 After the Vietnam War, when the United States Army had less to do, then they had all this equipment. And of course, the Army would like to have new equipment, so they wanted to get rid of the old equipment. And so they offered it free to police departments. And the police department said, oh sure, we're happy to have that. And so on. Now, what neither of them seemed to be aware of was that having all of this military equipment would require policemen to be trained in the use of this equipment. And that in turn would change their attitudes that instead of being on the side of the people on the street, they were like military invaders coming in on an enemy. This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today on Juneteenth with Dr. Peter Timmons, someone I was lucky enough to become familiar with as an undergraduate at MIT. He's a professor emeritus at MIT in economic history. His forthcoming book, Never Together, an Economic History of a Segregated America is just extraordinary. This is the second podcast we've made. There was a working paper that he made, which was a segment or chapter that foreshadowed what would be in the book last year on this podcast series. But he's got a new working paper that just came out on the Inet website. And it is called Mass Incorporation, Mass Incarceration, Retards Racial Integration. I think this is a painful but very, very important topic. Peter, thanks for joining us and thanks for continuing to illuminate the challenges that America must face. Okay, thank you, Rob. It's a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to participate in an Inet podcast again. And so I'd like to make a focus on the Inet working paper. And people can look at that for more details of what I'm going to say right at the beginning here. But there are two points that I'm making in this paper. And one is the point that Mass Incarceration, which affects Black Americans much more than White Americans, because Blacks are only 13% of our population, but they are 40% of our prisoners. That one is that it ruins the lives of a lot of young, poor Blacks who never finish school. They are restricted in what they can earn as an adult, taken back into their families. But really, and often don't have any families there for that. So that's the effect on the Blacks. The effect on the Whites is to confirm their view of Blacks as unruly, illegal. Otherwise, whatever negative thoughts you want to have on the Blacks, but they are not members of society. And so a point that I make in the paper and in the book more forcibly is that this affects poor Blacks and uneducated Blacks. And as a result of President Lyndon Johnson's great society, we have what Richard Freeman of Harvard called a Black elite. That is to say, Black people who have gone through school, often quite good schools, have done well and then have professional jobs of one sport or another who are accepted into this kind of dominant life and can earn money and so on. And so that there is this kind of ambiguity that if you are a prominent educated Black, you are accepted. But if you are an uneducated Black male in prison or having been released from prison, you are dirt and so not accepted into society. So it's both a raised issue and it's also a class issue that this affects not the entire Black population, but it affects the uneducated Black population. So I think it's fine that the Koch brother, it's not the Koch brothers anymore, it's Charles Koch, are supporting education, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. I mean I've seen, you know, in the first step act, but the court just restricted the act as the first step act. And there has not been a second step either in an act or in state organizations or things. You would think that would be a perfect thing to start on because that was passed in the Trump administration. And so the people who want bipartisan work could then introduce this in a democratic administration and get bipartisan support for it. But I don't see Charles Koch making that statement. And if he should, I would welcome him. Now there are a number of things that I would say are quite mysterious in reading your working paper. I remember a quote where Glenn Lowry said, well, the intensity of this prison industrial system and so forth is going up even and incarceration rates are going up even as crime rates are going down. What, tell us a little bit about the history. I mean obviously black people were not treated fairly and those are other chapters in your book. But when did this frontier, the mass incarceration, come to the forefront as part of what you might call the repressive toolkit? Well, this started, had its start in the Nixon administration when Nixon replaced Johnson's war on poverty with a war on crime and so on. And this was greatly expanded in the Reagan administration and then became known as a war on drugs. Now the war on drugs then was amplified in the 1980s by, there was a drug epidemic there which got everybody excited. And the penalties were a hundred times as high for the kind of of coke, of narcotics, for the form that blacks like, then for the form that whites like. It's the difference between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. And so that led to this, well that and policing and so on led to the progress of mass incarceration. And what several people have found in research studies is that at the same time that the mass incarceration was involving more prisoners, the drug crimes were decreasing. In other words, these things were going in opposite directions. Now you can see this, the drug things were supported more by Republican administrations than by Democratic. But while you can see the difference, the difference is not large. And so let me take an example from President Clinton's administration because he was trying to take advantage of the hysteria about blacks by having both more police to deal with the crimes and having more social services to provide alternate activities to help the blacks and the incriminated blacks, the people who had been freed from prison, do some healthy activities and kind of motivate themselves in a way. He didn't talk about education particularly, but to get them on a different track where they might go back to school then for that. And the Republican legislature stripped out all this, all the social services and people watching this podcast may recall the controversy over midnight basketball, which became the symbol of all of these social services and the source for Republicans to strip all this out of the bill. Nonetheless, in the mid-80s, President Clinton signed the bill, put 100,000 more policemen out on the streets. He has subsequently said that he regrets signing the bill, but of course that's a couple of decades after the act that he did and he no longer has any political office. So it's kind of comforting that he comes to that realization, but it's a little late for public policy. It's better than denial, but it's because so much time has passed, the damage has been done, but it is how would I say? Exactly. The damage, but it's not just that the damage has been done, it's that the damage continues. That's right, but his acknowledgment may help or may contribute like your work to trying to change this course. So it may not be enough, but it's in the plus column, however small. So there are a lot of different dimensions to this. Now there are a lot of dimensions. Let me mention one dimension before you go, which is that one of the federal aims in the expansion of mass incarceration was to take the recommended sentences that had been promoted by the government to try to standardize courts around the country became mandatory signed, mandatory punishments for various crime. Now at the same time, in local jurisdictions, the funds for public defenders were restricted and were limited and kind of disappeared. And so the prosecutors were seeing these people in their offices rather than in a courtroom. And in the courtroom they would say, look, if you're here under a drug thing, the minimum is five years. But if you'll plead guilty to, say, stealing a car or stealing something or hitting somebody, some aggression kind of thing, then we have more freedom and I can give you a shorter term, one or two years. And so in our prisons, when you look at state prisons, state drug offenses are a minority of the convictions of the crimes that they're in for. But this is the result of the minimum sentences and the prosecutors getting more influence than the courts. That's fierce. One of the things that is mentioned in your working paper is the, which you might call militarization of law enforcement and the discipline in the prisons. As people return from Vietnam or is this more a loop later in time, but tell us a little bit about what that change in the nature of both law enforcement and prison administration implies. Yes, this has been going on for a long time and I think in the book, the timing is explained in more detail that after the Vietnam War, when the United States Army had less to do, then they had all this equipment. And of course, the Army would like to have new equipment, so they wanted to get rid of the old equipment. And so they offered it free to police departments. And the police department said, oh, sure, we're happy to have that and so on. Now, what neither of them seemed to be aware of was that having all of this military equipment would require policemen to be trained in the use of this equipment. And that in turn would change their attitudes that instead of being on the side of the people on the street, they were like military invaders coming in on an enemy. And so it tended to spread the police being very hostile to the typically black street crimes that were going off. And so if you recall the original, or not the original one, but prominent black who was about to go to college on blocking on his name at the moment in a suburb of St. Louis for that. And he was shot by the police and laid on the in the street for six hours before anybody picked up the dead body. But there were riots that night. And the police showed up in military equipment in fortified troop carriers, having all of this equipment come in. And it really did look like a wartime invasion of the of this suburb of society, except that all the weapons were on the police side. And there were peaceful demonstrations on the other side. And so you can get other examples for them. That's one that stands up in mind. But I was growing up in Detroit in the late sixties. Mayor Roman Griggs created something called the stress force. Stop the rioting in joy state streets. Yeah. And it was essentially, from what I understood, people were hired, who were former Green Berets that came home from Vietnam. And they were a plain closed operation that was in large part used to intimidate the black population. Though I it was how they say etched into my mind very powerfully, because my father was a urologist and a Caucasian urologist, who was a good friend of his lived in our community, was driving home one night when plain closed people stopped him in downtown Detroit. In those days, that was scary. They didn't identify themselves as police. And they pulled them out of the car and they beat beat the tire out of him. And he later said, well, I was quite inflamed because I was quite scared. But he had no idea what was happening to it. And eventually, the mayor Coleman young, the black mayor who took over in large part, mobilized his campaign around ending the stress force. And so this was a very, very tangible experience. I got pulled over by the stress force a couple of times in when I was in high school. And how would I put it? I wasn't under their zoom lens. It was the black population that was. But they were pretty, pretty forceful, pretty, I mean, I'll tell you one example. It's a little bit graphic. I was driving my car, my mother's car, Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser Stacia wagon, taking some guys downtown to see a music show. And a guy in a Volkswagen said pull over. And he put a, he's a plain close guy in a Volkswagen. He put a badge out the window. His partner did out the passenger front window. And one of my friends in the back was a smart aleck. And he said, where'd you get that? The cracker jack box? He pulled out a big pistol and pointed it at me. I have not had a gun pointed at me again in my life. But so this was the kind of things you're talking about. I guess a lot of the urban black population, those who rose up in the 67 riots and others had experienced a great deal of even at that time. But it seems like it's only accelerated since the late 1960s. And I thought it was a very haunting experience. Yes. And I think that's right. And that's a good example. Because that doesn't make the news, but it affects very much the way people's lives are lived, to be harassed one way or another by the police. And there is a lot of research on this. And people say, you know, that it's not so bad. But it is clearly racially done. And racially determined that they're much more likely to hit people with dark skins, people with light skins. Although your last example suggests if you have teenagers in your car, you may be liable to be pulled over and terrorized, independent of the car. So that it affects there. And one that must remember that in mass incarceration, the majority of prisoners are white. You know, this is damage to the white community. And that's important for the United States, because by taking all these people out of the educational system, then what happens to these people is that if they're very bright, or very inventive, they have no way of capitalizing on that and getting there. And so it affects the progress that the United States will make. But disproportionately, almost half of the prisoners are black, even though blacks are less than one sixth of the population. And so it's much more proportionally set for blacks. But mass incarceration is affecting the future of America by taking all these people out of the labor force. And it does so by another mechanism entirely. Don't think of the individuals, think about the financing of prisons. Because if we were to take, let's say we were to reduce the mass incarceration by half, still maintaining the proportions, that would send out whites as well as blacks into other sorts. And it would free up the funds that are now given to prisons to have more education. So I describe that in the paper as a win-win situation. The problem is here is political, because the prisons are typically located in the country, out of the cities, where the real estate is cheaper. So it provides jobs for rural people. And those people tend to be supported by, tend to support Republicans and be a part of their base, the rural base. And so the Republicans have been very resistant to decreasing the presence of these rural prisons in the rural areas. And partly because they don't know what would replace them. Now, President Biden has suggested that getting the internet to be a national phenomenon, rather than an urban phenomenon. And getting high-fi and fast high-fi available in the rural areas would provide an avenue for other activities to go on. And one of the lessons of the pandemic is that people can work from afar over the internet if they have access to it. And so if they were to do this to allow Biden's infrastructure plan to get through, it might decrease the importance of all of these prisons in these rural areas. And so they are opposed to the infrastructure plan as well. That seems far removed from mass incarceration. But you see, if you take the finance... But there are a number of thoughts that came to mind as I was reading your working paper based on... You joined me in 2016 at the Detroit conference that I did. And as I was researching for that, I met a woman from University of Michigan who unfortunately couldn't attend the conference, but she helped me with lots of issues. Her name is Heather Ann Thompson. She's recently written a book about Attica Prison that's quite prominent. But Heather Ann Thompson showed me some of her work. And you were talking about the win-win situation of more money liberated for education people out of the prison. But there's a third dimension that I heard from her. She studied what happened to the performance of children in Detroit public schools when the acceleration of their fathers being put in jail took place. And the performance dropped markedly in the schools where the fathers had been in some substantial amount taken off to prison. She also spoke a great deal about the state politics that you referred to. She taught me that when there was a census in Michigan, the men from Detroit, both men and women who had committed or been convicted of felonies, I don't know whether they committed them, they had been convicted of felonies, they are not allowed to vote. But for the census, they weren't counted at where their home and residence was. They were counted as population where they were in prison outstate which strengthened the out-of-city, out-state Republican party relative to the Democratic party in the state legislature. And there was a lot of outrage about that in and around the time of the Detroit bankruptcy where the out-of-city state legislature was trying to play a very aggressive role in the restructuring of the city of Detroit. And so you're correct. And that's exactly what's going on. And so the census is also involved in this by that ruling, which is now quite an old rule of where these people are given as living. And so that accentuates the political problem. Any of the working paper at the end after the references are a number of graphical exhibits of various different facets. And I think this is important to give a sense of proportion about the scale of the change in America because you talk about cumulative risk of imprisonment in 1945 to 1949. And then again in 65 to 69. And you just see an explosion of the risk of going to prison for black people who are high school dropouts. It goes from 4 to 11 among white people who were in college, who had some college, at least some college. It went from one to one. It didn't change. And the only, how do I say, it's hard to find good news in here. But the only good news was among blacks who had gone to college or at least had some college. It went from six down to five. But the idea that it's still five times, for college educated people, it was five times what it was for white people. And I'm not saying college education makes you honest. I'm saying it probably takes, it gives you greater probability of employment, alleviating despair. But looking at those numbers, and then you have another graph right after that, it's called figure one, the incarceration rate as an aggregate. Now you've said 40% are black while only 14% of the population. But you watch the United States on this graph from 1925 to 1975, it's essentially 100 people per 100,000. By 2010, it's 500 per 100,000. It's gone up by a factor of five. Yes. Well, you see, and in other post-industrial countries in Western Europe, and so on, the people we identify with, it's remained the incarceration rate. It's remained at 100,000. And one per 100,000. And so we are unusual. This is an American phenomenon. This mass incarceration, and racial mass incarceration is very much, this is Jim Crow 2.0, as various people have said, to keep the black population down. It's an amazing thing to see because through, how would I say, the history of my own work on Capitol Hill, I worked in the United States Senate for six years. Some of the people I knew who were down there were telling me stories that both what I'll call moderate Republicans and Democrats have been starting to rise up against this. Many of the Republicans, not on humane grounds, but on the ridiculous cost of this, that this is making society worse off at a tremendous cost to a society that has to marshal its resources productively. And I do remember a very prominent bipartisan op-ed in the New York Times, Jason Furman, who had spent time at the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama. And on the other side was Doug Holtzak, who was a student of Allen Blinders, but very involved in the Republican Congressional Budget Office and so on. They coauthored an op-ed complaining about this. I've heard more recently that some of the Koch Brothers Foundation and others have been very involved in trying to change this course because, first of all, the waste of money. And the secondly, what you call the lose-lose situation needs to be reversed. What is creating the persistence of clinging to this past policy? Are there vested interests who are making a lot of money, like owners of prisons who get cheap laborers? Or I know there's a young man who was a postdoc who, I remember, was interviewed by Joseph Stiglitz and by Inet for a postdoc, and he did a dissertation that showed that the wages in the communities around where the prisons were located were going down and business failures were going up because they couldn't compete with that approximately zero wage of labor inside the prison. So there's all kinds of negative side effects, but my question to you is where is the resistance to the constructive change that you make, what you might call, obvious in this working paper? Okay. Well, the resistance comes from several different directions. And one direction is just if you've been doing it for a while, it's hard to change. We all know that. We get into habits. And so the police, as we've talked before, are in the habit that public defenders, the prosecutorial lawyers are in this and so on. And the budgets are in this. Okay. Second thing is there is a growth of private prisons. Private prisons are more, they only have about 10% of the American prisoners. But of course, we have so many prisoners that's still substantial. And they're more in housing immigrants than housing native-born black people. But they're there and they send lobbyists to Congress saying, you know, give us more resources, 10 more people there and so on. So just as lobbyists for other things go along. A third thing is this geography. And as you say, there are a lot of problems with rural America and the prisons have ambiguous effects. Nonetheless, they do provide a lot of support for people to stay in those rural areas. And so that proposes political support that tends to go toward a Republican Congress for that. And they are reluctant to give that up for that. And then of course, finally, the things that we've said, this has been going on for half the century. So it's in regulations that come from the military giving military equipment to the police, to the census classifying residents as their prison home, rather than their actual family home, that you have the state laws set up with minimum sentences for some effects. And that gives rise to this out-of-court settlement process and so on. So there are just lots and lots and lots of ways in which the given structure, and this leads us back to the first thing I said, which is, as you've done this for half a century, it's very hard to get you out of this for that. Now in the paper, I argue you don't have to go back to the whole web. There's a model underneath the paper, and it suggests strongly that if you go back to a middle course that is in there where the laws are less severe, that then the progress of the legal system would get you eventually back to our original level. That will take time, and that's a legal effort, so that I think at the moment the most promising change would be to have the follow the first step act, or the act under President Obama to try to equalize the penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine, and then the first step act under Trump to try to alleviate some of this is the way to go. And so I think if they could just say, we're not trying to solve the problem at once, what we're trying to do is to reduce the resources that are needed for it by increasing it over time, that then we might be able to support legal changes that would reduce the penalties that come in various ways to the less educated members of our society, both white and black. I think there's another dimension in what you talk the win-win of coming out of funding prisons and redirecting the money to education. With the advent of the so-called technological or internet age, you refer to it a little bit in the how we're learning from the pandemic, more and more work is knowledge-intensive. It used to be you could use some muscles to get a pretty good job. Bill Lozadek just wrote a working paper that I made a podcast on this week about the undoing of the black middle class as globalization and automation technology took people out of that workforce. But at this time, with what's been revealed through the pandemic with the technology that's present, it seems to me for social sustainability the need to step up knowledge-intensive funding. Going back to your earlier book, The Vanishing Middle Class, the rungs in the ladder from low-margin services to high-margin services have been devastating. And there's a call to action now that I think is extremely important. And given the imperatives of climate, given the funding or the pandemic we've just been through, finding healthy uses for money related to knowledge-intensive education has got to be one of our highest priorities. And you've identified a sack of gold that can be redirected to that purpose. Yes. Well, I've been focused very much on mass incarceration on this podcast. But you're right, the economy has changed greatly. And that has been accelerated in the pandemic that we're now coming out of this June 19th, 2021. And so that the factory life that was the main stay and the main attraction for blacks in the Great Migration that ended in 1970 have disappeared. They started disappearing, starting in the 1970s, as automation came in. And that has continued for a half a century, very much the same half century that mass incarceration has grown. That the ideal has been to that what you need to get a decent job in the new economy is more education. And so that gives an urgency to increasing the educational system in our country. But I wrote a paper a long time ago now about the fact that teachers pay was not increasing. They were stagnant wages and that the women who gained access to the pill and then control over their family life could then go for higher paying and more demanding jobs and jobs that were worthy of their intellect. Like my own daughter who is an emergency department physician at Mass General Hospital or that so that you go there and you get out of the teachers, I'm sure very hard working, very good. But it's hard to attract the best teachers if you only pay low wages because the other jobs are out there and they will attract the potential teachers better. So that you not only have to educate people more but you got to change the educational system so that you could pay teachers more. They could make the classes more attractive and then that's the other side of the coin, one is the supply, the other is the demand and so on so that you could get more there. But you are exactly right that the change in the economy makes all of these issues more stuff. I mentioned Heather Ann Thompson's work in Detroit when the fathers were put in jail the children's performance dropped. I forgot one dimension which resonates with what you just said because you get to a place where the teachers are being judged on the kids performance on standardized tests and when the fathers go to jail and the traumas come from things beyond their control, the high quality teachers vacate the areas that are traumatized. So you have a supply shock that's induced by the incarceration of mothers or fathers and so there's a whole lot of damage going on in this realm that you explore and I find it very important and very illuminating. I wanted to conclude by saying that in almost every realm I've always learned a great deal from you starting as an undergraduate knowing you through Tom Ferguson, looking at your work on the 1930s. One of the things that makes a great scholar is knowing what questions to choose and I don't know what it is that's inside your heart but I recently have been monitoring of oh I've been taking a course an adult education course at the Union Theological Seminary. It's taught by a brilliant man named Obery Hendricks and who is a professor there and formerly worked on Wall Street and it's called The Kingdom of God and Political Economy and the person who keeps coming back to what to do is Martin Luther King Jr. and they describe the essential ingredients in how Martin Luther King found his courage. They talk about he cultivated a certain love and a certain righteousness and a certain courage and what he called from the Hebrew Bible Hesed, a deep love and he meaning Dr. Hendricks shared with us pieces that he'd written that Dr. King obviously was subject to an awful lot of danger, physical danger and was ultimately murdered but he went inside and he found with that pursuit of truth and pursuit of righteousness and that loving notion called Hesed which he was very conscious of the stamina to continue to do good work for society and when I see you while I'm taking that course in these weeks I can see that you have a lot of that inside of you and I want to applaud that and I want to thank you for that and I want to ask you where you get it from. Well, thank you. I think I get it and I think my mother was very invested. I grew up in Philadelphia in Germantown and my mother established a group called Public Education in PEP in Public Education in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and which my brother ran some years and so after her death and so education has been a center of my life through that going through and the importance of education has been proclaimed and that's of course we can do all these things and say we're great doing them but it comes basically from my family coming in and then what I chose was to be a college professor to be an economic historian which I've enjoyed very much.