In this episode, we take on the question, Why does the US, with 5% of the world's population, hold 25% of its prison population? I speak with historian Elizabeth Hinton, author of, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. She explains the key public policy decisions regarding crime and criminal justice—and the assumptions about race and poverty that shaped them—that caused the US prison population to explode after 1970. Tags: American history, history pod