What the New White House Video Gets Wrong About Prisons

The new video of President Obama interviewing David Simon is a work of public relations genius; it also makes some dangerous mistakes concerning the criminal justice system.

Last night, the White House posted a video of President Barack Obama interviewing David Simon, the creator of the brilliant HBO crime drama The Wire. It’s a bracing bit of programming from the Administration: In the wake of Ferguson, the nation’s first black president talked to one of our most penetrating, pessimistic thinkers on the topic of widespread racial disparities in the criminal justice system. (Simon even has a blog on these topics titled “The Audacity of Despair,” a riposte to the president’s book, The Audacity of Hope.)

The video has been widely praised for the frank insights on American crime and punishment that Obama and Simon offered—which is strange, considering how much they distort or even get wrong about trends in the system.