Everyday Injustice Podcast Episode 290: “The Problem Isn’t the Prison — It’s That It Exists”

Everyday Injustice

On this episode of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald sits down with distinguished Rutgers University professor Todd Clear, a leading scholar on mass incarceration and its social consequences. With a career spanning over five decades, Clear has been at the forefront of research showing how incarceration harms communities, especially in already-disadvantaged neighborhoods. In this deeply reflective conversation, he shares insights from his landmark work Incarceration and Communities and opens up about his intellectual journey—from aspiring prison reformer to abolitionist thinker. Clear recounts the moment that shifted the trajectory of his career: the 1971 Attica Rebellion, which occurred just as he began graduate school. That event led him to question not only the effectiveness of prison rehabilitation but the very purpose of prisons themselves. Over time, his work evolved into a broader critique of the justice system’s failure to promote community well-being. Rather than making neighborhoods safer, Clear argues, mass incarceration has torn them apart, leaving behind social, emotional, and economic devastation. Throughout the interview, Clear emphasizes the moral and practical failures of a system that punishes excessively while ignoring rehabilitation and human dignity. He argues for a reimagining of justice—one that centers the health of communities and recognizes that risk is not static. Incarceration, he notes, often continues long after any actual threat has diminished. Education, aging, and personal transformation all suggest that many people currently behind bars no longer pose a danger. “If the reason they’re in prison is us, not them,” Clear states, “then we owe them something better.” This episode also highlights a crucial but often overlooked point: the growing crisis in rural America. Clear warns that incarceration rates in economically distressed rural communities are now rivaling or surpassing those in urban areas, exacerbating cycles of poverty and political alienation. As public discourse remains focused on urban crime, this rural dimension remains underexplored. In a conversation that spans history, policy, and moral philosophy, Clear calls for bold reforms—and perhaps most urgently, a reckoning with the damage we’ve done in the name of public safety.