted communities of color, Bloomberg justified the program’s outcome by saying that “Ninety percent of all people killed in our city – and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes – are black and Hispanic.”95

Some experts cited the racial biases exhibited by judges and juries in conviction and sentencing decisions.96 One study found that all-white juries were significantly more likely to convict Black defendants than white defendants, and that this gap disappeared when the jury pool included at least one Black person.97 Another study found that Black people with darker skin received longer sentences than white people or lighter-skinned Black people.98

These discrepancies by race began early. A study on police perceptions of childhood innocence found that, while officers underestimated the age of adolescent white felony suspects by one year, they overestimated the age of adolescent Black felony suspects by five years. In a related experiment with university students, subjects assessed the culpability of children above the age of nine as significantly higher for Black children than for white children.99

Institutionalized Racism

Still others would argue that institutionalized racism and a culture and legacy of white supremacy, or the institutionalized inferiority of Blackness, motivated people and institutions to disproportionately disrupt, disempower, and control Black communities with the tool of mass incarceration [Exhibit 14 provides definitions of institutionalized racism and white supremacy].

In the 2010s, a rash of publicized police-involved killings of unarmed black men brought this argument to the nation’s attention. A lack of mandatory statistics around police-involved killings of unarmed Black men made these killings difficult to track. However, internal Chicago police files revealed that Black men aged 20-34 years were 14 times more likely to be arrested via force (beating or use of a Taser or firearm) than their white counterparts between 2005 and 2015. Black women in this age group were 10 times more likely than white women, and twice as likely as white men, to experience the use of force. A Washington Post database of real-time police shootings between 2015 and 2019 revealed that unarmed Black men were more than four times more likely to be killed by police than unarmed white men. Exhibit 15 describes a small sample of the victims. While the public shootings of unarmed Black men by police officers made headlines, more common were the mundane acts of profiling experienced by individuals of color. Being pulled over because one “fit the description” was a narrative familiar to many Black men.100 According to one young man who was approached by police while driving through a predominantly white neighborhood:

Yeah, he asked us for [our] driver’s license and all that stuff. Then he asked if we lived around here because, I guess, my driver’s license address wasn’t from around where we was. Then he asked us where we lived and why we were over here. And he made us get out of the car and stuff. I mean, I just kept cool about it, I guess. I kept my composure. Because I didn’t want to make something out of nothing. I mean it was something, now that I look at it. But I didn’t wanna, you know, give him a reason to do anything else. So I just play along with it. But after all, I felt really bad. … Yeah, they put us in handcuffs. And we sat outside for about an hour, and then they just let us go.101

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The Experience of Imprisonment When they put you on that transportation truck, with shackles on your feet, you feel like cattle.

— Sylvia Lipscomb, formerly incarcerated, mother of five daughters including Ashley Lipscomb, Harvard Divinity School ‘21

Material Constraints

Life in prison was a difficult experience to articulate. Material losses were pervasive. Amber Ashley James, HBS and HLS ’19, described a client she represented through the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Institute, Mr. Brown. The first time James met Mr. Brown, it was his daughter’s birthday. He wanted desperately to reach her, but phone calls from inside can cost up to $25 for fifteen minutes.102 Mr. Brown worked in the prison kitchen, earning $1 per day. “But I won’t eat there,” he said firmly: working on site meant he saw the rotten food that came in off the trucks, the maggots crawling on equipment, the rat droppings on the floor. Instead, he survived on off-brand ramen noodles that he bought from the commissary at $1.00 a cup. James noticed his deformed fingers: he had been mugged days before he was arrested, but still had not been seen by a healthcare provider. Unable to afford bail, Mr. Brown was awaiting trial in Suffolk County House of Corrections for four counts of assault and battery. He spent eight months waiting in jail.

People in prison worked for low or no wages, often earning cents per hour (with an average hourly wage of $0.86 in 2017, with Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas paying zero),103 and examples of their deployment for economic activities were striking in the inequality they reflected. During a particularly harsh Boston winter in 2015, the city exhausted its snow removal budget and looked to unpaid prison labor to keep the city safe and accessible. In an interview, a local county sheriff said, “If you were in a 6-by-9 [foot] room, wouldn’t you want to get out of there at some point? No, very seriously, they are more than happy to get outside of the facility, to stretch their legs … [They] really do want to contribute. They want to give back.”104 In the midst of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, hand sanitizer became a scarce commodity, and the Governor of New York sought prison labor help. Prisoners were barred from using hand sanitizer themselves as it contained alcohol and was therefore considered contraband.105 In 2018, prisoners were deployed to fight California’s deadly wildfires at a wage of $1 an hour with an extra $2 per day, saving the state an estimated $90-100 million.106 Upon release, however, former prisoners were ineligible for firefighting licenses due to their criminal record.107

Although wages were low, the cost of necessary goods and services in prison were high. Prison services were typically provided by private companies, with 80% of the market dominated by three companies: Securus Technologies, GTL (Global Tel Link), and ICSolutions,108 all three owned by private equity firms [Exhibit 16]. In Illinois, prisoners spent an average of $80 per year on toiletries and hygiene products within the prison, which consumed more than half their annual wages.109 Examples of other prohibitive charges were numerous. In a West Virginia prison, inmates paid $0.05 per minute to read a “free” public-domain book on a tablet, costing around $45 for a 300-page book.110 Video chatting a friend or family member cost $0.25 per minute, or $15 per hour. Wages in such prisons were as little as $0.04 an hour, requiring 375 hours of work to pay for the video call. The calls were not a luxury: many prisons had eliminated in-person visits and replaced them with video calls.

Basic services such as healthcare were scarce and expensive. A survey of prisoners nationwide in 2004 found that approximately 40% of incarcerated individuals suffered a chronic medical condition; among them, 14% of federal inmates, 20% of state inmates, and 68% of those in local jails had received no medical examination since incarceration.111 And while participation in any type of educational

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program in prison was found to reduce recidivism by 43%, only 6% of corrections spending was devoted to any prison programming (of which educational programs was one), reaching only 6% of incarcerated individuals in the United States.112,113

Psychological Environment

The psychological impacts of prison life could be, some prisoners recounted, more destructive than the material. Some described imprisonment as wholly disorienting, with arbitrary rules and punishments, intentionally erratic schedules and expectations, and structural barriers to developing trust and community. One individual in a maximum-security prison described the pain of idleness in the system:

For me, and many like me in prison, violence is not the major problem; the major problem is monotony. It is the dull sameness of prison life, its idleness and boredom, that grinds me down. Nothing matters; everything is inconsequential other than when you will be free and how to make time pass until then. But boredom, time-slowing boredom, interrupted by occasional bursts of fear and anger, is the governing reality of life in prison.114

Another described the capriciousness and lack of trustworthy authorities:

I was serving time in Texas when a guard asked me if I witnessed another guard sexually assaulting a prisoner. Assuming I would be protected for my testimony, I told the guard I was indeed a witness to the sexual assault. When the accused officer filed disciplinary charges in retaliation to the witness testimony, I was put into solitary confinement for three years, remaining in the SHU [solitary housing unit] long after the accused officer was fired. … After I was released from solitary, I was summarily shipped to another prison without warning.115

Such anecdotes shed some light on the lived experience of daily imprisonment, but this was as varied as the 2.3 million in the carceral system itself. Public interest in the first-person prison experience motivated the production of the Marshall Project video series “The Zo” and the podcast “Ear Hustle,” recorded largely in California’s San Quentin State Prison. As a series of prisoners described in “The Zo,” “The life of a prisoner is not a life at all. It is nothing short of a bleak, pitiful existence within an inhumane, artificial environment that is scientifically proven to degrade an individual’s sense of humanity to base levels.”116

A 2006 survey found that over half of all imprisoned individuals had a diagnosable mental health condition, with similar figures for drug and alcohol dependence.117 One woman described how her brother, who suffered from depression and mental health challenges after the death of his grandmother and caretaker, was incarcerated for an unregistered firearm. “He needed therapy, or a healthy outlet. Instead he got prison. So it’s a cycle: he goes to jail, gets released, falls back into the same pattern of depression and abuse, gets sent back. It’s when I saw him that I finally separated incarceration from rehabilitation. When you’re suffering like that, prison will only make things worse.”118

Abuse of Minorities

Women and LGBTQ-identified people were particularly vulnerable to abuse and violence, often at the hands of guards hired to keep them safe.119 According to UN Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women Radhika Coomaraswamy, sexual abuse was widespread: forced strip searches, superfluous gynecological exams, and numerous allegations of sexual abuse by prison guards were commonly reported.120 In 2018, federal legislation finally put an end to the practice of shackling pregnant women while they gave birth.121 Transgender people were often put in prisons that did not correspond with their gender identity, leading to additional challenges and threats to their safety: one

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study found that nearly 60% of transgender women in California’s male prisons reported having been sexually abused (compared with 4% of male-identifying population).122 LGBTQ prisoners were often segregated and put in solitary confinement in an effort to protect them.123

The Consequences of Incarceration

The Crime Prevention Effects of Incarceration

One of the primary arguments motivating mass incarceration was emphasis on the preventive purpose of incarceration through deterrence and incapacitation.124 Indeed, violent crime in the United States declined over the 1990s and 2000s as imprisonment increased. However, the National Research Council concluded in 2015 that the “deterrent effect of lengthy sentences is moderate at best.”125 This was based on six studies which found that the risk of imprisonment produced substantial increases in compliance with fines and probation conditions, zero to modest deterrent effects on criminal activity from California's three strikes law, no deterrent effect on gun crimes of longer prison sentences, and no deterrent effect on juveniles of reaching adult age and moving into the stricter adult criminal system.126 Evidence further suggested that incarceration failed to deter future offenses; it either had zero effect or made the formerly incarcerated more likely to commit further crimes.127

A 2016 study offered suggestive evidence that expansions in the criminal justice system in the 1980s reduced crime rates by one-third, but the continued expansion in the 1990s had no further impact.128

Life After Release

The problem of recidivism, or returning to jail or prison, was potentially further exacerbated by the limited opportunities and harsh experiences of formerly incarcerated people, who were often restricted from job opportunities and otherwise disenfranchised from communities because of prior conviction. Formerly incarcerated individuals faced a profoundly different society upon release than their counterparts. As of 2018, unemployment rates among the formerly incarcerated hovered around 27% – five times the national average and greater than unemployment rates during the Great Depression.129 High unemployment rates were due to (1) selection: formerly incarcerated individuals often came from disadvantaged communities without the skills required to be competitive on the market; (2) transformation: the experiences of imprisonment made reintegration into social institutions like normal employment difficult; and (3) discrimination: most job applications required that individuals reveal their criminal records, substantially reducing employer willingness to hire.130 For example, employers were 50% less likely to call back white job applicants with criminal histories (17% callback rate) than without (34%). This disparity was further exacerbated by race: white job applicants with a criminal history still saw more favorable outcomes than Blacks without a criminal history (14%). Blacks with a criminal history had a 5% callback rate [Exhibit 17].

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 denied cash and food assistance to individuals convicted of felony drug offenses.131,132 Those with felony records also faced discrimination in the private rental market and were forbidden from voting (6.1 million Americans in 2016),133 although they were still counted to determine representation in the House of Representatives.134,135 Notably, in parallel with mass incarceration reform efforts, campaigns to enfranchise the formerly and currently incarcerated gained some traction after 2010, with sixteen states allowing formerly incarcerated and two states allowing currently incarcerated individuals to vote.136

The implications of arrest and incarceration could be far-reaching. As Alexis reflected, “I bet every student at HBS has done something illegal. But they likely haven’t faced the consequences. They

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haven’t been called a ‘felon.’ It’s easy to say bad people deserve bad things, but do people deserve to have their whole lives derailed?”

Consequences for Families and Communities

As of 2000, over two million children had an incarcerated father.137 As of 2009, the likelihood of a child seeing a parent without a high school diploma imprisoned was around 15% for white children and 62% for Black children.138 Incarceration had both material impacts on families, who often experienced the loss of a breadwinner as well as the substantial costs of the criminal justice system, and long-term impacts on children’s well-being, school performance and likelihood of high school graduation, behavior, and aggression.139,140

Responses to Mass Incarceration In 2017, an ACLU poll suggested that over 70% of Americans from across the political spectrum

supported reducing the prison population.141 Momentum had built for reform over the last decade, with advocates from President Trump and the Koch Brothers to Democratic presidential candidates such as Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders calling for a wide range of actions. Some sought simply to reduce the rate of imprisonment, others to change the experience and effects of imprisonment, and still others to challenge the place of prisons in American society.

In part through reform efforts, state and federal prison population declined slightly from a high of over 1.6 million from 2008 to 2010, to under 1.5 million in 2017. The racial gap remained, but with some changes in composition between 2007 and 2017: the fraction of Black individuals imprisoned out of the total imprisoned population fell three percentage points among Blacks, rose three percentage points among Latinx, and remained unchanged for whites.142

Limit Criminalization

Many advocates focused on decriminalizing homelessness, mental health crises, poverty, or addiction. This approach also included limiting legal consequences for arguably harmless activities. The Charles Koch Institute, a conservative think tank, was a proponent of this approach: “Thousands of seemingly ordinary activities, like shipping lobsters in the wrong kind of container and shampooing hair without a license, are classified as crimes. … [J]ail should be reserved for people who pose a threat to public safety.”143 The institute protested the plethora of laws and regulations that could make someone an “accidental criminal,” noting that in 1790, the federal criminal code included 30 crimes, while in 2019, there were approximately 5,000 statutes and 300,000 regulations that carried criminal penalties at a federal level.144 Vikrant Reddy, a Koch Institute fellow, further argued for reduced incarceration for nonviolent drug and property offenses.145 Such proposals would need to reckon with the composition of crime types among imprisoned individuals [see Exhibit 20] and consider how meaningful a dent this would make in the phenomenon of mass incarceration.

Reform Sentencing

Sentencing reform focused on ending mandatory minimum sentencing, truth-in-sentencing, and three strikes laws.146 In 2018, President Trump signed into law a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill called the First Step Act, which introduced sentencing reforms including reduced mandatory minimums and sentencing for drug offenses and retroactive application of the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which had reduced the sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine.147 Critics of the First Step Act suggested it did not go far enough – out of 2.3 million incarcerated people, the law led to the

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release of just 3,000 for good-time credits, retroactively reduced sentencing for 2,000, and other benefits for far smaller numbers of inmates.148 Other critiques argued that a bill that did not more broadly reduce mandatory minimum sentences and give judges more discretion in sentencing was an inadequate solution to the challenge of mass incarceration. Former Attorney General Eric Holder tweeted of the First Step Act, “Momentum for sentencing reform is being derailed by an effort that is misguided, ideological and outdated. The narrow ‘prison reform’ bill won’t deliver the transformative change we need. The only way to achieve that is by passing bipartisan, comprehensive sentencing reform.”149

Holder was referring to the bipartisan Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which was simultaneously making its way through Congress. 150 The bill proposed to retroactively reduce sentences for crack convictions, reduce mandatory minimum sentences, limit the use of solitary confinement on juvenile prisoners, and require greater funding for post-release programs aimed at reducing recidivism.151

Eliminate Monetary Bail

In 2016, 65% of people in jail were simply awaiting trial.152 This practice, known as “pretrial detention,” could often be avoided by paying monetary bail, but was out of reach for many poor individuals.

Some reformers proposed alternatives to pretrial detention. One idea was to give people accused of criminal activity the opportunity to be monitored by a GPS-equipped ankle bracelet. These bracelets could be expensive to the wearer — the cost to one wearer in Mississippi was $10 per day, along with a $300 upfront cost and a $50 installation fee to participate in the program.153 An alternative was the use of risk assessments, which relied on algorithms to determine a person’s likelihood of committing crime in order to determine whether they should be kept in pretrial detention. These algorithms looked at a person’s past arrest record and sociodemographic data to determine who could be released until trial. 154 In one study in Broward County, Florida, Black people were found to be twice as likely to be incorrectly labeled as high risk of recidivism than their white counterparts.155

Proponents for investing in technological and private alternatives to incarceration focused on the resultant decline in prison populations. Critics worried about a future of increased surveillance and criminalization outside of prisons. Harvard University PhD candidate (’20) Jackie Wang wrote, “As technologies of control are perfected … the distinction between the inside and the outside of a prison will become blurrier. It is even possible to imagine a future where the prison as a physical structure is superseded by total surveillance without physical confinement.”156

Expand Alternatives to Incarceration

Some jurisdictions experimented with efforts to divert people away from the criminal justice system by “offer[ing] responses to law-breaking behavior that are proportionate, that emphasize accountability, and that connect participants with social services to reduce the probability of future offending.”157 In New York, for example, some people arrested for low-level, nonviolent crimes (e.g., shoplifting, trespassing) could participate in a program called Project Reset, which allowed participants to avoid a criminal record by engaging in self-reflective arts practices and meaningful conversations with peers and community leaders.158 Several cities across the nation, beginning in Seattle, adopted a program called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), wherein police officers directed low-level offenders to community-based services. The program reduced recidivism in King County by 22%.159

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A related diversion approach that gained mainstream attention in the 2010s was restorative justice, which involved offenders in in-depth conversations with people impacted by their criminal activity. In the typical restorative justice circle, responsible parties sat with the person harmed by their behavior, a trained facilitator, and friends or family of both people. These circles gave victims a chance to ask questions to understand why they were harmed, and to articulate their needs in order to facilitate their healing process. By the end of the circle, both parties agreed on what the perpetrator could do to be held accountable. Examples included apologies, financial compensation, and community service. When victims of crime were approached by Common Justice, a leading restorative justice nonprofit in New York City, and given the chance to choose between incarceration and restorative justice for the perpetrator, 90% chose the latter option.160

Create Opportunities for Formerly Incarcerated People

Employers considered hiring individuals with a criminal record in order to give them a second chance and potentially decrease their chances of going back to prison. Alexis Jackson’s father secured work at a bolt manufacturing firm in Pennsylvania that hired formerly incarcerated people. Some large companies offered similar opportunities. For example, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said he would increase efforts to recruit people who had been impacted by the criminal justice system.161 Hiring formerly incarcerated people could help a company build a loyal workforce and good will with the local community and provide a powerful alignment with company values. However, it could also bring challenges; employees were sometimes impacted by homelessness after release from prison, or suffered from untreated substance abuse and mental health issues, decreasing their productivity and reliability.162 Some reformers pressed for increased educational and professional opportunities inside prisons to help prepare people for successful re-entry and limit recidivism. On Rikers Island, incarcerated people could get unpaid jobs working as baristas in a coffee shop serving guards and officers, preparing the inmates for employment at companies like Starbucks upon release.163

End For-Profit Prison Industries

Advocates seeking to end for-profit prison industries identified over 4,000 corporations whose business models relied on incarceration.164 This list included companies that directly owned and operated private prisons and immigrant detention centers such as CoreCivic and GEO Group, companies providing contract services to public prisons (the vast majority of prisons in the United States), 165 and investors in both private prisons and private prison services.

In August 2016, the Obama administration announced that it would no longer contract with private prison companies such as GEO and CoreCivic, causing GEO stock to fall. The next day, the company donated $100,000 to a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC), followed by a $125,000 donation the day before the November presidential election. GEO and CoreCivic each donated $250,000 to President Trump’s inaugural committee. Once elected, Trump reversed the Obama administration’s decision to cut out private prison companies and awarded GEO a contract to build an immigration detention center in Texas that could generate $44 million per year in revenue.166 In 2017, private facilities housed 8% of the total federal and state prison population, but 73% of detained migrants.167 GEO Group and CoreCivic received over $1 billion in government contracts in 2018, the majority of which came from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, also known as ICE.168 In 2019, ICE was GEO Group’s largest tenant, accounting for one-fifth of its revenue.169 GEO and CoreCivic together accounted for over 50% of private prison contracts, with combined revenues of $4 billion in 2017.170

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University endowments, retirement funds, and pension funds were among the types of investors that generated returns from firms associated with the “prison-industrial complex,” a term describing corporations and individuals that profited from and drove increased rates of incarceration.171 Additionally, major banks extended credit to private prison companies, giving them loans and underwriting their bonds. As of 2016, for example, CoreCivic had borrowed $65 million from JPMorgan Chase on a revolving credit line of over $132 million, and a total of $444 million across credit lines from 10 banks.172

While they garnered less attention, private prison services companies also received much of the revenue generated from incarceration through government contracts. Of the $80 billion spent annually on incarceration in 2018, roughly half went to private vendors providing services including healthcare, food, commissary products, email and phone services, and financial services.173

Advocates believed that the entire prison system could be disrupted by eliminating the economic returns generated from incarceration and starving prison companies of capital to fund their operations and expansion. A common tactic was to advocate for divestment from companies that profited off of incarceration. One coalition of advocates pressured eight major banks (including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America) to stop financing private prison companies in 2019.174 This campaign led to the termination of $2.4 billion (87.4%) of the credit lines and term loans on which these companies relied. Later that year, GEO Group included “public resistance” as a risk factor in its 10-Q filing for the SEC.175

In 2018, Harvard University students launched the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, which pressured endowment managers to disclose their investment in prison companies, divest from those companies, and subsequently invest in communities that have been impacted by incarceration.176 As of March 2020, the school had not capitulated to the organizers’ demands. According to the campaign’s analysis, Harvard had at least $3 million invested in the prison industry overall [Exhibit 18]. According to Harvard’s own analysis, the endowment’s holdings in private prison companies were valued at $18,000.177 In 2020, the campaign sued Harvard for violating its fiduciary duty by failing to investigate the endowment’s investments in the prison industry. It wrote in its lawsuit that “by continuing to profit off the caging of people, Harvard violate[d] its legal duty to consider the charitable purposes of its investments.”178

Bianca Tylek, who was arrested as a youth and worked on Wall Street before graduating from Harvard Law School, founded a criminal justice advocacy organization called Worth Rises in 2017 to dismantle the prison industry. She said, “I decided to use my understanding of finance to challenge an industry that has traumatizes Black and Brown communities.”179 Worth Rises published an annual report detailing investments in the prison system and campaigned for divestment and against privatization. The organization also led campaigns against prison services corporations and their private equity owners. For example, they successfully pressured the Pennsylvania State Employee Retirement System to block a $150 million proposed investment in Platinum Equity, a private equity firm, due to their ownership of Securus Technologies, one of the largest prison telecom corporation in the U.S.180 Another campaign led to the passage of the nation’s first law making all jail phone calls free in New York City, saving the city’s incarcerated population and their families an estimated $10 million annually.181 In the months following these efforts, the leverage loan pricing of prison telecom corporations plummeted, costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars.182

Use International Models

In considering prison reform, some suggested that the United States look outwards for alternative examples to mass incarceration. Nordic countries rates of incarceration roughly one-tenth to one-

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twentieth that of the United States (37 to 71 per 100,000).183 Sentences were short, averaging eight months (compared to 2.6 years for the United States in 2016). First-degree (intentional and planned) murder was punishable by up to 21 years in prison and second-degree (intentional and unplanned) murder by six to 12 years; this compared to maximum sentences in the United States of the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole, respectively.184 Norway had no life sentences. Amenities such as cooking classes, music recording studios, and in-cell flat-screen TVs were available in Halden, Norway’s maximum-security prison [Exhibit 19 shows a U.S. prison cell and a Norwegian prison cell].185 Norway boasted an uncommonly low recidivism rate of 20%, compared to 68% in the United States.186

Stop Building New Prisons

Proponents of prison moratoriums worked to end the construction of new jails and prisons, thereby halting the expansion of incarceration. Two prison moratorium campaigns gained momentum in 2018. The first was the No New Jails Campaign in New York City. In 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his plan to close the notorious Rikers Island Jail and replace it with four smaller jails located throughout the city. Rikers had 10,000 beds, and each of the smaller jails would have 886 beds, cutting jail capacity in half by 2026.187 Some reformers celebrated this decision, while the No New Jails Campaign opposed the plan and supported redirecting jail construction funds into community resources for decarceration.188 In 2019, the JusticeLA coalition (led by Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors) successfully pressured the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors to abandon plans to build two new jails in the city.189 Prison moratorium advocates often identified with the most ambitious group of reformers, who referred to themselves as “prison abolitionists.”

Abolish All Prisons

Prison abolitionists argued that the criminal justice system did not keep communities safe — instead, it ripped families apart, traumatized victims and perpetrators alike, and reinforced intergenerational cycles of poverty. Chloe Cockburn, a grantmaker and former ACLU attorney, said: “Many people involved in criminal justice reform see prison and jail as incompatible with safety — they make people inside and outside prisons and jails unsafe. When you arrest someone 15 times but never really help them, and then they harm someone else, whose fault is that?” Such reformers thus imagined a world without incarceration, achieved through two major efforts. The first was to invest in community safety by supporting community-based organizations that combatted violence and helped formerly incarcerated people re-enter society. The second was to divert resources away from the carceral apparatus and invest in resources and services that treated the root causes of crime or violence, including quality mental health care, education, housing, and jobs.190

As conceived by CUNY Professor of Geography Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolition meant not an immediate call to close all prisons, but gradual closures alongside building the economic, health, education, and other support systems that could address the conditions contributing to violence and offer rehabilitative alternatives.191 Her theory of abolition asserted that harsh sentences mirrored violence by devaluing life. Gilmore pointed out that while mass incarceration and the war on drugs clearly reflected racial bias, approaches to the carceral system needed to recognize other hard truths.

1) Race: Emphasizing anti-Black bias, in her view, inadvertently served to associate crime with Black people – who still formed a minority of roughly one-third of prison inmates, similar to the population of white inmates.

2) War on drugs: The emphasis on nonviolent drug offenders, meanwhile, could readily produce sympathy while overlooking the fact that these cases constituted less than one-fifth of prison

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cases. More than half of state and federal inmates were in fact violent offenders, and any system of change would need to address the roots of violence and not only the plight of the “relatively innocent” [Exhibit 21 shows a breakdown of violent and nonviolent offenders].

3) Private prisons: Gilmore also emphasized that private prisons and profit motives were minor issues – 92% of prisoners and 99% of jail inmates were held in public facilities. Private prisons did not lead to mass incarceration, but instead, “They are parasites on it.” In the public sector, state and federal agencies competed for revenue, while public correctional employees formed a powerful lobby. Early budgets for 2020 proposed $15.5 billion for corrections, with 40% in employee wages.

In 2003, activist Angela Davis wrote,

Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.192

Long a fringe perspective on criminal justice reform, prison abolition recently entered mainstream discourse, with outlets like The New York Times profiling Gilmore in 2019.193 The organizers of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign wrote, “Our world is in need of profound transformation. Abolition is the process of imagining the world necessary to make prisons obsolete and bringing that world into being. We refuse to struggle for anything less.”194

Back in Boston, Amber Ashley James and the HLS clinic had succeeded in having the cases against Mr. Brown dismissed. It was a small but critical win for James, for whom the American carceral system hit close to home. In 1972, her grandfather, an African American, had been convicted by an all-white jury of raping a white woman in Wichita, Kansas. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Remembering her father’s stories of seeing her grandfather in shackles, she reflected, “The harm that the state imposes on incarcerated people trickles down. It can be a generational cycle of harm and violence. I don’t think any child should have to see their parent in chains.” James considered herself an abolitionist. “The system that we have is inherently violent,” she said. “We need mechanisms to prevent and respond to harm without perpetuating even more harm.”

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Exhibit 1 Rise in U.S. prison population

Source: “File: U.S. incarceration rates 1925 onwards.png,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_ rates_1925_onwards.png, accessed April 2020. Image created by Wikimedia user Smallman12q using data from the Bureua of Justice Statistics (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/tables/incrttab.cfm) for the 2003 - 2008 incarceration rate and Table 6.28, p. 500 from "Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics 2003" (http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/section6.pdf) for the rate by sex (gender) for 1925-2008.

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Exhibit 2 Incarceration rates by selected country, United States and Europe.

Source: National Research Council (NRC), The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, eds. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press), p. 36. Data taken from the International Centre for Prison Studies.

Note: Rate estimates vary slightly from those of other sources for the United States. Year of reporting for the United States is 2012; years for other nations range from 2011 to 2013.

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Exhibit 3 Annual spending on corrections and related criminal justice functions

Source: Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, “Following the Money of Mass Incarceration,” Prison Policy Initiative, January 25, 2017, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html, accessed April 2020..

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Exhibit 4 Trends in U.S. prison population by race

Source: Pamela Oliver, “White rural imprisonment rates,” Race, Politics, Justice blog at University of Wisconsin – Madison, July 7, 2017, https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepoliticsjustice/2017/07/07/white-rural-imprisonment-rates/, accessed April 2020..

Exhibit 5 Lifetime likelihood of imprisonment by race and gender

Source: The Sentencing Project, “Criminal Justice Facts,” https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/, accessed April 2020.

Note: Estimate based on data taken from Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2001.

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Exhibit 6 National Research Council normative principles

The National Research Council, in its investigation on the causes and consequences of growing incarceration in the US, advises employing four principles with which to judge the normative legitimacy of incarceration: proportionality, parsimony, citizenship, and social justice.

1. Proportionality: Criminal offenses should be sentenced in proportion to their seriousness

2. Parsimony: The period of confinement should be sufficient but not greater than necessary to achieve the goals of sentencing policy

3. Citizenship: The conditions and consequences of imprisonment should not be so severe or lasting as to violate one’s fundamental status as a member of society.

4. Social justice: Prisons should be instruments of justice, and as such their collective effect should be to promote and not undermine society’s aspirations for a fair distribution of rights, resources, and opportunities.

The NRC notes, “In the domain of justice, empirical evidence by itself cannot point the way to policy, yet an explicit and transparent expression of normative principles has been notably missing as U.S. incarceration rates dramatically rose over the past four decades.” Source: National Research Council (NRC), The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and

Consequences, eds. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press), p. 23, 8.

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Exhibit 7 U.S. carceral population by facility and violation

Source: Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020,” Press Release, Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html, accessed April 2020.

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Exhibit 8 U.S. population under the carceral system: adult correctional population including state and federal prisons, local jails, probation, and parole, 1972 to 2010

Source: National Research Council (NRC), The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, eds. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press), p. 41.

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Exhibit 9 Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, Indiana, 1930

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, Indiana

On August 7, 1930, a large white mob used tear gas, crowbars, and hammers to break into the Grant County jail in Marion, Indiana, to lynch three young black men who had been accused of murdering a white man and assaulting a white woman. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19 years old, were severely beaten and lynched, and 16-year-old James Cameron was badly beaten but survived.

The brutalized bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith were hung from trees in the courthouse yard and kept there for hours as a crowd of white men, women, and children grew by the thousands. Public spectacle lynchings, in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness and participate in pre-planned heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and/or burning of the victim, were common during this time. When the sheriff eventually cut the ropes off the corpses, the crowd rushed forward to take parts of the men’s bodies as souvenirs.

Photographs of the brutal lynching, featuring members of the crowd proudly posed beneath the hanging corpses, were widely shared, but local authorities claimed no one could be identified. Mounting outside pressure eventually led to the trial of two accused mob leaders, each of whom was found innocent by juries of all white men.

The alleged assault victim, Mary Ball, testified years later that she had not been raped.

Source: Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Outside the South,” https://eji.org/issues/lynching-in-america- outside-the-south/, accessed April 2020. Image: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo.

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Exhibit 10 Lynching headlines in contemporaneous newspapers in the. Southern United States

Source: Brent Staples, “When Southern Newspapers Justified Lynching,” New York Times, May 5, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/opinion/sunday/southern-newspapers-justified-lynching.html, accessed April 2020. From The New York Times. © 2018 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

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Exhibit 11a Black and white drug use versus incarceration: Visualization of Black and white drug use and trafficking versus likelihood of entering the criminal justice and carceral systems

Source: Brave New Films, “Racism is Real,” April 16, 2014, https://youtu.be/cGFdIEZRH5k, accessed April 2020.

Exhibit 11b Black and white drug use versus incarceration: Drug arrest rates for Blacks and whites showing the rise in Black arrests during the 1980s “War on Drugs”

Source: National Research Council (NRC), The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, eds. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press), p. 61.

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Exhibit 12 U.S. prison and jail incarceration rates by education and race, men aged 20-39, 1972- 2010. C = at least some college; HS = all noncollege men; DO = < 12 years of completed schooling.

Source: National Research Council (NRC), The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, eds. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press), p. 65.

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Exhibit 13 Definitions of Institutional Racism and White Supremacy

“Institutional racism” is a term first coined by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. The authors offer the following example to distinguish institutional from individual racism:

“When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city – Birmingham, Alabama – five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of power, food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which most people will condemn. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.”

“White supremacy” is understood in a variety of ways. Below are four definitions in common use:

1. White supremacist: a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races – Mariam-Webster Dictionary

2. White supremacy is a term used to characterize various belief systems central to which are one or more of the following key tenets: 1) whites should have dominance over people of other backgrounds, especially where they may co-exist; 2) whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society; 3) white people have their own “culture” that is superior to other cultures; 4) white people are genetically superior to other people. - Anti-Defamation League

3. By “white supremacy” I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. – Frances Lee Ansley, HLS ’88, Professor of Law

4. “[W[hite supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e. slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”— a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white-supremacist control” over other black people.” – bell hooks, Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies, Berea College.

Source: Compiled by casewriters from: Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: Politics of Liberation (New York, Vintage, 1992), p. 4; Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “white supremacist,” https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/white%20supremacy#h1, accessed April 2020; Anti-Defamation League, “White Supremacy,” https://www.adl.org/resources/glossary-terms/white-supremacy, accessed April 2020; Frances Lee Ansley, quoted in David Gillborn, “Rethinking White Supremacy: who counts in ‘Whiteworld,’ ” Ethnicities 6 (2006): 318-340, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10001659/, and; bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p. 113.

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Exhibit 14 Examples of high-profile deaths of Black victims involving police force

Sample of high-profile deaths of Black people involving the police

• July 2014: Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man and father, was put in a chokehold for resisting arrest for selling cigarettes on the street. Video footage showed him dying after gasping for air and saying “I can’t breathe.” NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo was not charged, but Garner’s family received a $5.9 million settlement.

• August 2014: John Crawford III, a 22-year-old Black man, was shot dead by officer Sean Williams in an Ohio Walmart after picking up a toy gun while shopping with his girlfriend. Officer Williams was not charged.

• August 2014: Four days after Crawford’s death, Michael Brown Jr, an unarmed 18-year-old Black man, was shot 12 times by officer Darren Wilson after an altercation after Brown allegedly stole cigarettes at a local liquor store. Officer Wilson was not charged, and Brown’s family received a $1.5 settlement.

• November 2014: Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, was shot and killed by officer Timothy Loehmann while playing with a toy gun in a park. Officer Loehmann was not charged.

• April 2015: Walter Scott, a 50-year-old Black man, was pulled over for having a broken tail light on his car. He had an arrest warrant for failing to pay child support, which potentially motivated him to leave his car and begin running after being approached by Officer Michael Slager, who then shot him 5 times. Officer Slager was sentenced to 20 years in prison for violating Scott’s civil rights.

• July 2016: Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man who worked in the cafeteria at a local Montessori school, was shot and killed while being pulled over for looking like a robbery suspect who had a “wide- set nose.” Castile informed Officer Jeronimo Yanez that he had a licensed firearm in the car, and then reached for his wallet with his ID. Yanez fired on Castile seven times out of confusion as to which item Castile was reaching for. Castile’s death was captured on camera by his girlfriend, who was a passenger in the car along with her four-year-old daughter. Officer Yanez was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter.

• March 2018: Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old Black man, was killed by police in the backyard of his grandmother’s home after officers mistook his cell phone for a gun. He was shot seven times. Neither officer was charged, and Clark’s sons received $2.4 million in a settlement.

• September 2018: Botham Jean, a 26-year-old Black man and PwC accountant, was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer, Amber Guyger, after she mistakenly entered Jean’s apartment thinking it was her own. Officer Guyger was sentenced to 10 years for murder.

• October 2019: Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, was playing video games with her eight- year-old nephew late at night when police officer Aaron Dean, responding to a neighbor’s call that her front door was open, shot and killed her. Officer Dean was charged with murder.

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Exhibit 14 (continued)

Source: Compiled by casewriters from: Nicholas Quah and Laura E. Davis, “Here's A Timeline Of Unarmed Black People Killed By Police Over Past Year,” Buzzfeed News, May 1, 2015, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ article/nicholasquah/heres-a-timeline-of-unarmed-black-men-killed-by-police-over, accessed April 2020; ABC News Australia, “Timeline: The Black Lives Matter movement,” February 22, 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-14/black-lives-matter-timeline/7585856, accessed April 2020; Jon Swaine, “Video shows John Crawford's girlfriend aggressively questioned after Ohio police shot him dead in Walmart,” The Guardian, December 14, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/14/john-crawford- girlfriend-questioned-walmart-police-shot-dead, accessed April 2020; Jasmine C. Lee and Haeyoun Park, “15 Black Lives Ended in Confrontations With Police. 3 Officers Convicted,” The New York Times, October 5, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/17/us/black-deaths-police.html, accessed April 2020; Amanda Holpuch, “Walter Scott: uncertainty over arrest warrant for thousands owed in child support,” The Guardian, April 10, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/10/walter-scott-no-warrant-issued-child- support-traffic-stop, accessed April 2020; Michelle Broder Van Dyke, “Police Audio: Philando Castile Pulled Over For Matching ‘Wide-Set Nose’ Suspect Description,” BuzzFeed News, July 11, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mbvd/police-audio-philando- castile-pulled-over, accessed April 2020; Shannon Van Sant, “Philando Castile’s Mother Wipes Out School Lunch Debt, Continuing Son’s Legacy,” NPR, May 7, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/05/07/721142955/philando-castiles-mother-wipes-out-school- lunch-debt-continuing-son-s-legacy, accessed April 2020; Dan Simon and Michelle Krupa, “The children of Stephon Clark, who was fatally shot by Sacramento police, will get $2.4 million from the city,” CNN, September 6, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/us/stephon-clark- settlement/index.html, accessed April 2020; Natalie Gempel, “PwC Unveils Botham Jean Memorial in Dallas Office,” D Magazine, October 3, 2019, https://www.dmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2019/10/pwc-unveils-botham-jean-memorial-in-dallas-office/, accessed April 2020; Ralph Ellis and Bill Kirkos, “Officer who shot Philando Castile found not guilty on all counts,” CNN, June 16, 2017. Jose A. Del Real, “No Charges in Sacramento Police Shooting of Stephon Clark,” New York Times, March 2, 2019, https: //www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/stephon-clark-police-shooting-sacramento.html, accessed April 2020, and; Meagan Redman, Ashley Louszko, Cho Park, Byron Pitts, and Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, “Shot at home by police: Teaching officers how to react under stress after Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson killings,” ABC News, December 19, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/US/shot-home-police-teaching-officers-react-stress-botham/story?id=67825639, accessed April 2020.

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Exhibit 15 Private equity-owned prison services companies

Source: Excerpted by casewriters from: Jim Baker, “Private Equity-Owned Firms Dominate Prison and Detention Services,” Private Equity Stakeholder Project, December 2018, https://pestakeholder.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/PE- Incarceration-Detention-PESP-122018.pdf, accessed April 2020.

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Exhibit 16 Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign’s analysis of Harvard’s investments in the prison industry (US $)

Source: The Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, “The Harvard-To-Prison Pipeline Report,” October 2019, https://harvardprisondivest.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/191014_HPDBooklet_WEB.pdf, accessed April 2020.

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Exhibit 17a Prison Cells: Solitary confinement cell in Rikers Island, a jail complex in New York, 2016

Source: Bonita Tenneriello, “Can You Imagine Spending 23 Hours A Day In A Cell The Size Of A Parking Space?” WBUR, November 15, 2017, https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/11/15/solitary-confinement-reform-massachusetts- bonita-tenneriello, accessed April 2020.

Exhibit 17b Prison Cells: Prison cell in Halden Prison, a maximum-security facility in Norway, 2015

Source: Knut Egil Wang/Moment/INSTITUTE, in Christopher Zoukis, “Not the worst, but not Norway: US prisons vs. other models,” Huffington Post, September 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/not-the-worst-but-not-norway-us- prisons-vs-other_b_59b0772ae4b0c50640cd646d, accessed April 2020.

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Exhibit 18 U.S. spending on corrections versus higher education, selected states: State spending on corrections per inmate versus primary and secondary education per student, selected states

Source: CNN Money, “Education vs prison costs,” https://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison- costs/, accessed April 2020. Courtesy CNN.

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Exhibit 19a Sentenced U.S. prisoners by most serious offense: State prisoners (2015)

Source: Data for state prisoners in 2015 and federal prisoners in 2016 taken from E. Ann Carson, “Prisoners in 2016,” U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin , January 2018, https://www.bjs.gov/ content/pub/pdf/p16.pdf, accessed April 2020.

Note: Violent offenses include murder, manslaughter, rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault. Public order offenses include weapons, immigration, and DUI offenses.

Exhibit 19b Sentenced U.S. prisoners by most serious offense: Federal prisoners (2016)

Source: Data for state prisoners in 2015 and federal prisoners in 2016 taken from E. Ann Carson, “Prisoners in 2016,” U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin , January 2018, https://www.bjs.gov/ content/pub/pdf/p16.pdf, accessed April 2020.

Note: Violent offenses include murder, manslaughter, rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault. Public order offenses include weapons, immigration, and DUI offenses.

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Endnotes

1 Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020,” Press Release, Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html.

2 For a more updated comparison across countries and to see how individual US states compare to the international context, see Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer, “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2018,” Prison Policy Initiative, June 2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html.

3 Bill Keller, “Where Right Meets Left,” The Marshall Project, Commentary, February 20, 2015, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/20/where-right-meets-left.

4 Timothy Williams and Thomas Kaplan, “The Criminal Justice Debate Has Changed Drastically. Here’s Why.” New York Times, August 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/us/politics/criminal-justice-reform-sanders-warren.html.

5 National Research Council (NRC), The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, eds. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press), p. 136.

6 “Latino/Latina” or “Latinx” refers to people of Latin-American descent, and “Hispanic” refers to people of Spanish-speaking descent. However, these terms overlap significantly and depend on self-identification, and are often used interchangeably in the United States. This case references sources that use both designations, but uses “Latinx” throughout for consistency. For a discussion of these terms, see Mark Hugo Lopez, Jens Manuel Krogstad, and Jeffrey S. Passel, “Who is Hispanic?” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/11/who-is-hispanic/.

7 NRC, p. 13.

8 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2020), p. 11.

9 The Sentencing Project, “Trends in U.S. Corrections,” June 22, 2018, p. 5, https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf.

10 Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), p. 26.

11 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, p. 44.

12 NRC, p. 20.

13 NRC, p. 37.

14 Sawyer and Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative.

15 See Alexander, The New Jim Crow; on probation and parole generally, pp. 118-119; on financial obligations during probation and parole, pp. 194-195.

16 NRC, p. 41.

17 NRC, p. 42.

18 Chattel and other forms of slavery are discussed in Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” Slavery and Abolition 24 (2003), pp. 1-16.

19 American Abolitionist, “Fact Sheet: History of Slavery and Abolition in the United States,” http://www.americanabolitionists.com/fact-sheet.html.

20 Khushbu Shah and Juweek Adolphe, “400 years since slavery: a timeline of American history,” Guardian, August 16, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/aug/15/400-years-since-slavery-timeline .

21 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Collins Publications, 2003).

22 Christian, Charles M., and Bennet, Sari, Black Saga: The African American Experience : A Chronology, Basic Civitas Books, 1998, p.102-103.

23 Deirdre Cooper Owens, “Black Women’s Experiences in Slavery and Medicine,” in Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pwt69x.7, pp. 42-72.

24 Olivia B. Waxman, “How the U.S. Got Its Police Force,” Time, May 18, 2017, https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/.

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25 David Pilgrim, “The Brute Caricature,” Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia website, November 2000, edited 2012, https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/.

26 Alexander, pp. 43-44.

27 Calvin John Smiley and David Fakunle, “From ‘brute’ to ‘thug’: the demonization and criminalization of unarmed Black male victims in America,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26(2016): 350-366, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5004736/.

28 For an overview of vagrancy laws, see Enyclopaedia Britannica, “Black code,” August 20, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/black-code, and Alexander, pp. 35-36.

29 Enyclopaedia Britannica.

30 Alexander, p. 38.

31 David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 35.

32 “Prison Abuses in Mississippi: Under the Lease System Convicts are Treated with Brutal Cruelty,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1887, quoted in Davis, Policing the Black Man, p. 12.

33 The 13th Amendment of the US Constitution states, ““““Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis added). The text of the 13th Amendment is available at https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=40&page=transcript.

34 Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 790, 796 (1871), quoted in Alexander, p. 39.

35 “Alabama Ends Convict Leasing,” New York Times, July 1, 1928, https://www.nytimes.com/1928/07/01/archives/alabama- ends-convict-leasing-800-happy-negroes-sing-old-time.html.

36 The Supreme Court ruled a Jacksonville vagrancy ordinance “void for vagueness,” noting that “it encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions, it makes criminal activities that, by modern standards, are normally innocent, and it places almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police.” Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972), available at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/405/156/.

37 For an overview, see VCU Libraries Social Welfare History Project, “Jim Crow Laws and Racial Segregation,” Virginia Commonwealth University, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil-war-reconstruction/jim-crow-laws-andracial- segregation/.

38 Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017), http://www.eji.org/lynchinginamerica, p. 39.

39 University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law, “Lynching in America: Statistics, Information, Images,” http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchstats.html.

40 James Allen and John Littlefield, “Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America,” 2005, https://withoutsanctuary.org/. Please note this resource includes images of lynching victims.

41 Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil, “Digital History: Lynching,” http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3178.

42 UMKC School of Law.

43 Aimable Twagilimama, “Rape, as Provocation for Lynching,” in Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, Vol. 2, eds. Walter C. Rucker and James N. Upton (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006), pp. 541-547.

44 EJI, pp. 30-32.

45 Angela Davis, ed., Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), p. 18.

46 Davis, Policing the Black Man, p. 19.

47 Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), available at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/408/238/.

48 Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), available at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/428/153/.

49 Davis, Policing the Black Man, p. 19.

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50 Isabel Wilkerson, “The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/.

51 NRC, pp. 111-112.

52 NRC, pp. 127.

53 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

54 Alexander, pp. 44, citing H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries (New Yor: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p.53

55 Alexander, pp.44, citing John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p.233

56 Alexander, pp.46, citing Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992), p.12-13

57 Alexander, pp. 60.

58 Alexander, pp. 49.

59 Alexander, pp. 61-62.

60 Alexander, pp. 49-50.

61 Premilla Nadeson, “How a Democrat Killed Welfare,” Jacobin Magazine, February 9, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/welfare-reform-bill-hillary-clinton-tanf-poverty-dlc/

62 William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty … and How to Win America’s War on Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 27.

63 John J. DiIulio, Jr., “The Coming of the Super-Predator,” The Weekly Standard, November 27, 1995, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-coming-of-the-super-predators.

64 Elizabeth Becker, “As Ex-Theorist on Young ‘Superpredators,’ Bush Aide Has Regrets,” New York Times, February 9, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/09/us/as-ex-theorist-on-young-superpredators-bush-aide-has-regrets.html.

65 James Forman, Jr., Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017), p. 55.

66 Forman, p. 56.

67 Forman, p. 61.

68 Forman, p.63

69 NRC, pp. 70-71.

70 Katie McDonough, “The guy behind the ‘super-predator’ myth admitted he was wrong. Hillary Clinton can, too,” Splinter, January 1, 2017, https://splinternews.com/the-guy-behind-the-super-predator-myth-admitted-he-wa-1793854999.

71 Jamie Fellner, “Race, Drugs, and Law Enforcement in the United States,” Stanford Law & Policy Review 20: 257-291 (2009). https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states#_C._Race,_Crime.

72 Fellner. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1 and repealed the five-year mandatory minimum non-retroactively; see Jim Abrams, “Congress passes bill to reduce disparity in crack, powder cocaine sentencing,” Washington Post, July 29, 2010.

73 United States Department of Justice Archives, Criminal Resource Manual §1032: “Sentencing Enhancement – ‘Three Strikes’ Law,” https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1032-sentencing-enhancement-three-strikes-law.

74 California’s 2012 Three Strikes Reform Act removed life sentencing for lesser offenses and allowed reduced sentences for inmates sentenced under the earlier law for a third minor offense (see Stanford Law School, “Three Strikes Basics,” https://law.stanford.edu/stanford-justice-advocacy-project/three-strikes-basics/). By 2014, nearly 2,000 prisoners were freed under the reform law, with a recidivism rate below 5% (Sharon Driscoll and Michael Romano, “Three Strikes: An Update After Propositions Reform Sentencing for Nonviolent Offenders and Milestone of 2000th Prisoner Released Approaches,” Stanford Law School Legal Aggregate blog, December 15, 2014, https://law.stanford.edu/2014/12/15/three-strikes-an-update-after- propositions-reform-sentencing-for-nonviolent-offenders/), compared to an overall two-year recidivism rate of about two-thirds

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for all those with prior felonies (Mia Bird, Justin Goss, and Viet Nguyen, “Recidivism of Felony Offenders in California,” Public Policy Institute of California, June 2019, https://www.ppic.org/publication/recidivism-of-felony-offenders-in-california/).

75 Paula M. Ditton and Doris James Wilson, “Truth in Sentencing in State Prisons,” U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, January 1999, https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp.pdf.

76 “Truth-in-sentencing” is a 1980s neologism derived from “truth-in-lending” laws of the 1970s, which mandated the disclosure of interest rates by consumer lenders; see NRC, p. 79. The implication for perceptions around discretionary decisions on release dates is noteworthy.

77 NRC, pp. 93-94.

78 NRC, p. 50.

79 Rachel E. Morgan and Barbara A. Oudekerk, “Criminal Victimization, 2018,” U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, September 2019, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf.

80 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Statistical Briefing Book, “Law Enforcement & Juvenile Crime,” https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2, accessed April 2020.

81 United States Sentencing Commission, “Demographic Differences in Sentencing,” November 14, 2017, https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing.

82 Matt Simon, “Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Seriously Believed Criminals Were Part Ape,” Wired, November 12, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/11/fantastically-wrong-criminal-anthropology/.

83 Pamela Black, "Subcultural Theories of Crime,” In The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), ed. Jay S. Albanese, doi:10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj254.

84 Alexander, pp. 45

85 Daniel Geary, “The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition,” The Atlantic, September 14, 2015. Citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Ch.3., https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/

86 Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 18.

87 Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti, “The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self- Reports,” American Economic Review 94 (2004): 155-189, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/000282804322970751

88 Lance Hannon and Robert DeFina, “Violent Crime in African American and White Neighborhoods: Is Poverty's Detrimental Effect Race-Specific?”, Journal of Poverty 9 (2005): 49-67, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J134v09n03_03.

89 Poverty USA, “Poverty Facts: The Population of Poverty USA,” https://www.povertyusa.org/facts, accessed April 2020.

90 Emily Leslie and Nolan G. Pope, “The Unintended Impact of Pretrial Detention on Case Outcomes: Evidence from New York City Arraignments,” Journal of Law and Economics 60(2017): 529-557, https://doi.org/10.1086/695285.

91 Joseph Shapiro, “In Ferguson, Court Fines And Fees Fuel Anger,” NPR, August 25, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fines-and-fees-fuel-anger.

92 Shapiro.

93 Thomas B. Edsall, “The Expanding World of Poverty Capitalism,” New York Times, August 26, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/opinion/thomas-edsall-the-expanding-world-of-poverty-capitalism.html.

94 Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018), pp. 160-161.

95 Michael Bloomberg, “Stop and frisk keeps New York safe,” Washington Post, August 18, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-bloomberg-stop-and-frisk-keeps-new-york- safe/2013/08/18/8d4cd8c4-06cf-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html.

96 David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?” Journal of Legal Studies 41(2012): 347-383, https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/355/.

97 Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, and Randi Hjalmarsson, “The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127(2012): 1017–1055, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjs014.

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98 Jennifer L. Hochschild and Vesla Weaver, “The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order,” Social Forces 86(2007): 643–670, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/86.2.643.

99 Kristin Henning, “Boys to Men: The Role of Policing in the Socialization of Black Boys,” in Davis, Policing the Black Man, p. 61.

100 Renée McDonald Hutchins, “Racial Profiling: The Law, the Policy, and the Practice,” in Davis, Policing the Black Man, p. 105; quoted from Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald P. Haider-Markel, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

101 Ibid.

102 Peter Wagner and Alexis Jones, “State of Phone Justice: Local jails, state prisons and private phone providers” Prison Policy Initiative, February 2019, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/state_of_phone_justice.html.

103 Wendy Sawyer, “How much do incarcerated people earn in each state?” Prison Policy Initiative, April 10, 2017, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/.

104 Eric Levenson, Low on Resources, Boston Turns to Prison Labor to Shovel Snow,” Boston.com, February 17, 2015, https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/02/17/low-on-resources-boston-turns-to-prison-labor-to-shovel-snow.

105 Hope Corrigan, “Incarcerated people tasked to make hand sanitizer to fight coronavirus are banned from using it themselves,” Quartz, March 10, 2020, https://qz.com/1815496/ny-forces-prisoners-to-make-hand-sanitizer-to-fight-coronavirus/.

106 German Lopez, “California is using prison labor to fight its record wildfires,” Vox, August 9, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/8/9/17670494/california-prison-labor-mendocino-carr-ferguson-wildfires.

107 Nick Sibilla, “Inmates who volunteer to fight California's largest fires denied access to jobs on release,” USA Today, August 20, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/08/20/californias-volunteer-inmate-firefighters-denied-jobs-after- release-column/987677002/.

108 Isaac Scher, “A Captive Market,” Jacobin, January 25, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/prison-services-firms- technology-books-commodification-gtl/

109 Kate Wheeling, “Are Prison Commissaries Fair?” Pacific Standard, May 30, 2018, https://psmag.com/social-justice/are- prison-commissaries-fair.

110 Scher.

111 Andrew P. Wilper, Steffie Woolhandler, J. Wesley Boyd, Karen E. Lasser, Danny McCormick, David H. Bor, and David U. Himmelstein, “The Health and Health Care of US Prisoners: Results of a Nationwide Survey,” American Journal of Public Health 99 (2009): 666-672, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2661478/.

112 Kathleen Bender, “Education Opportunities in Prison Are Key to Reducing Crime,” Center for American Progress, March 2, 2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/news/2018/03/02/447321/education-opportunities- prison-key-reducing-crime/.

113 Prison Studies Project, “Why Prison Education?” http://prisonstudiesproject.org/why-prison-education-programs/, accessed April 2020.

114 Norval Morris, The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.205.

115 The Marshall Project, “The Zo, Episode 3: Retaliation,” February 27, 2020, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/02/27/welcome-to-the-zo.

116 The Marshall Project.

117 NRC, p. 204.

118 Case writer interview with anonymous woman

119 ACLU, “Women in Prison: An Overview,” https://www.aclu.org/other/words-prison-did-you-know#II.

120 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, p. 80.

121 Lauren Kuhlik, “Congress Just Took a Big Step Toward Ending the Shackling of Pregnant Prisoners,” December 20, 2018, https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/women-prison/congress-just-took-big-step-toward-ending-shackling-pregnant.

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122 Law, Victoria (2012-09-01). Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. PM Press. ISBN 9781604867886., p.203

123 National Center for Transgender Equality, “LGBTQ People Behind Bars: A Guide to Understanding the Issues Facing Transgender Prisoners and Their Legal Rights,” October 2018, https://transequality.org/transpeoplebehindbars.

124 NRC, pp. 131-134.

125 NRC p. 154.

126 NRC, p. 136.

127 NRC, p.150.

128 Magnus Lofstrom and Steven Raphael, “Crime, the Criminal Justice System, and Socioeconomic Inequality,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30 (2016): 103-126, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.2.103.

129 Lucius Couloute and Daniel Kopf, “Out of Prison & Out of Work: Unemployment among formerly incarcerated people,” Prison Policy Initiative, July 2018, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/outofwork.html.

130 NRC, p.234. See also Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

131 By 2018, 24 states had opted out of the food stamp ban (but not the cash ban), and the remainder preserved some or all of the restrictions.

132 The Sentencing Project, “Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System,” April 19, 2018, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/.

133 Ibid.

134 NRC, pp. 309-310.

135 https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/

136 ”Felon Voting Rights,” National Conference of State Legislatures, October 14, 2019. https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights.aspx

137 NRC, p. 260.

138 NRC, p. 262.

139 NRC, pp. 270-271.

140 Laura E. Henkhaus, “The Child Left Behind: Parental Incarceration and Adult Human Capital in the United States,” American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings 109 (2019): 199-203, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20191092.

141 American Civil Liberties Union, “91 Percent of Americans Support Criminal Justice Reform, ACLU Polling Finds,” November 16, 2017, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/91-percent-americans-support-criminal-justice-reform-aclu-polling-finds.

142 The Sentencing Project, “Criminal Justice Facts,” https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/.

143 Charles Koch Institute, “Criminal Justice Reform,” https://www.charleskochinstitute.org/issue-areas/criminal-justice- policing-reform/, accessed April 2020.

144 Charles Koch Institute, “The Criminalization of Everything,” https://www.charleskochinstitute.org/issue-areas/criminal- justice-policing-reform/the-criminalization-of-everything/, accessed April 2020.

145 Vikrant P. Reddy, “Criminal Justice: The Real Reasons for Reform,” National Review, May 18, 2016, https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/criminal-justice-reform-facts/.

146 James Cullen, “Sentencing Laws and How They Contribute to Mass Incarceration,” Brennan Center for Justice, October 5, 2018, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/sentencing-laws-and-how-they-contribute-mass-incarceration.

147 Federal Bureau of Prisons, “An Overview of the First Step Act,” https://www.bop.gov/inmates/fsa/overview.jsp, accessed April 2020.

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148 Kara Gotsch, “One Year After the First Step Act: Mixed Outcomes,” The Sentencing Project, December 17, 2019, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/one-year-after-the-first-step-act/.

149 Eric Holder (@EricHolder), Twitter post, May 8, 2018, 8:16 a.m., https://twitter.com/EricHolder/status/993872322720301057.

150 Justin George, “Is The “First Step Act” Real Reform?” The Marshall Project, May 22, 2018, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/05/22/is-the-first-step-act-real-reform.

151 U.S. Congress, Senate, Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, S.2123, 114th Congress (2015), https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/2123.

152 James Cullen, “Ways to End Mass Incarceration,” Brennan Center for Justice, July 18, 2018, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/ways-end-mass-incarceration.

153 Ava Kofman, “Digital Jail: How Electronic Monitoring Drives Defendants Into Debt,” ProPublica, July 3, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/digital-jail-how-electronic-monitoring-drives-defendants-into-debt.

154 Wang, p. 49.

155 Wang, Carceral Capitalism, p. 49.

156 Wang, Carceral Capitalism, pp. 39-40.

157 Center for Court Innovation, “Diversion,” https://www.courtinnovation.org/areas-of-focus/diversion, accessed April 2020.

158 Center for Court Innovation, “Project Reset,” https://www.courtinnovation.org/programs/project-reset/more-info, accessed April 2020.

159 National Institute of Corrections, “LEAD: Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion,” https://nicic.gov/lead-law-enforcement- assisted-diversion, accessed April 2020.

160 Michelle Alexander, “Reckoning With Violence,” New York Times, March 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/opinion/violence-criminal-justice.html.

161 Ruth Simon, “The Company of Second Chances,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the- company-of-second-chances-11579928401.

162 Ruth Simon.

163 Amy Chozick, “The Rikers Coffee Academy,” New York Times, December 27, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/business/rikers-island-baristas.html.

164 Worth Rises, “The Prison Industry: Mapping Private Sector Players,” April 2020, https://worthrises.org/theprisonindustry2020.

165 Cody Mason, “Too Good to Be True: Private Prisons in America,” The Sentencing Project, January 2012, https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Too-Good-to-be-True-Private-Prisons-in-America.pdf.

166 Mirren Gidda, “Private Prison Company GEO Group Gave Generously to Trump and Now Has Lucrative Contract,” Newsweek, May 11, 2017, https://www.newsweek.com/geo-group-private-prisons-immigration-detention-trump-596505.

167 The Sentencing Project, “Private Prisons in the United States,” October 24, 2019, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/.

168 Renae Merle and Tracy Jan, “Wall Street pulled its financing. Stocks have plummeted. But private prisons still thrive.” Washington Post, October 3, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/03/wall-street-pulled-its-financing- stocks-have-plummeted-private-prisons-still-thrive/.

169 Esther Fung, “Donald Trump Has Been Very Good for Publicly Listed Prison Owners,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-has-been-very-good-for-publicly-listed-prison-owners-11551189601.

170 Michelle Conlin and Kristina Cooke, “$11 toothpaste: Immigrants pay big for basics at private ICE lock-ups,” Reuters, January 17, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-detention/11-toothpaste-immigrants-pay-big-for- basics-at-private-ice-lock-ups-idUSKCN1PC0DJ.

171 Angela Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” COLORLINES, September 10, 1998, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-prison-industrial-complex.

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172 In the Public Interest (ITPI), “The Banks That Finance Private Prison Companies,” November 2016, https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/ITPI_BanksPrivatePrisonCompanies_Nov2016.pdf, p. 12.

173 Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, “Following the Money of Mass Incarceration,” Prison Policy Initiative, January 25, 2017, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html.

174 Morgan Simon, “GEO Group Running Out of Banks as 100% of Known Banking Partners Say ‘No’ to the Private Prison Sector,” Forbes, September 30, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/morgansimon/2019/09/30/geo-group-runs-out-of-banks- as-100-of-banking-partners-say-no-to-the-private-prison- sector/?fbclid=IwAR2But8vc6mZ3zkbNaWJUSwbDOCAtznJeQV6GmlehbEW0Cvf9pV6cYzO1yc#53e42c403298.

175 GEO Group, March 31, 2019 10-Q (Boca Raton, FL: GEO Group, 2019), https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/923796/000119312519138425/d651801d10q.htm.

176 The Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, “The Harvard-To-Prison Pipeline Report,” October 2019, https://harvardprisondivest.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/191014_HPDBooklet_WEB.pdf.

177 Ellen M. Burstein and Camille G. Caldera, “Harvard and Divestment Advocates Disagree Over How Much the University Puts Into Private Prisons. Here’s Why.” Harvard Crimson, March 6, 2020, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/3/6/harvard-prison-divest-analysis/.

178 Camille G. Caldera, “Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign Files Suit Against University,” Harvard Crimson, February 20, 2020, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/2/20/prison-divestment-lawsuit-filed-2020/.

179 Casewriter interview with Bianca Tylek

180 Joseph N. DiStefano, “PA’s millions: Pensions split on private-prison protest,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 1, 2019, https://www.inquirer.com/business/phillydeals/psers-sers-pension-investment-prison-securus-fillman-20191001.html.

181 Zoe Greenberg, “Phone Calls From New York City Jails Will Soon Be Free,” New York Times, August 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/nyregion/phone-calls-free-nyc-jails.html.

182 Private Equity Stakeholder Project, “Platinum Equity’s prison telecom company Securus sees debt trade at up to 50 percent discount,” February 6, 2020, https://pestakeholder.org/platinum-equitys-prison-telecom-company-securus-sees-debt-trade- at-up-to-50-percent-discount/.

183 Denmark (71), Finland (53), Iceland (37), Norway (60), and Sweden (61 per 100,000); see Prison Brief, “Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Rate,” https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to- lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All, accessed April 2020.

184 https://lovdata.no/dokument/NLO/lov/1902-05-22-10/KAPITTEL_2-15#%C2%A7233

185 Jeffrey Kofman.

186 Laura Paddison, “How Norway Is Teaching America To Make Its Prisons More Humane,” Huffington Post, August 22, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/norway-american-prison-system-reform_n_5d5ab979e4b0eb875f270db1?guccounter=1.

187 Matthew Haag, “N.Y.C. Votes to Close Rikers. Now Comes the Hard Part.” New York Times, October 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/nyregion/rikers-island-closing-vote.html.

188 No New Jails NYC, “How We Got Here,” https://www.nonewjails.nyc/background, accessed April 2020.

189 JusticeLA, “We made history. But the fight isn’t over.” February 18, 2019, http://justicelanow.org/we-made-history-but- the-fight-isnt-over/.

190 Bill Keller, “What Do Abolitionists Really Want?” The Marshall Project, June 13, 2019, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/13/what-do-abolitionists-really-want.

191 Rachel Kushner, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind,” New York Times, April 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html.

192 Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, p. 10.

193 Keller.

194 The Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, p. 5.

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