827 American Literature's War on Crime (with Theodore Martin) | W.E.B. DuBois Sits with Shakespeare
The History of Literature

827 American Literature's War on Crime (with Theodore Martin) | W.E.B. DuBois Sits with Shakespeare

B2Upper-intermediateAugust 31, 20261 hr 23 min
  • Interview

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by an extreme increase in America's prison population, from roughly 250,000 inmates in 1940 to well over two million by 2008. At the same time, American readers were devouring mysteries, thrillers, detective novels, police procedurals, and other forms of crime fiction. In this episode, Jacke talks to Theodore Martin about his book, American Literature's War on Crime: Novels and the Hidden History of Mass Incarceration, which explores the connection between crime novels and the making of mass imprisonment in America. PLUS Jacke takes a look at W.E.B. DuBois's famous statement that...

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Here's the bold statement, America likes to put people in prison.

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0:07

Hello, let's start with a bold statement and support it with some statistics. Here's the bold statement, America likes to put people in prison. That's right, America, my country, land of the free, likes, well, we could say loves, to put people behind bars.

0:27

And 20th century Americans really, really liked to do it. They got drunk on the idea of locking people up. We've sort of known this a long time, but the statistics are still shocking. Now with any stats like this, sources are important, data is imperfect, and so on.

0:46

So with full transparency, I'm pulling these statistics from Wikipedia, which is citing statistics from the World Prison Brief, which is hosted by London's Birkbeck College. I've also looked at statistics from other sources like the US government's Bureau of Prisons, some historical sites, books, and so on, and they're all directionally the

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