RPP Podcast- Incarceration in America

The hosts discuss the history of crime, policing, and public policy in America. In the 1900s, there was a lack of punishment for crimes, resulting in many killers evading arrest. The 1920s saw the first war on crime, leading to aggressive policing. Minority groups were disproportionately targeted. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers and Chicano Militant Group pushed back against aggressive policing. The focus on the war on crime overshadowed efforts to address poverty. Poverty was blamed on minority communities without considering systemic racism. The use of AI for crime anticipation raises concerns about systemic racism and biases. Funding for incarceration and policing increased dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s. The penal system replaced welfare systems, and drug treatment programs were defunded. The prison system also took the place of inhumane mental institutions. The trend of over-policing and profiling continues today and may evolve with predictive analytics. Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Chris Sochowski, and today I'm joined with my guest host, Anna P. Say hi, Anna. Anna P. Hey there. Chris Sochowski One of the topics I find fascinating in America as a carceral state, we hear in the media all the time how America has way more of its population incarcerated than our peer countries. Today we're going to explore the history of crime in the 1900s, policing, and public policy that led us to where we are today. So starting off in the 1900s, we see a real lack of enforced punishment on crimes. Prosecutors only saw about 20% of their cases end in conviction. Judges were frequently dismissing cases, resulting in four out of five killers evading arrest. In 1925, due to public outrage, we start seeing the first war on crime appear with politicians and public policy focusing more on the punishment aspect. In 1934, J. Edgar Hoover started the FBI, and it was around this time we see cops start to go through a rebranding. Previously, they were considered widely ineffective. They were kind of more like a Paul Blart mall cop kind of look to them, but then we started to see a real swing to the opposite side and them becoming overly aggressive. Yeah, and I feel like that aggression definitely seemed to target minority groups the most. We had looked at a story of a homicide in 1932 of a white grocer, and the police rounded up 900 black men, did fingerprint and interrogate, but it turned out to be like one in six men of that town. That's wild. Four out of five killers evading police to 900 people being questioned over one murder. Huge swing. Exactly. Crazy. Yeah, so you know we continue to see this type of aggression, aggressive policing throughout the 1900s, and we start to see minority groups give a little bit more pushback, especially in the 1960s with the formation of the Black Panthers in the 1966 and the Chicano Militant Group. Yeah, at the same time too in the 60s, we also had President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society efforts to address the war on poverty, but I feel like those war on poverty efforts really just got absorbed by the focus on war on crime. For sure. So it is widely accepted that poverty was the root of crime. However, they didn't seem to understand the root of poverty, especially for minority communities. There's a widely popular article, The Negro Family, by Daniel Moyahan that basically said it was the black community's own fault that they were poor and completely ignored the effects of systemic racism and slavery. That's so wild because you just really expect a group of people that's been pushed down and marginalized for so long to be able to just be on equal footing as people who've had all these privileges and really doesn't, puts all the ownership of poverty back on them and doesn't really address the root cause there to get to equality. So one thing that really stood out to me on this overlap between poverty and crime was the idea of taking a military approach to focus on anticipated crime. So Philadelphia used a computer system to identify urban areas that were more likely to have crimes committed and focused the majority of their policing efforts there to try to detract from crime or get the criminals before they actually did anything. Well, there's the root of the over-policing right there. I think we see that today just in our own area. We're always seeing cops cruising on the west side of town, but not really in the nicer parts of the city. But regarding Philadelphia's crime anticipation, weren't you watching a show that is exploring the same idea, but in a modern day AI? Yeah, so there's this new show that I was watching on Hulu called Class of 09, and I won't get into the whole premise, but basically part of the show is set in the future where crime is virtually non-existent, but it's because of this very sophisticated AI algorithm that uses facial recognition and smart devices and just takes in all this data to identify the key factors of someone who would commit a crime, and then they arrest them before they actually have a chance to commit the crime. I thought that was kind of a cool idea at first, because it would be great to just get criminals off the street before they do anything, and maybe if you're buying fertilizer and igniting materials, you're like... Suspicious purchases. Yeah, and you're like, okay, yeah, they're going to build a bomb. Let's not wait for the bomb. Let's get them off the street. But as we've been having our conversation today, I'm really seeing how probably that AI could have some inherent systemic racism built into it, and probably just isn't the best approach. Yeah, well, I mean, it's also built by human beings who have their own biases and everything else, so I could see how that could definitely cause problems. Well, and we've even seen that with facial recognition on phones. I think there was an example, it was either... I mean, one of the two, right? iPhone or Android, but it recognized, could distinguish between white people's faces, but couldn't distinguish between black people's faces, because they just didn't have any of those racial groups involved in the development of the process. Right. So like you said, it's AI and it's smart, but it's human-based. Yeah, definitely something to watch as we move towards the future capabilities. So where we left off in the 60s and 70s, we saw a huge jump in state support funding in incarceration and policing. In 1965, $22 million was spent on policing, and that number had jumped to $7 billion right before Reagan's presidency. Gosh, that's like an astronomical increase in not really that long a time. I feel like it really shows you where our priorities are as a country, where we're spending so much money on that. Well, you definitely see more focus on arresting people than trying to solve the problem of why they're being arrested. Yeah, or same for schools, too. I feel like we saw that in town. They just built a new Clayton County jail a few years ago, but I know my high school had holes in the auditorium that would leak every time it rains, and it's like where your dollar's spent really shows the value you place in your community. Right. From the 1980s to 2000, our incarceration population quadrupled and was disproportionately made up of black and Latino men. Throughout the second half of the 1900s, we also see the penal system really take the place of welfare systems. Drug treatment programs were defunded and a high rate of arrests for drug crimes. I feel like that's probably the theme for mental health, too, right? We see a lot of inmates, even now, would probably benefit from mental health programs, but because there's not enough funding or not enough education, they're incarcerated instead. So that actually has a historical context, too, though. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, mental institutions were so inhumane that there are several documented cases of offenders actually asking to be placed in prison instead of these facilities. Oh, wow. I didn't realize that. That's sad. I mean, I think it probably makes sense, right, because education has come farther now, but it definitely gives some more context to some of the trends we see today. All right. Well, we're coming to a close. Let's recap what we've learned. America's ineffective approach to crime came to an end in the late 1920s with the creation of the FBI and the rise of aggressive policing procedures, particularly against minority communities. We continue to see the approach last throughout the 1900s, and minority communities begin to form groups to push back. At the same time, we see war of poverty policies really become a vehicle to incarcerate more disadvantaged groups and begin the trend of policing anticipated crimes versus crimes that were actually committed. This type of profiling and over-policing is prevalent today and will likely continue to evolve with the rise of predictive analytics. I hope this segment has been of value to our listeners and leave this conversation a little more educated than when you began to listen. Once again, I'm your host, Crystal Hotsky. And I'm Anna P. Thank you for listening, and we'll catch you next time.