America built mass incarceration: the wholesale imprisonment of entire populations. Why, exactly, are so many people in prison - more than the entire population of New Mexico? That's our focus for this week's video: how a crisis of capitalism created a surplus population of former workers concentrated in declining cities, and how politicians and capitalists - instead of helping those people, and building a better and more just economy - built a prison system larger than any other in the history of the world to warehouse them. Chase Madar, professor of law at NYU Gallatin, explains.
