The United States of Incarceration

 

Jails are usually run by a city, local district or county, and they house people who are newly arrested or awaiting trial or sentencing. People sentenced to less than a year may serve all of their time in jail. Prisons are long-term facilities for people convicted of serious crimes. They tend to be under state or federal jurisdiction. Each year, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, over 600,000 people go to prison. People go to jail 10.6 million times a year, including those who cycle in and out due to mental illness, substance abuse and poverty.

The system in which many people are imprisoned for decades at significant cost to taxpayers and families is called mass incarceration. Rather than an inevitable outcome, mass incarceration is the result of a series of political choices.

Before the 1970s, 100 people out of every 100,000 were incarcerated. In 2018, 655 people out of 100,000 were behind bars. Mass incarceration has had a disproportionate effect on Black and Latino people. In 2016, the incarceration rate for White people was 465 per 100,000, while Latinos made up 1,091 and Blacks comprised 2,724.

Some historians trace the beginning to President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs, declared in 1971. “The declaration and escalation of the War on Drugs marked a moment in our history when a group of people defined by race and class was defined as the ‘enemy,’” Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” told The Marshall Project in 2017. Other researchers point to an actual rise in violent crime, as opposed to drug crimes, in the 1970s through the 1990s. This led to the hiring of more prosecutors, greater prosecutorial power and more felony convictions, many through plea bargains.

While in recent years the rate of incarceration has dropped substantially, especially for young Black men, “the racial disparity remains so vast that it’s pretty hard to celebrate,” John Pfaff, a Fordham University law professor and expert on criminal justice statistics told The Marshall Project in 2017. “How exactly do you talk about ‘less horrific?'”

Although the U.S. prison population has declined slightly over the past decade, major challenges remain in reducing it further. In 2018, Congress passed the bipartisan First Step Act, which reduced the length of some sentences, including retroactive reduction of about 2,600 involving crack cocaine. The First Step act also gave judges the authority to ignore mandatory minimum sentencing, and gave incarcerated people access to more services.

The First Step Act though, only applies to the federal prison population, less than 20 percent of all people who are incarcerated. Some prison reform activists have started to focus on prosecutors, who have wide discretion over which cases go to trial and what crimes defendants are charged with.

Watch

Listen

Read