Mass Incarceration
The problem of mass incarceration, or the massive overuse of imprisonment and jail, is dire. According to The Sentencing Project, the US is “the world's leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails -- a 500% increase over the past thirty years.”
The importance of addressing the injustices, massive financial burden and ineffectiveness of the burgeoning penal system cannot be overemphasized.
Dimensions of the problem:
Consequences:
The importance of addressing the injustices, massive financial burden and ineffectiveness of the burgeoning penal system cannot be overemphasized.
Dimensions of the problem:
- Over 2.4 million incarcerated; more than quadrupling the imprisonment rate from roughly 110 per 100,000 adult population from 1925-1975 to 502 per 100,000 in 2009. The incarceration rate has increased each year since 1973, as have the costs.
- This is coupled with continuing wide racial and ethnic disparities. For example, a 7:1 ratio of incarceration between African-American young men and European-American young men.
- All this while: street crime was mostly holding steady or declining.
Consequences:
- Minimum to moderate crime reductions (short-term).
- Criminogenic effects (short-term and long-term): Rather than deterring crime, incarceration often increases it. High recidivism rates do not reflect something wrong with former inmates. Instead, they reveal the system working to perpetuate itself, to spread fear and division, and to successfully avoid dealing with social and economic injustice.
- Economic, social, psychological damage to those over-incarcerated.
- Disruption of families. See Families and Youth Violence.
- Devastation of struggling communities.
- Economic damage: See Data.
- Violation of norm of proportionality: The punishment should fit the crime. Small crimes do not deserve big penalties.
- Threat to legal order: When the state behaves badly, without regard to the restraints and protections of law, it sets a bad example for the people. They ask, why should we trust or respect these thugs?
- Political delegitimation: The state depends on the consent of the governed. If you live in a crappy neighborhood, get the short end of public resources, and then find your relatives, friends, and neighbors being hauled away for minor offenses and locked up for a long time, are you going to vote? Are you going to call the cops or cooperate with their investigations?
- Disenfranchisement: Losing the right to vote as a result of incarceration.