 in Tallahassee or Newark or Boston, what we have done is looked at the relationship between crime and incarceration at the neighborhood level. And what we can see is that prison and prison admission has a lot to do with race and class in the United States and not particularly with crime. My name is Gir Tont, and I'm a professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. The United States incarcerates more of its own people than any country on the planet in any time in history. The United States has about just below 5% of the world's population, and one in five prisoners are locked up here in the United States. If you go over a few stylized facts of the incarceration system and the prison system in the United States, we know that today there are about 1.9 million people incarcerated. This has been slowly decreased from a 2.4 million or so high in 2009, and it decreased a little bit during a great recession, and especially now during the lockdowns and the slow down of the criminal justice system in response to the pandemic. The prison system is mostly male, over 90% of all those locked up are male, and about 2 thirds of them are black, Latino, and native. The majority of prisoners are poor. They are on average, their average pre-incarceration income is about half of the average income, you know, of the average income of those particular groups. There's lots of kind of geographic variety. So in the United States, there are certain states, especially the Northeastern states, which have a lower incarceration rates versus the Southern states, which have a much higher incarceration rates. So there's a lot of state variation. So each state has its own prison system. In addition to this kind of state prison system, which lock up the bulk of prisoners, you have a series of local jails. And you also have a federal prison system. And so say today, just 1.1 million people or so are locked up in state prisons, 200,000 in federal prisons, and the rest, around five or 600,000 in local jails. And especially during the pandemic, there has been a decrease about 15% of the prison population. The way we can think about prisoners is not just as a stock. It's not just people that are locked up inside a particular prison facility. We have to think of them as a flow because they all come home, or almost all of them do. And so what you have as a constant, so those, the 1.9 million people, they are a snapshot about when they're counted, prisoners are counted, they don't capture the flow. So for example, there might be 500,000 people in local jails right now, but over a year, that would be about 10 million people would cycle in and out. Similarly, with prisons, what you have is about 500,000 people or 600,000 people, or depending on the year, that are entered and that are also released from those prisons. We have to think of the prisoners not just as people that are locked up, but as a flow of people that come in and out. If you think about incarceration rates, it's a way that we can compare how people are locked up in different places. So for example, today there might be about 650 people locked up per 100,000 across the United States, but that would vary between over 1,000 per 100,000 in Louisiana and 300 per 100,000 in Maine. Historically, this seems like a big variation between Maine and Louisiana, which it is, but if you compare this to say like Germany it would be around 90 per 100,000. And historically, the United States is much closer to the German example than its current example of locking up so many people. So in historically, as long as incarceration has been measured, the incarceration rate hovers around 100 per 100,000, much like the Western countries are today, and around during the Great Depression it goes up a little bit, to around 130, during World War II is a historic low. But the first time it surpasses the Great Depression level is 1980, which is an important moment because around 1980 is when all social statistics kind of reverse trends. And we can see a real difference in the possible period before 1980 and after 1980. So often people think about the reason this is, why is it that Maine is three times incarceration rates, three times in the people of Germany or an average European country and in Louisiana 10 times as many, or the United States in general, about six and a half times as many today, and just 10 years ago this was even higher. So most people would say, oh United States has a lot of crime. And usually we think about this kind of relationship between crime and incarceration. So if we think about crime, crime moves alike in different kinds of societies and it has the same similar trends in Germany as it is in Louisiana as it has in Maine or as it has in California or Alaska. The trends are similar and the way crime has been falling since the Middle Ages, since the late Middle Ages crime has been slightly, it has been decreasing across the Western countries. There is an exception and that is between the 1960s and the 1990s, say between 1960 and 1990, there was an increase in crime across the United States, across the Western world. And what we can see is that this has more to do with changing cultural norms than any kind of police or crime or punishment. So usually most people that study crime recognize these aspects of how crime trends move together across countries and across space over time, but they do not think that it has something to do with directly to do with policing or punishment as to how that impact crime. In some of my research I've done, I've looked at this kind of particular relationship between incarceration and crime in United States during the more recent periods. And so for example, in Tallahassee or Newark or Boston, what we have done is looked at the relationship between crime and incarceration at the neighborhood level. And what we can see is that prison and prison admission has a lot to do with race and class in the United States and not particularly with crime. A colleague of mine at the United States Department of John Jay Christian Prenti has talked about kind of funnel effect that exists about crime. So say that for people that drug related crime or drug use, the African-American population in United States about 13% of the population is about, little studies have shown a little less than that in compared drug use, but those arrested for drug use are about 35% are African-American. Those convicted of drug use are 55% of African-American and those incarcerated are 74% incarcerated are African-American. So as you can see this kind of funnel effect that at each level of the criminal justice system, you have some kind of a large impact about race and class. Some people argue that the reason the United States is different is because it has private prisons. Private prisons are a small part of the prison system total. So if there are, again, many states don't have any private prisons. Some rely on private prisons a lot. Some private prisons have more to immigration detention more recently. All together this make a small percentage of the number of beds that are foreseen for prisoners. Another part that people usually talk about is about prison labor. It's that private corporations use and exploit prisoners for their private gain. I'm currently working on a study with a master student, John Jay, Eric Seligman, and he and I have worked and studied prison labor and analyzed prison labor in the United States. And we find that if you look at those for working for private corporations, right, you remember it's like about two million people incarcerated, less than 5,000 work for private corporations. And so it is not something that is explanatory. So the question, you know, then becomes why? So if we think about in 1980, when incarceration rates really increased and surpassed the Great Depression for the first time and you have an increase in 1980s and an increase in the 1990s, especially it starts, the slope starts decreasing, but it continues to increase to 2009 when in the aftermath of the Great Depression and now more with the pandemic, there's been a slight downward trend. So why has that happened during this time period? So with everything in the United States, this is the period of neoliberal capitalism where the way that we think about running the economy changes from before 1980 to after 1980. The prison system had increased sevenfold, you know, over this, or seven and a half times. So why and what is the role of the prison system in neoliberal capitalism in the United States and how does that help us understand race and class dynamics in the neoliberal period in the United States? The prison system, I would argue, is a central labor market institution in the United States and not in the way we think of it sometimes as a way that the prison system exploits labor and prisoners labor, not in that way, but in the kind of, and not just about maintaining the, or anything with the prisoners inside, but mostly for the rest of us outside of prison. In the United States, one thing that is well known in the United States is that inequality has grown tremendously during the neoliberal periods. All kinds of inequality and class power has grown. You have, but in any kind of class society, you need some kind of ways to maintain social control between, in an unequal society. The prison system plays that role in a neoliberal capitalism. The neoliberalism has reduced the need of labor. There has not been a labor shortage, even though right now we are talking a lot about labor shortage, but that's partially because of during the neoliberal period, so many people, neoliberal periods, so much of a percentage of the population has been removed from the labor force. They're not employable anymore. The threat of unemployment is not a sufficient disciplining mechanism. The prison, or the logic of the whip, becomes one instead of maintaining people that have been removed from the labor force and maintaining order. So this maintaining order in the United States has taken different forms from racialized slavery in colonial America and in the early, early part of the United States through Jim Crow segregation, through now the prison system. And they play that role in a similar way in order to maintain and to reproduce the racial color line. In any kind of class society that's very unequal, you have a need to maintain some kind of social order. In the United States, various kinds of racial systems have been used to maintain this kind of social order. So Du Bois talks about this kind of cross-class alliance that's created. The way you do Du Bois talks about this kind of cross-class alliance that's maintained to create this kind of social order. So you have a class line which separates, say, between the capitalist class and the working class and a color line between white and non-white. So the cross-class alliance is that part that's white of the working class aligns himself with certain kind of benefits with the capitalist class that's mostly white in order to maintain kind of a system of social order.