Focus Magazine
May/June (35/3)
Who's Gonna Take the Weight?
Assessing the Cost of Mass Incareration in America
by Adolphus G. Belk Jr.
America is the undisputed global leader in incarceration. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were nearly 2.2 million persons in America’s prisons and jails as of 2005—60 percent of whom were black or Latino. If all persons under adult correctional supervision are included, the number of individuals under the surveillance of American criminal justice systems increases to over 7 million. What is more incredible is that, according to the International Center for Prison Studies, the U.S. alone—with just 4.6 percent of the world’s total population—accounted for 24 percent of the world’s prisoners in 2006.
The explosion in the U.S. prison population reflects the shifting politics of crime and punishment, which left an indelible mark on the formulation and implementation of public policy. During the 1960s, federal and state lawmakers began to argue that the nation’s crime problem could only be solved by hardening criminal justice policy. By the 1970s, new policies emphasized deterrence, incapacitation, punishment, and victims’ rights rather than rehabilitation, treatment, and re-entry. This new paradigm was fueled by the campaigns of issue-seeking politicians of both parties and commentaries from the scholarly community. The 1980s and 1990s saw the dawn of the “get tough” movement, which sparked president-led wars on crime and drugs. This movement also targeted juvenile offenders, particularly those in central cities who were young, black, or Latino. Federal—and even state—policies grew more punitive, resulting in the incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders for lengthy prison sentences (e.g., via the “100-to-1” powder cocaine/crack cocaine ratio), the diversion of juveniles to adult criminal justice systems, and measures such as “Three Strikes and You’re Out” and mandatory minimum sentencing—all of which contributed to an overflowing prison system.
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