 I'm your host Pedro Ducosta. This is the State of Working America podcast, where we seek to elevate workers' voices to make sure they're heard in the economic policy debate in Washington and beyond. I'm here at the sidelines of the EARN Conference in Pittsburgh, and I'm joined by Jamie and Shade, who's the criminal justice policy analyst for the Oklahoma Policy Institute. And I really want to talk to you about the issue of incarceration and how it relates to the labor market, because as somebody who pays attention to the job of labor market very closely and who pays attention to federal reserve policy very closely, these are issues that barely ever even enter the radar of the discussion. So please tell me a little bit about the work that you guys do, and tell me about how you see the criminal justice system interacting with the labor market. Well, thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk about criminal justice issues, especially through an economic lens. I think at Oklahoma Policy, one of the biggest value ads we've been able to give to the conversation is to show the way in which low income, especially marginalized communities of color, have found their economic earning potential, their ability to build wealth, their ability to have the equity to buy a home, to leverage themselves out of one economic condition actually experience economic mobility has been constrained by the American court system, by the punitive system of fines and fees, and by the mass incarceration system writ large. So I'd say it is very difficult to think of the racial wealth gap in the United States and truly contextualize what it means as a policy idea, as a notion that policy makers could come together and actually resolve the racial wealth gap and do that hard work of reconciliation that we seem to find so difficult and pernicious in America. To me, there is no way to get there if you aren't actually looking at what the criminal justice system does to black and brown communities. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of everyday hurdles and challenges that black Americans predominantly face because of these fines and fees, the system that kind of gets people into this sort of debt into perpetuity and doesn't allow them even to get a foothold in the economy, much less develop a base of wealth from which to do anything. Absolutely, we've actually produced data that can demonstrate in my home state of Oklahoma, there is actually no better geographic proxy for race than court debt. In my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, you can actually see in the historically black portion of my community, which was known as Black Wall Street or Greenwood before the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 when it was burned to the ground by an armed mob. That portion of the town, you can actually see the zip codes having a concentration of court debt that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 to $1,000 a person for a tiny zip code of a tiny community and in a subset of a relatively low population state. We're talking a state with about 3 million people total and this tiny community in 2017, we found more than 20,000 failure to pay warrants. That is arrest warrants, bench warrants from district judges for mostly black and brown people who had not paid, in many cases, municipal fines. And in the state of Oklahoma, so we're talking about anything from a speeding ticket to simple municipal fines for the way you did your garbage, things having to do with utilities. We're talking about things for low level misdemeanors. So just to break it down, you basically, you commit a minor infraction just like any of us does, just like you made a mistake, you got something wrong, you got a fine, you couldn't pay it. When you can't pay it, the fees pile up and suddenly you're in more debt than you can pay and then you can actually be put in jail for that debt. So it's a debtor's prison. Absolutely, debtor's prisons are alive and well, not just in the state of Oklahoma, throughout the United States. There are actually websites, websites like free-to-drive.org is a great one. You can click on that website, go to any state in the United States and you can see the thousands of people who have failure to pay warrants, in some cases failure to appear, which like a trade secret, just a little secret of the industry that people don't like to talk about, you will almost never see a failure to appear warrant from the court system for someone who's already paid their fines and fees. So there are people who never have to have those extra appearances because they've paid. There are people who bond out of prison because they are bond out of county jails because they've paid and there are people who don't show up for their appearances but they have representation and they've paid and judges never issue a warrant for them. Even though they don't show up to court, they don't follow the instruction of the court. As long as you pay the fees, you are given a presumption that you deserve to be treated without incarceration. The worst remedies are reserved for the poorest people in the system and just a basic baseline data fact about this population of people, not just in Oklahoma, but across the United States. As of 2018, 80% of all criminal defendants in the United States were declared indigent, meaning they didn't have enough money for an attorney and actually in most statutes, the way that's critically defined, these are people who we consider relatively few steps away from homelessness, from experiencing homelessness. So we're talking about some of the poorest people in the United States, many of them experiencing the cyclical traumas of intergenerational oppression, often involved with racial discrimination. As I had mentioned the racial history of violence that my own hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma is steeped in. And so when you look at a heat map of my state. Can you talk a little bit about the massacre for those who don't know the history? For those who don't know, on May 31st of 1921, there was an organized attack. There's really no other way to describe it, involving people who were deputized by the police, the white members of the southern half of Tulsa County, many of them who were resentful of the fact that the most prosperous black community in the United States began in 1906 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was called Black Wall Street, founded by a man named O.W. Gurley, who was himself a child of slaves. He moved from the American South and during the Oklahoma Land Rush of the 1860s, he actually worked for Grover Cleveland. He was so good at land speculation. He was such a remarkable educator that this person truly in the way, as the old conservative axum likes to go, truly pulled himself up by his bootstraps from slavery to founding this, what was going to be a black township in what is now Tulsa, Oklahoma, the area north, the northernmost zip codes of Tulsa County, which are now called North Tulsa or Greenwood. This was the most prosperous black community in the United States. There were millionaires, dozens and dozens of black millionaires. I'm talking in the 19, in the early part of the 1900s. So 1919, black millionaires running around flexing, like from street to street, businesses, small businesses, a thriving community, and they found ways to get around the segregation infrastructure that controlled the economic and political realities of their time. And that community was destroyed, more than 1,000 homes and businesses burned to the ground. It was firebombed from the sky by the Air Force. So it was a state-sanctioned, white nationalist terrorist attack. This was a state-sanctioned act of terrorism against the black community that had formed in the northern parts of Tulsa County in 1921. And so the impacts of that and redlining efforts that happened in the 1950s, terrible policies around education funding and parity, and the criminal justice issues that we see in mass incarceration, particularly in the 1970s, ramping up in the 1970s and 80s, as it did throughout the United States as the mental health infrastructure and the community health infrastructure was collapsed. In that same vacuum entered the criminal justice system as the means of perpetuating the hierarchy of economic undervaluation of opportunity that you see for so many communities, black and brown, but also rural communities, indigenous communities, Latinx communities, throughout the United States, you see this system places where the poorest are put in the position of having to fund the court system, the way that we fund Netflix, right? This fee-for-service model. And to such an extent that prosecutors will have openly said to me, there are innocent people who I know are innocent, but I am pushing for a plea agreement because that's what keeps the lights on. That's amazing. So what's fascinating about your work is that it actually, when we talk about the racial wealth gap, we often think about it. Some people talk about it as historical grievances, redlining and so on, but actually the way the criminal justice system operates is very much a clear and present ongoing danger and an ongoing drag on black wealth. Absolutely. If we talk about structural racism, obviously I know there are people who don't believe that structural racism could exist now that a president named Barack Obama was in office for eight years, but I have the unfortunate duty to tell America there is at least one truly structurally racist system in the United States and that is the American criminal justice system. In Oklahoma, there's no way to even view the data without the context of race. So just to give you a simple example of it, the incarceration rate for the United States was an outlier amongst Western industrialized countries. We're the worst of the NATO nations, even if you put us on a chart with China and Saudi Arabia and subtracted political prisoners, we still have the highest mass incarceration population of any industrialized nation, more than two million people in our system. The ratio that exists in most of the U.S. is every 698 per 100,000 Americans are incarcerated. In the state of Oklahoma, 1,079 of every 100,000 Oklahomans is incarcerated. So we see this profound statistical difference, but when you dig into the data, you see that for white Americans, it's roughly, or white Oklahomans, it's roughly analogous to the national average. So it's about 767 of every 100,000. But for indigenous Oklahomans, it's more than 1.3% higher. For them, for Hispanic or Latinx, it's more than twice. That number, it's over 1,000. It's something like 1,800 per every 100,000 for black Oklahomans. The number is more than 3,000 per every 100,000. So you are talking about a per capita incarceration rate that is more than four and a half times that of white Oklahomans. So our entire incarceration disparity, the reason Oklahoma is the prison capital of the world is the incarceration disparity that exists between communities of color and white Oklahomans. It's so clear and stark in the data that it's actually impossible to think about ways and strategies to truly reform Oklahoma's system that don't focus themselves keenly on communities of color throughout the state. I wanted to ask you about, as far as storytelling and narrative, the role of the 1619 project in opening the broader American consciousness, at least those who are willing to read it to some issues that people haven't thought about before. I'm wondering if you've read it. And in particular, I was struck by the criminal justice piece in that series, right? Because, I mean, and I did a whole Twitter thread on it because I'm like, you can't really make this up, right? I'm from Brazil originally. I get sort of Portuguese, the Portuguese history of the Portuguese role in slavery. Excuse me, so to have a prison named Angola, to have a prison named Angola, where the detainees, the prisoners are forced to pick cotton for free. And if not, they're put in the hole. So my question to you is what do you make of that whole project? And was there any history there that you didn't already know if there wasn't? What is it that came out of that particular story and that you hope can kind of open people's minds to the way that the seamlessness with which this country transitioned from a system of slavery to a system of quasi-slavery with the kind of cyclical detainment of blacks? I think to me, most of what I read in the series, I'm not quite done yet. So there may be information that I hadn't seen before. Most of it was stuff that I already had some historical context for. To me, the big line is the trend line in America, right? Going from a slave state, essentially 400 years. And then having another time period at post-reconstruction that we don't talk enough about, right? What we call the gilded age. In that time period, we see heights of political corruption. We see heights of economic inequality. What we never discuss is how that economic inequality became itself a type of system that created the Jim Crow South and that eventually became the American court system, the prison industrial complex. So when we talk about police, we are literally talking about a group of people that was designed to ensure that workers were not able to organize and agitate against their owners. That's their employers. So the first police officers, we literally see them putting down labor uprisings. We literally see them amongst groups of young low income white communities breaking up those abilities. Why is that important? Because it is the cultural stratification, the power of having a permanent underclass of black and brown people that those lower class white folks would think of as their political opponents. Keeping those groups segregated has been the popular project of American politics. As long as it was. And it's so alive and well today in this presidency. How has your work changed under this president? I'd say the biggest thing. So-called occupant, rather. I like Ayanna Presley's characterization. I'd say the biggest thing that this administration has done for a large number of Americans is to make them less comfortable with the amount of unaccountable power we've been pouring into the executive branch of the United States. So for more than 50 years, we have watched a massive expansion. I'm talking about the prison industrial complex, but we could add to that the surveillance state, the massive militarization of police, all of these intense powers and depreciations of our Fourth Amendment rights, right? And our sense of due process, how that all works. It's all been going in a particular direction for decades, increasing incarceration, increasing the punitive nature of the system, increasing the disproportionate power of prosecutors, all of those things. And there's been, I hate to say it, amongst even the liberal coalition, a willingness to acquiesce to some of that power loss. And I think one of the things that one of the sad truths of the Obama administration for all of the good the Obama administration did, the fact that criminal justice reform was never a top tier agenda for the Obama administration and for liberals during that time period is something that we have to reckon with now. Now that we can see what abuses of a presidential administration can do to our immigration enforcement and detention system, which is all a piece of that, right? All a piece of that mass detention infrastructure. Now that we see what can happen when an attorney general doesn't believe in reviewing civil rights misconduct cases against police departments all across the United States, including my home state, when Oklahoma city police are doing things that should be investigated by the Justice Department, when missing and murdered indigenous women in my state are dying at a rate that's disproportionate to any other part of the United States where we see indigenous populations analogous to ours. When we're seeing these outcomes, we understand we've allowed too much power to go into the hands of an unaccountable regulatory structure. We've given too much power to the presidency and I think Democrats are waking up to that and I know in the criminal justice space that's a huge piece of what we are thinking about. How do we pull some power back? How do we end some of the state-based preemption of being able to change municipal laws, laws about detention, police practices, probation practices, all of those things. They have to be on the table, which means our localities, our state governments. They have to start reasserting themselves and saying, hold up, Oklahoma cannot follow this path. My state cannot just abdicate its responsibility to investigate racial disparities if the Justice Department isn't gonna do it. If the Civil Rights Act, if the Voting Rights Act don't matter to huge portions of the executive branch, it is the duty of our state governments, our local governments and our county governments to fill that gap and they're not gonna do it unless those of us who care about justice reform and care about putting the economic power that's being stolen from these communities by these punitive processes back, it's only going to happen if we force it. It's one of my favorite Frederick Douglass quotes, power concedes nothing, nothing without a demand. That's the nature of the system so I think if there's any positive that's come from this nonsense in the past three years, it is our ability to be honest and say that we were asleep at the gate on the issue of criminal justice reform as a political coalition and we've got to start fighting. Last question to two-parter. So is there anything in the backlash to Trumpism that lends momentum to your cause and if so, what are the most kind of pressing issues that you're working on that you see positive momentum maybe on or at least the reforms that you think would have the biggest impact, have lowest hanging fruit? I, as a black kid who grew up in Jackson, Mississippi during the height of the crack epidemic, I genuinely never thought I would live in a time where I would see large numbers of white Americans saying black lives matter and saying that it is important that we name what is happening in our country right now because it's not okay. And the fact that the criminal justice system that the court system is a branch of the oppression of hundreds of years of subjugation that we've just let flourish. All of our state governments, our federal system, we've just let it grow into this exponential leviathan that is sucking people down a drain. The fact that we've let that happen is one of those things that I think the backlash to Trump will help us organize and fight against because a lot of Americans who were sitting on the fence who were comfortable with the dog whistle racism of the 1980s and the 1990s see what is happening now and it is a different creature. It is a fundamentally different thing to say, I hear some of this welfare queen stuff, I hear some of this stuff about super predators and criminals and all of the things that were being sold by both parties for 20 years, right? In the backlash to Trump, I think there are a lot of people who might have considered themselves centrist or moderates who are going to be willing to throw a lot of those old tough on crime, war on drugs, notions which were often centered in deliberate racial prejudice and animus. Get rid of those notions, throw those metaphors out and actually build anew. To your second question, to me, there are three big pieces. If we wanna fix the America's mass industrial prison complex, there's three things we need to do. We need to reform the system of cash bail. The notion that any American should be incarcerated for no other reason than they cannot pay by their freedom from a bondsman is the human rights catastrophe of our time. Right now, there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, depending on how you do the estimate of Americans who are in pre-trial detention who are presumed innocent. They're legally innocent, I ask prosecutors all the time. What does the presumption of innocence mean if you can incarcerate me for months? This is a distinctly American problem, I assume. I mean, other than in authoritarian countries where people just get thrown in jail for nothing. I mean, for a developed country with a proper criminal justice system, that doesn't usually happen. There is no Western industrialized nation where this is happening other than the United States. We are a, as I said before, we are an outlier if you look at us on a list with other NATO nations. I believe the next closest nation to us has 131 per 100,000 citizens incarcerated, whereas we are in order of magnitude above that with millions of incarcerated people in our state and the amount of, in our nation, the amount of those people who are there because we have criminalized poverty is what bail reform is about. You shouldn't have to pay money to not go to jail when you're innocent, right? You shouldn't, and there are counties in my home state of Oklahoma where people literally stay in jail for six months because they can't pay bail for nonviolent offenses. That's what I mean. So if we could reform the system of cash bail, we could literally do for American human rights what was done for human rights in other parts of the world that we've seen in Western Europe, in parts of Africa, where we will have a class of human beings who have been put into a permanent underclass position by what our county jails are doing. The next big component that we've got to talk about is mental health. I don't know why it takes massive shootings for us to start having that conversation when we know let's not stigmatize people who are experiencing mental health issues, people who experience mental health struggles, those individuals we see the data, they are not more violent than most individuals. The things that create and produce violence are crisis, right? So you have untreated illness that goes into crisis and other factors, sometimes bad interactions with police mitigating circumstances that continue to spiral a situation that should be resolved with a doctor and a hospital and a treatment regimen, but those things aren't even present in huge portions. I'm thinking specifically of rural America in Oklahoma, one in 10 people in rural Oklahoma do not have access to any form of mental health care, any form of hospital care. And in my state of Oklahoma, we have the highest rate of adverse childhood experiences of people reporting two or more of those before the age of 17 in the nation. So there is no, for anyone to try and make the argument that there's no connection between the fact that Oklahoma leads the nation in trauma and we are the prison capital of the world is absurd. Those two facts are hand in hand. I will talk to police officers and prosecutors all day who will say the same thing. So we've got to begin dealing with the mental health crisis in this country, the crisis of suicide, the crisis of opioid addiction, the crisis of methamphetamine addiction. Those are all mental health issues that nations like Portugal, nations like Norway, other nations all around the world have strategies that we should be deploying evidence-based best practices to deal with these things that are less expensive than prisons and jails. In my state, we can literally spend $5,000 a year on state-based mental health substance abuse treatment or $15,000 to $80,000 to incarcerate people. Is that even a math problem that I need to make an argument to defend? Like we could spend that $5,000 several times and still save the taxpayer money on what they are getting right now. Some of my conservative friends like to say we are spending money that we don't have for outcomes that we don't want. So this is the reason why there's a bipartisan coalition on this. There are hundreds of millions of dollars in potential cost savings across the United States to be given to the lawmakers and policymakers who have the good sense to close some jails and open some hospitals. The third component of that is we have to create a probation and parole system in the United States that works. There are millions, more than 10 million Americans on paper, they like to call it, on probation or parole at any time in the United States. In my state of Oklahoma, we're talking about a class of people whose voting rights are often in jeopardy, who do not, they are, in my state of Oklahoma, they are, their unemployment rate is five times the unemployment rate of people without justice involvement, which means you have a permanent underclass of individuals who cannot have access to jobs because of occupational licensing bans who often do not have access to educational training because of the inability to get grants and to get the same types of FAFSA supports that most students would be able to get who often cannot get a driver's license because of the court debt that we've already described, so you can't get utilities, you can't rent a place, and you have the vast and completely counterproductive and not evidence-based system of probation restrictions. So you have to go to get drug tests every week. You have to go back and forth to therapy. You have to pay if you have a GPS monitor, you pay for that. You pay fines and fees to the district attorneys for the pleasure of them collecting your check every month, that these are the systems that make it impossible for literally millions of Americans to escape poverty. They take the, it takes the racial wealth gap, it makes it worse. It takes the disparities that we see in rural America in education and outcomes makes them worse. I said this to you earlier, but if you think of public policy problems as a fire throughout the United States, the criminal justice system is the accelerant and the probation and parole system that we have that is not based on evidence in many parts of the United States, it is simply based on what we can do with the under-resourced court system that we have and how we can extract fees so we can pay for more court system, whether we need that court system to fix these problems or not. It's an economic model that's both unsustainable, it's not actually funding the government agencies that it's supposed to be funding and it's producing harm to our communities and the economic power of millions of Americans and we can fix it. I like this problem because the solutions are right there. If we can look at what's happening at Texas, if we can look at in states like, even states like South Carolina and Georgia and Louisiana which has a bad incarceration rate like Oklahoma but they're doing things that are reducing incarceration by thousands and they are seeing public safety, their crime rates continue to fall and they are seeing vast millions of dollars in reduction of incarceration costs for their citizens. We can fix this problem, we just need the political will to do it. Wow, thank you so much Damien Shade from the Oklahoma Policy Institute. I feel truly enlightened by this discussion and I know our listeners well as well. This is the State of Working America podcast. You can sign up at epi.org slash podcast. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel or download us wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, et cetera. Thank you so much.