For any particular policy or set of policies, but rather to provide the Historical Context that can help inform policymakers and the public as they deal with difficult issues. I want to acknowledge first off the Financial Support of the mellon foundation, which has made this program possible, and also the work of amanda mooneys, the assistant director, and Frankie Lyons for organizing todays event. The history of mass incarceration, the us you of ofs incarceration issue mass incarceration has reached a Critical Mass of attention in the last six months or so. There have been initiatives that have been launched obviously by the senate just this week. And in various other venues as well. All of them calling for reform of the system of incarceration, and what is interesting is that this has been a Bipartisan Initiative involving democrats and republicans. It is a response to what is clearly a serious problem. I just want to offer a few brief statistics to highlight this. The United States incarcerates about 2. 3 million people, a larger proportion of our population than any other nation on earth. Has 5 of thetes worlds population but nearly 25 of the worlds prison population. Is, how did the United States become what the economist magazine recently referred to as the jailhouse nation. Have three leading historians who will tell us how we got where we are to get a today. Next to me is allen lichtenstein, interim director of the american storm review, author of various work on the history of prison labor. The political economy. It was one of the first works 2. 2 the link between the growth of incarceration first works to point to the link between the growth of incarceration. The newthe director of york public library. He is the author of condemnation of blackness. He is also contributing author 2014 National Research council study, the growth of incarceration in the United States. Last not least is heather thompson, professor of history at the university of michigan who has written widely on the issue of mass incarceration, and. As a book coming out she sits on the board of the Prison Policy Initiative and she to recently served on the National Academy of sciences Blueribbon Panel on the consequences of incarceration in the United States. We have a great panel here this afternoon. What will happen is that each of them will speak for about 10 minutes and then we will have a few minutes for questions, answers, discussion, and the like, and we have about an hour in total. Thank you, thank you all for coming this afternoon. And theu to Dane NationalHistory Center for arranging this. It is an honor to be here with khalil and heather, who i know well. My task is to talk about the deep 19thcentury. Looking at that period makes me skeptical and cautious. We are poised on the edge of Prison Reform. The Current System seems too many people on both sides of the aisle to be cruel and unusual. The latter, because it is in fact unique in the contemporary world and its intensity and as unprecedented history of its scope in the United States as well as around the world. I know they will speak to how we moved from a system to a system of incarceration to mass incarceration over the past century. Systemminal justices reliance on incarceration, we can all agree that it is simply fiscally unsustainable at this point. I think that is the reason for bipartisan concern with reform. Said, thess, as i history of Prison Reform makes me skeptical when i hear enthusiasm or new ideas. More often than not, the history of Prison Reform has been the history of new forms of brutalization and human exploitation of the incarcerated. When Charles Dickens visited the showcase president of the United States, the model for the rest of the world at the time, the eastern state penitentiary in philadelphia in 1842, he observed and wrote that in its intention i will conceived that i am tentiary but those who designed the system do not know what it is theyre doing. Tickets recognized dickens recognized the prison which confinement,litary laid in the first generation of american penal reformers. In doing so, they built a prison that they thought was adequate to the needs of a virtuous new nation. This is in the first decades of the 19th century. In doing so, they hoped they would improve over the ability to states punish and torture wrongdoers. It arose as an explicit reform. When dickens condemned the penal experiment, he acknowledged a new system had already risen to take its place, the socalled auburn system. Named for a prison in new york which still stands. I think heather has led wars there. Tours there. It was called probably the best prison in the world, a model worthy of the worlds imitation. Instead of confining prisoners to isolation, the auburn congregate system as it was called, brought them together into a single space so they could engage in common labor. In essence, the auburn system turned the prison into a factory. It was probably no accident auburn systeme began to displace the philadelphia system as the model prison at the very moment in the 19th century that the factory had begun to replace the art is all workshop as the main site of industrial production. This innovation was most certainly touted at the time as a reform of the existing solitary system in philadelphia, whether because of its allegedly more salutary effect on the prisoners. It is hard to say. Whatever the originally been assistant attentions were of the auburn that assistant intentions were of the auburn system produced a work Program Efficient enough to be leased out to the highest that are. Bidder. R they produced clothing, carpets, homes, furnaces, furniture, even rifles. Essentially all of the commodities of a growing industrial and consumer economy in the 19th century, much the way goat cheese and farm raised to let be a part tilapia are today. This system of the prison factory does seem somehow to be regarded today as a potential solution. Inon i put marks quote marks. In any case, when progressive penal reform or Thomas Osborne day,ted the prisons of his he pointed to none other than the auburn prison which loomed over his hometown in new york like a medieval dungeon, where he spent a voluntary week to study conditions as a prisoner. Osborne pointed to auburn as the preeminent example of a cool system that did more to brutalize and hardened prisoners and to reform or rehabilitate. The previous generations reform was the next generations example of brutality. The 19th century south lagged behind the north in penal in the innovation. Many of the people normally subject to the penal discipline of the state were instead disciplined by their masters. They were slaves. Emancipation in 1965 change that, thrilling 4 million new citizens into the labor market potentially the critical terminal Justice System. Many whites in the south turn to the shares badge and judges gavel. The south was poor. There was no money to open or build new prisons so the solution was to release the prisoners out to the highest bid der, having them make railroads and bricks, and whatever work the entrepreneurs thought was necessary. Wasconvict lease system simply a new system of slavery or a barbarous throwback to a darker error era. System, even if the leasing of that labor to place outside the prison walls instead of inside them. System one think the should be laid solely at the feet of the southern democrats, the party of White Supremacy in the south at the time, in fact it was the republicans of the reconstruction governments who wanted to rebuild the south, who pioneered the system as a potential reformist system. This can be seen as a penal innovation and a reform in its day. Which came tog, represent the most brutal aspect of southern punishment, only fell under bad odor in the south when a more progressive penal system began to take its place. That was the chain gang, the symbol of argest replaced convict leasing. A used penal offered helpful, Outdoor Activity to keep prisoners busy, that is how it was sold as a reform. Yet fell gang itself into disfavor journey Great Depression when it was exposed by films. The 1930s, not only was the chain gang condemned as brutal but theres convict on the roads were seen as taking jobs from the needy. Let me put it this way every the 19th and early 20th century chronology, the auburn factory system, the convict lease system, the chain every single one was advertised by its advocates as a been assistant and necessary assistant and necessary reform. Even in our own era, i suspect the notorious super max prison returning to isolation of the earliest prisons, even though as early as the 1840s doctors are pointing out that extended periods of solitary confinement group drove people mad, even the super max was developed with a benificent idea. Each brought new horrors. I do not recount this history to dissuade anyone from reforming our Current System which is so , obviously in need of change. As far as i can tell this is about the only thing the democrats and republicans in congress cant agree on right now, that we need some kind of penal reform. As a historian i want strike a cautionary note. I want to suggest that we need to pay much more attention to why we punish and incarcerate and who and how much and for how long in addition to how. In thinking we can improve the latter, that is the prison system, perhaps as a society we avoid wrestling with the more difficult questions about who is sent there and why. Let me wrap up my comments with 18kens own conclusion in 42. There is surely more than sufficient reason for abandoning a mode of punishment attended by some little hope of honest and fraught beyond dispute with such a host of evils. Thank you so much. [applause] to director kennedy. Thank you for inviting me to join this very Important Panel to discuss the history of incarceration. Both small and large. Millions of people in our institution represents the nations most urgent threat to democratic governance, the principle of liberty, and in fact inequality. Constituents of the federal government thank you for joining , us this afternoon. I am honored to share this space with my colleagues. Building on his key point i want first emphasize the deeply historical nature of Racial Discrimination as a pillar of incarceration. In short, how the very notion of punishment assumes a citizen and noncitizen type. Constructs which were fundamentally tied to racial and social categories, white and free, black and enslaved, indigenous and colonized. It serves to remind us that there is no moments in north American History with crime and punishment have not been shaped by these ideas. In light of what alex noted about the history of the jim crow south policies and practices as a punishment reggie custom tailored to serve the ideology of White Supremacy and new economic development, the criminal Justice System that was neither backwards but the modern, but in fact a crucial forwardlooking innovation. I will link the progressive policy is the punishment in the south to the urban north in the early 20th century. This will show throw in sharp relief how contemporaneous are our ideas and practices in the 21st century as compared to a century ago. Humanitarians and religious leaders designed as an alternative to brutal and punishmentorms of such as branding dismemberment , and beheading inherited from old world europe. It was intended to be a rational instrument of social control. Early prisons sure many comment features such as solitary confinement. They were also overcrowded with men of european ancestry. They were conceived in opposition to slavery. According to one scholar. Slavery was the Great National scandal of the antebellum age of and the reformers who built the 20th century belongs to antislavery circles defined their institution against the brutality of the plantation. They represented the discipline of slavery as a dehumanizing violence and their own punishment by contrast, a set of refined chastisement that prepared the convict for freedom and selfgovernance. The enslaved black and indigenous native american populations remained outside the gate, subject to brutal and capricious physical punishment. By todays standards, this wasnt a problem. Did prison demographics change so past two centuries . If the earliest prisons were not yet defined by huge disparities in incarceration it was not , stigmatized by black people is prone to reality. The idea of black criminality is embedded in the cultural dna of the nation. During the earliest days of the nation, the idea of aryan freedom was born in contrast. As early as the 17th century, leading. 10 ministers equated blackness puritans took seriously the conventional image of the black and black and character of a virtuous. The demons who possessed young white girls during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692 were described as black. The devil himself was called the black man. This is not an isolated incident or literary metaphor divorce of the actual situation. And 1800, they identified 33 published execution in reference to the criminal offenses. The racial criminalization of blacks has been a common theme from the colonial. Colonial period until the helped to lay the Cultural Foundation for distinctive treatment against africanamericans. Much Current Research turns on Racial Disparities as a measure of punitive punishment policies. American drug and crime policies have disabled poor young black men from successful participation in American Life and thereby damaged not only them but their families and communities. The Racial Disparity data notes are legion. The democratic consequences of erican crime control state it is now common in scholarship the news and even congressional , debates to note the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal Justice System. Bruce weston, another renowned scholar adds that the novel social experience is wholly outside of mainstream social life. From estimates of how many black babies born today will go to prison to how many citizens indicatete, these data unparalleled gray space punitive this. The literature was not always this way. For much of the past, it was not read automatically. There instead evidence of pathology. Bad behavior produced Racial Disparity. Disparity data drove down policy. As once noted harvard scholar of the late 19th century, statistics will lead the way to a new understanding of black peoples true racial capacity. One of the earliest promoters of the use of Racial Disparity data in the 1890s. Near the turn of the 20th century, this scholar and many built antions enduring framework for how to study, discuss, and debate Racial Disparities between blacks and whites. Frederick kaufman, the leading expert on homicide rates outside census reports in the 1930s established black crimes is to six as evidence of group destruction. As he noted in his well read and in the statistics of crime and the data of illegitimacy, the proof is furnished that neither religion nor education has decreased to an appreciable degree the moral progress of the race. Several leading social scientist lead, carrying forward the nothing works approach of the last halfcentury, essentially using the disparity of punishment as evidence that there was no point in helping these people. In the following example i will sketch a relationship of white criminality in the early 20th century, like white incarceration in colonial america is a use of racial crime data. Words, to note nonpunitive racial responses to one of many avenues on the way to mass incarceration. Children are dying in chicago. The young and old are afraid to walk the streets of some neighborhoods. Gangs and drugs have overtaken many neighborhoods. Mothers and ministers are organizing antiviolence campaigns. Juvenile delinquency experts are working together to stop the bloodshed. In the words of one Community Activist those of us who live in , chicago are obliged. Lester they were arrested and brought into court. The year is 1909, not 2010. No politicians were calling for the National Guard to intervene in chicagos most troubled communities. Advocates were anxiously awaiting the Supreme Court decision on the case of the donald versus chicago, a landmark case that overturned 20yearold handgun bans in chicago. Crime and antiviolence prevention was still compassion, not fear. Nativeborn whites and european immigrants were still the face of innercity crime, not lax and latinos. Obviously much has changed, but not killings. Blackefore the latemodel drug dealer or gang banger became public enemy number one, well before al capone gained a reputation for being the most violent place in america. Young white drug pushers terrorized lawabiding resident. The most influential social worker witnessed white on white violence daily for decades. The violence,ng he wrote, this tale could be duplicated on most every morning. White teenager, she added, a transplant from a little farm in ohio has shot and killed a policeman by resisting arrest and was now awaiting the death penalty. Chicagoans grew heartsick over the mounting tragedies just as we do today. How did this happen . That the circumstances of chicagos white on white