What are the economic implications of racism?

In this week’s episode, Chris sits down with Elizabeth Hinton. Elizabeth is an American historian and associate professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University, as well as a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the twentieth-century United States. Hinton’s book “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America” traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era. There are 80 million people in the US, or 1 in 3 Americans, that have an arrest or conviction record. Mass incarceration prevents these millions of people from fully participating in society when released. Hinton and Hyams will discuss how we got to this point in America, how the lack of job opportunities contribute to the cycle of police violence and social unrest and what policy recommendations are needed to break this cycle.