James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics: “Why Americans Tolerate such a Monstrous Penal State”

Millions of Americans, mostly people of color, are segregated in harsh penal confinement. Police killings are at levels seen nowhere else in the developed world. Predatory justice extorts revenue from offenders and their families. Collateral consequences exclude millions of ex-offenders from mainstream society. Death penalties and whole-life sentences imposed long after they’ve been abolished elsewhere…. The persistence of these peculiarly American phenomena raises a question that is as much moral as it is sociological: how could such a monstrous penal state be tolerated by majorities of Americans and their political representatives? In this year’s Moffett lecture, I explore the social sources of public indifference and what might be done to address them.