Kevin B. Smith is the author of the new book The Jailer's Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration is Damaging America. His other books include Predisposed. He is the Leland J. and Dorothy H. Olson Professor in political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Q: What inspired you to write The Jailer’s Reckoning?
A: I wanted to know the answers to two questions: (1) Why did the United States—the land of free, the evangelist of democracy and individual liberty—become the largest jailer in the world? (2) What has that done to us, socially, economically, and politically?
Q: Author and scholar Shadd Maruna said of the book, “With the flair of a storyteller and the brain of [a] social scientist, Kevin B. Smith exposes the rise of mass incarceration as an unprecedented and surely unsustainable historical aberration.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s flattering and much appreciated! And Shadd is spot-on about the unsustainable part. Already we're seeing that some states don't even have enough prison guards to handle the prison population, and consequently they're having to increase the amount of time the prisoners are in their cells, which has health and mental health consequences for the prisoners.
Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about incarceration in the United States?
A: The most common misperception is that mass incarceration is a national problem—it is a state problem. Florida locks up people at twice the rate as New Jersey. Texas at three times the rate of Minnesota. Louisiana at four times the rate of Vermont.
Mass incarceration cannot be addressed by the national government because it is primarily being driven at the state level.
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to mass incarceration?
A: Three things.
First, incarceration rates will likely decline somewhat if trends in violence continue trending down but will nonetheless remain at historically high levels.
Second, the massive state-level differences in incarceration rates will continue unchecked.
Third, the big issues associated with mass incarceration will increasingly have less to do with people behind bars and have more to do with the rapidly growing population of ex-convicts.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Pondering my next book!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: The key takeaway of The Jailer’s Reckoning is that we are all paying for a 40-year-long social engineering experiment and will continue paying for the foreseeable future. The extent of that cost, I believe, will surprise a lot of readers.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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