Ani-Turner Racial Equity

Ani Turner, a Co-director at the Altarum Center for Sustainable Health Spending, wrote an essay called “The Business Case for Racial Equity” that provides an economic impact analysis that offers an alternative to the neoliberal creeds of free market supremacy to “direct lives.” The study includes in its examination historical causes of poverty and inequities, such as racism, rather than the ahistorical approaches to poverty and public policy in America argued by modern economic and penal advocates. The study begins by recognizing the historical impact racial inequity has had on contemporary America, and works to “quantify [the] economic benefits” of targeting it:

We found that if the average incomes of minorities were raised to the average

incomes of whites, total US earnings would increase by 12 percent, representing nearly $1 trillion today. By closing the earnings gap through higher productivity, gross domestic product (GDP) would increase by a comparable percentage, for an increase of $1.9 trillion today. The earnings gain would translate into $180 billion in additional corporate profits, $290 billion in additional federal tax revenue, and a potential reduction in the federal deficit of $350 billion, or 2.3 percent of GDP. When projected to 2030…[it] would increase by over $1 trillion and corporate profits would increase by $450 billion (Turner 21).
Additionally, by helping to eliminate the education gap “between African American and Hispanic students and white students in the United States found that closing [that] gap would have increased US GDP by 2 percent to 4 percent in 2008, representing between $310 and $525 billion” (Turner 22). The Altrarum’s study proposes that investing in uplifting and supporting our most vulnerable instead of directing and penalizing them could create exactly what the modern paternalistic, penal system desires.
Attempts to represent the carceral system demand a disciplined focus. The abdication of responsibility in representation often does not only harm incarcerated individuals, but it can also impair counter carceral movements. By narrowing the critical view of mass incarceration just to the penal system or to the events attributed to its rise, any attempts to atone for this system, or any system, become susceptible to a myopic examination of just this isolated occurrence, rather than an inspection of the underpinning “social conditions” and cultural structure of America that sanction it or previous iterations. 13th’s illustration of the era of mass incarceration targeted key American elements in the creation of a carceral system of unconscionable injustice, but its advocacy of a “Prison-Industrial Complex” obfuscates the broader powers at play. Although “accurately” understanding and representing the reality of prison remains impossible, as Tapia noted earlier, creating a false, obscured reality from misrepresentation remains possible. Here, the responsibility demands focus. It is not that the present prison system is primarily designed to generate profit in the market; rather, it is designed to fit a market-only model that deploys the prison system as a reinforcing tool. This era of mass incarceration in the United States marks a historical variant of dehumanization grounded in a cultural fabric woven with iniquity. And as a historical epoch, America has a cultural problem rooted in ideology, not simply an industrial one. Endeavors to represent the penal system must also indict American culture in order to reconcile iniquities that constitute its current frame in order to halt its continued sanctioning of institutions that allow theoretical ideology to sever a unified understanding of our shared humanity.