Race and America's Prison Industrial Complex

Dr. Jesse Dizard 
Faculty, Anthropology Department, CSU, Chico 

Dr. Jesse Dizard starts his presentation by noting that there are 4,575 prisons in the United States – this is four times more than Russia, the country with the second-highest number of prisons. The cost of running these prisons is staggering, and an increasing number of them are run by private, for-profit companies rather than by the government. Dr. Dizard shares statistics that illustrate the over-representation (in contrast to their percentage of the U.S.population) of Hispanic and black inmates, both as part of the prison population and as death row prisoners. He concludes that it is difficult to ignore or overstate the enduring effects of racism in the American prison system. 

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Recorded: March 23, 2016