The late 20th century saw dramatic growth in incarceration rates in the United States. Of the more than 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers in 2020, 60 percent were Black or Latinx.
Harvard Business School assistant professor Reshmaan Hussam probes the assumptions underlying the current prison system, with its huge racial disparities, and considers what could be done to address the crisis of the American criminal justice system in her case, “Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States.”
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BRIAN KENNY: 1865 was a momentous year for the United States. Citizens witnessed the end of a devastating civil war and the abolition of slavery. They mourned the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It was, by the account of many historians, a critical turning point in the history of the Republic. Many criminologists might agree, because 1865 also triggered the nation’s first prison boom, with surging numbers of Black Americans being thrown into prison, fueled by a wealthy white class unnerved by a sudden shortage of labor and pending post-war recession. It’s no coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865. The Black Codes, or laws, enacted across the southern states in that year would see Black people thrown in prison for such offenses as walking without a purpose or walking at night. So, how have things changed in the past century and a half? We’ll take that up next with professor Reshmaan Hussam, discussing her case entitled, “Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call, on the HBR Presents network.
Reshmaan Hussam is a member of the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at HBS, what we affectionately call the “Biggie” Unit. Her research explores questions at the intersection of development, behavioral and health economics. Reshma, thank you so much for joining me today.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Thank you so much for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s your first time on the show, so we’ll try to make it painless for you, so we can get you to come back at some point in the future. I know you’ve got some other very interesting cases. Let me ask you to start by telling us, what would your cold call be to start this case in class?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: It is a little bit funny that I’m on the Cold Call podcast because this is one of those very few cases in which I don’t have a cold call.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s okay.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: One of the reasons that is, it’s quite a heavy case and a heavy topic. I try to avoid more nervousness or tension than is necessary. The question I ask is, to start off the class is, what are the social and economic roots to the racial disparities we now see in mass incarceration in the US? Really to probe how each moment in history is a measure or a signal of racial disparities in that moment, that are then persistent, and why that persistence really exists.
BRIAN KENNY: Let me ask you, what prompted you to write the case? How does it relate back to the work that you do as a scholar?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: It was a little bit circuitous actually. I had a personal interest in this space, but in terms of my research, most of my research is based in South Asia. In particular, I’m doing a bunch of work with the Rohingya refugees, who left from a genocide in Myanmar and are now in Bangladesh. I had written a case on that and my goal in that case had been to help our students think through the processes of dehumanization that can end with something as stark and terrifying as genocide. My goal, beyond understanding those processes, had been to get students to think about how this not only happens in other places in the world, but how this also can happen in your own back yard.
When we taught that case, those students were very invested in the context and the question. I don’t think they were quite making that connection, that these sorts of steps of dehumanization, in fact, can happen right in your own back yard, and in fact, we can be party to those processes of dehumanization.
That’s really what pushed me to write this case on mass incarceration because it illustrates quite explicitly how those things that we think only happen half the world over are in fact something that has happened within our history and within our current context as well in the US.
BRIAN KENNY: You can really see that unfolding as you follow the narrative of the case. There’s a protagonist in this case. Can you tell us about Alexis Jackson and her background as the protagonist?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: I’ll do my best. She’s fantastic, Alexis Jackson. She’s a second-year EC student now at HBS. She was kind and generous and courageous enough to share her story with us. Alexis grew up in Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh. She had a father who was incarcerated for several years while she was young. She described to us how it was that he came to be incarcerated and her experiences with her father in prison. Her father was in fact the first in his family to attend college. His name is Al Caldwell. When he came out of college he struggled quite a lot to find a job. He ended up working at a gas station. Part of trying to make ends meet to provide for his family meant that he became involved in drug selling. He was caught with possession of drugs and sentenced to a few years in prison. That’s how it came to be that she would go with her grandmother twice a month to go visit him in prison in West Virginia. She describes it strikingly as quite a normal thing, not something that was very jarring. She certainly missed him. She was very close to him. She missed him. She just remembers playing Scrabble with him in prison. He would send the very little money that he could accumulate home to her on her birthdays. Eventually he got out and was lucky enough to find a job with a company that accepted individuals who had been formerly incarcerated. I think it’s worth it to read one line of what she describes about this experience.
BRIAN KENNY: Please do.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: She basically said, “It was normal, and I was lucky. I had a dad who was active in my life. In our neighborhood, we used to accept the idea that by the time you’re 21, as a Black man, you’re either in jail or dead,” which I thought was quite powerful. The other thing I’d like to mention about what she shared with us, is that her brother was also tangled with the carceral system and in quite a different context, which is that he had been suffering from depression and mental health challenges for quite a while after the death of his grandmother, who was his main caretaker. Then he became incarcerated for having an unregistered firearm. As Alexis describes it, she saw that he needed therapy, mental health help, but instead, what he got was prison. She saw it as a cycle. He was incarcerated. He eventually got out. Again, because he didn’t have the right therapy, he found himself back in prison. It was through the experience of her brother that she really saw that prison is not a rehabilitative place. It is not a place that was able to deter crime. In fact, it was only punishing her brother, when what he actually needed was mental health help.
BRIAN KENNY: Very powerful stories. We talk about Alexis, saying that this felt normal to her. I think what’s happened in the United States is that it feels normal to people who aren’t in the prison system to assume that everybody that’s there belongs there and this is how it’s supposed to be. Your case really illustrates why that should not be the assumption. Let’s just dive into just a little bit, some of the numbers in the case. How do US incarceration rates compare with incarceration in other countries?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: It’s quite striking. I think, in fact, it’s the most striking statistic in the case. The US is a leader in incarceration in the world. The next highest incarceration rate, in 2012 was Rwanda. The US incarceration rate in 2012 was 707 per 100,000. Rwanda is 492 per 100,000. Now I checked more recent statistics and I think El Salvador is now in the 590s and the US has dropped into the 690s. Still, that is a massive margin. In fact, we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to Rwanda or El Salvador. We should be comparing ourselves to comparable Western European democracies. If we do that, then the US is about seven times the average incarceration rate of comparable Western European democracies.
BRIAN KENNY: Unbelievable.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: So, it’s striking.
BRIAN KENNY: If you look at the numbers that you just described, those are astronomical numbers. We don’t want to be leading that way in the world, but it hasn’t always been that way. The case describes a turning point where we entered this modern era of incarceration. What was that turning point?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: If you look at the numbers of incarceration rates, there is a clear rise, a rapid rise, what you would call a turning point, from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. We can talk about why that is, there were certain legislative changes and changes in funding, and also changes in crime rate that arguably led to this steep rise of what we call this era of mass incarceration. Even though we see these numbers rise during those few decades, I think it’s very important to think about what were the social norms, the desires of the population, the expectations of the population, that allowed, that permitted that sort of legislation to pass, that permitted that sort of funding to be diverted to what we call the criminal justice system. That deeper social dimension I think was fostered and nurtured for centuries, not just in those few decades before.
BRIAN KENNY: One thing that I didn’t ask you before, Reshma, has to do with the percentage of Blacks that are in the prison system versus whites. Is it safe to say that, on a percentage wide basis, there are many more Blacks being incarcerated than whites, or even Latinx?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Absolutely. Both Black and Latinx communities are clearly disproportionately represented within the carceral system. As a base measure, if we think of these minority communities, Blacks and Latinx, representing 30 percent of the US population, they represent 60 percent of the prison population. It’s a massive over-representation.
BRIAN KENNY: Massive, and it gives us a stepping off point to look at the history around this, that number has been fairly consistent, even going back to 1865, what I teased in the beginning of the show about the Black Codes. Can you describe a little bit about the incarceration system at that time? I loved the way you described the origins of policing, which I had no idea those origins began in the Deep South.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Yeah. The first arguably, state sponsored policing, were slave patrols, individuals who were tasked with finding runaway slaves and punishing them and incarcerating them and returning them also to their slave masters for further punishment. I think that’s quite important, that the origins of the carceral system, as one of retribution, as one of punishment, is something that scholars now are articulating, can be traced back to this institution of slavery. Arguably, I should say, this case doesn’t go back a little further, which maybe we should and scholars do, which is to the genocide of Native Americans. That might seem like quite a different phenomenon, but in fact, Bryan Stevenson, who is part of the Equal Justice Initiative, makes this really powerful point, which is, the reason that the carceral system evolved to be one of retribution is because it’s much easier to punish those who you think of as less human. Now, how do you come to this place of thinking of someone as less human? Within our own history in America, the starting point was with the genocide of Native Americans, where we “other-ized” this population, this large population of indigenous peoples, to a point in which we could think, it’s okay if they are eliminated, effectively. That sentiment was echoed in the process of slavery, and in the ways in which we thought of and conceived of slaves, which was not as human. You can see this process of dehumanization really, through both the way one treated slaves, and then as you said, after 1865, with the Black Codes in which individuals were punished for doing very normal, mundane human activities. How do we understand the legal mandate that comes from a popular, from a social desire, to segregate, to really think of the black community as less than and polluted as Isabel Wilkerson describes in her amazing book, Caste. Then you had the Jim Crow Laws that was accompanied by this social activity one would say, called lynchings.
BRIAN KENNY: Much more prevalent than I realized until I read the case.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: It’s a phenomenon that we’ve all heard of, that individuals were lynched. But I think it’s really important for us, and our audience, to sit with this event called the lynching, which again, like I said, was a social activity. Lynchings happened when a community thought that the functioning criminal justice system, the court system, was not going to really deliver the justice, what they called justice. That’s powerful. The case has a picture in there where you have little children watching a lynching and smiling at the camera. It’s really hard to articulate these ideas, but we should articulate them and we should recognize that they’re well within our own lived and remembered history when, to think of a Black body that was murdered even outside the court systems, was something to celebrate.
BRIAN KENNY: In a truly barbaric fashion. I couldn’t help but think about, when I read that Blacks could be arrested for things like walking without a purpose, you think about the phenomenon today of driving while Black, or doing almost anything while Black can bring you under suspicion, and we’ve seen this play out time and time again. Very sadly, it feels like not a lot has changed from that period of time to this period of time for the Black experience. Let’s bring it up a little bit more to modern day and talk about the 1994 Crime Act. It seemed like, in the case, that was really a turning point that fueled things as well. Can you describe the impact of that?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: I think one of the important things with the 1994 Crime Act is that it reflects the bipartisan nature of this phenomenon of mass incarceration. The Crime Act was brought up under Bill Clinton. It was championed by our current President Joe Biden, who has since acknowledged that it was a mistake, as many others have, but it’s again, really worth recognizing that this was championed by democrats. It was advocated for by Hillary Clinton, using the idea of super predators, which was this idea that was popularized by a then Princeton professor that there was going to be a massive group of dangerous, quote unquote, super predators who are young teens looking to pillage and destroy communities. The image was of young Black men. The Crime Act was part of a several decade long trajectory of being tough on crime, which was a very popular political position to take at the time. What it led to were much, much higher rates of imprisonment following conviction, far longer sentences, and a much greater proportion of time served on those sentences, rather than, for example, on probation or parole. In addition, it tied up much more federal funding in the carceral system. One of the reasons this is so significant, besides the bipartisan nature of it, is that these things are very hard to roll back. Once you say you’re tough on crime, nobody finds it politically popular to say you are light on crime, or weak on crime. The tough on crime is this ratchet effect and the Crime Act was maybe the pinnacle of that.
BRIAN KENNY: There were also huge disparities in sentencing between whites and non-whites following the implementation of the Crime Act.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Not just following, even prior to, but yes, following as well. Maybe some statistics will be useful, in the end of the 1980s, Blacks were arrested at four times the rate of whites, despite the fact that the Black population is less than a fifth of the white population. In particular, this was especially disproportionate with drug crimes. The rates of drug use among Blacks was consistently lower than whites, as were rates of drug selling. I think those two statistics are things that are not understood or recognized in popular culture or popular media, and yet, despite lower rates of drug selling and drug use, the proportion of Blacks arrested and convicted and jailed was far, far higher than for whites. By 2010 we were in a position where one in every three Black men could be expected to be incarcerated in their lifetime.
BRIAN KENNY: Remarkable, and the case describes firsthand what it’s like to be in prison. I think everybody assumes it’s no picnic, and we see it depicted on TV and in movies. I would say, having read the case, it feels to me like it’s a little different than what we see in the movies but it’s just as horrific in different ways. Can you describe a little bit about what that is like?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: One of the common themes is the material constraints, so things that you and I just take for granted to be able to do, like read a book. It often costs an exorbitant amount of money to do in prison. Make a phone call, again an exorbitant amount of money. Of course, these are for individuals who are lacking that very thing. They’re lacking cash. Often they were the bread winners of their family. It’s quite ironic that not only are they being charged far, far, far higher than you or I would be for either of those things or for sending a text. They don’t have the cash to even pay for that. But I think what was most powerful to me as I wrote this case was learning about the psychological constraints. Again, this harkens back to the social desires that create what we think of as a carceral system now, which is one again, of retribution, of punishment, rather than of rehabilitation. The prison is designed to always punish, to punish in a deep way, again as I described, in this way of dehumanizing. If I might just read a quote from a fantastic podcast, a very, very short series of recordings called, “The Zo.” Which is slang for the prison. It’s a collection of formerly incarcerated and incarcerated individuals who describe prison as, “The life of a prisoner is not a life at all. It is nothing short of a bleak, pitiful existence within an inhumane, artificial environment that is scientifically proven to degrade an individual’s sense of humanity to base levels.” I do think that’s worth sitting with. The little things one does to shape prison life to make one feel less than human.
BRIAN KENNY: Let’s talk about reform, because the case talks a lot about the kinds of reforms that have been tried. I would love for you to describe a couple of them and tell us if they have any merit.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: What we want to do is address the system, not just be desperately sad about the system.
BRIAN KENNY: Right, exactly.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Which is often where I am. If we think about reform, typically it might be useful to separate reform policies into two camps, traditional reform policies and what we think of as abolitionist policies. In the traditional reform policies, things that are now currently being championed with bipartisan support, you might think of improving prison conditions, so improving the conditions that I just described of life in prison, ending cash bail. A huge proportion of individuals who are currently sitting in jails are sitting there, not because they have been convicted of anything, but because they can’t afford the cash bail to release them until the trial. That’s something around 60 to 75 percent of individuals currently sitting in jails are in that position. If we were to end cash bails those individuals would not be missing their work and then consequently losing their job, which in turn, creates this vicious cycle. There’s also reform in sentencing laws. Both the 1994 Crime Bill and previous acts enforced ideas like mandatory minimums, the Three Strikes law. These legal moves made sentencing quite harsh, so perhaps we want to reform sentencing, and perhaps even decriminalize certain current acts which are considered criminal, for example, homelessness and perhaps drug possession. Then there’s also increasing rates of probation and parole instead of prison, so how might one do this. One new technological innovation is, for example, using GPS bracelets to track individuals rather than having to keep them within prison to be monitored. Also implementing various policing algorithms called predictive policing, or algorithms that determine what you’re risk of recidivism is and help shape what you’re sentencing should be like. That’s in the reform camp. Now when I say abolition, there’s a community of activists who consider themselves abolitionists, meaning they want to abolish the prison system as we know it. Now, how do they wish to do that, in two ways. The first is to defund or to divest funding from the industrial prison complex, the broad set of companies or corporations including prisons that feed this large system.
BRIAN KENNY: We know what a charged word defunding is. I’m sorry to interrupt, but defunding is a very charged word these days.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely, and I think that it helps to think about this idea of defunding both in the prisons and in policing. It’s a very charged word that is often… Those arguments or those conversations are often lacking nuance. The defunding term is not intended, I think, to say eliminate entirely, but rather to divert resources from what, for example abolitionists see as organizations that contribute to reducing safety in these communities to initiatives that increase safety. For example, mental health initiatives, investing in education, investing in healthcare in these communities, et cetera. I think it’s useful to have this conversation, because often one might say, yes it’s important to invest in these communities. Let’s invest in mental health initiatives and healthcare, but let’s keep the prison system as it is. But of course money or budget constraints are typically the policy constraint. Where will you get the funding to invest in communities? And that’s what abolitionists argue one must do through divesting in the carceral system.
BRIAN KENNY: Why not just privatize the whole thing, just have private prisons? That’s one of the things the case covers too. What are the issues around privatizing?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Good question, and important for, I think, a business school audience. Are prisons a setting in which incentives are aligned? In fact, they’re exactly not. It’s exactly the space in which we would not want to privatize, because when one privatizes, private companies are incentivized to maximize profit. How do they maximize profit in the prison industrial complex? They do so by the number of prisoners who they house, or the number of prisons that they build. The government contracts out these services. They pay you per prisoner often. So their incentives are to maximize the number of prisoners, which effectively means both to make crime laws tougher to increase the number of people who go through their system, to increase these rates of criminality potentially, and finally to reduce rehabilitative efforts as much as possible, because you prefer high recidivism rates. You prefer that individuals return to prison rather than eliminating the need for prisons. That would be destroying their own business model. So in order to maximize their profits, their incentives are actually just switched. The worse their services, the cheaper their services, for example, healthcare, education, quality of food, rehabilitative services, the more money they pocket. It’s precisely an industry in which we should not be engaging arguably, in privatizing.
BRIAN KENNY: This has been a fabulous conversation, Reshma. I want to ask you one more question before I let you go, which is, what’s the one thing you would want people to remember from reading this case?
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: I think my main goal, and I should not say “my” by the way. This was written with a fantastic co-author, Holly Fetter, who is a former student of mine at HBS. I think our main goal is to get our students to probe the underlying assumptions that have built the current carceral system. It’s easy enough to talk about the legislative policies that have led to increased incarceration, but I think it’s very important to think about why we find imprisonment and this vast carceral system in the US so normal. I think we find it that way because retributive policies, policies of punishment, punishment for crimes, and on top of that, thinking of an individual as a criminal rather than an individual, an individual who has committed a crime, all of these things are quite normal in our day to day ethos. Why are they normal? That, I think, goes back to this question of race, which sits deep, deep within our psyche, within how we understand human beings within this country because of our history. In the end, I think it’s important for us to think about reform. I think it’s important for us to think about action items moving forward, but I don’t think we can really do that in a sincere and genuine and meaningful way until we grapple with these underlying assumptions and feelings that even you and I have, about who is a criminal, what they deserve, and the idea that we often prefer punishment to rehabilitation in these spaces because of how we’ve defined criminality along lines of race.
BRIAN KENNY: Reshma Hassam, thank you so much for joining us on Cold Call today.
RESHMAAN HUSSAM: Thank you so much for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you’ll like other podcasts on the HBR network. They’re full of management insights from the best thought leaders in business, all curated by Business Harvard Review, and they’re free on Apple Podcasts. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School, on the HBR Presents network.