What is Mass Incarceration?

Over the past thirty years, the United States has instated radical and discriminatory policies and practices to address crime through unnecessary and harsh punishment, opposed to proper rehabilitation. This uptake in policy has led to mass incarceration, the reality that the United States criminalizes and incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world and is the leader in prison population rate. Mass incarceration is a system of policing, prosecution, and incarceration that is rooted in economic and racial inequality, and reflects a network of institutional bystanders who helped generate and maintain the broken system.  More than two million people are behind bars every day in the U.S. and even more on parole. The United States inmate population is nearly twenty-five percent of the world's incarcerated population and in 2018, had as many people locked up as the entire population of Portugal or Greece. America’s approach to incarceration often disproportionately affects minorities, such as poor people of color.

However, America did not always incarcerate at such a high rate. Fifty years prior to 1972, the number of people in jails and prisons was around 300,000, but since then, it has multiplied by 6 times that amount. The prison population began to grow in the 1970’s when politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties pushed for an increase in punitive measures. Government officials competed against each other on how aggressively they would punish those who broke the law, landing more people in jail for smaller offenses. This trend began during the Nixon administration, as he declared a “war on drugs” and justified being “tough on crime”. In addition, bills were passed such as the 1994 Crime Bill, which provided states with the money to preserve policies that led to the incarceration of more people. Incarceration especially began to grow at the state level: In Texas, from 1878 to 2003, the state jumped from incarcerating 182 people for every 100,000 residents to 710. Suddenly, prison populations skyrocketed, and jail became a first resort rather than a last, even for non-violent crimes. This rise in incarceration is especially prevalent for people of color. Sixty percent of the population of incarcerated people are Black or Hispanic, even though they comprise of less than one third of the U.S. population. One in every three Black men and one in every six Hispanic men will go to prison. 

Finally after decades, the inhumanity and insanity of mass incarceration has reached a level of exposure to where now state and federal populations have reduced. In the past decade, prison populations have declined by around ten percent, and racial disparities have also decreased. This comes as policy makers arrive at the conclusion that mass incarceration is both expensive, cruel, and unproductive at combating crime.  However, more change is still essential as just a small percent decrease annually is not enough to reverse the years of damage to our criminal justice system. With the current rate of decline, it will still take decades to reach an appropriate incarceration rate, and around a hundred years for African Americans to match the number of prisoners as their white counterparts.