Why has incarceration increased

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You can unlock new opportunities with unlimited access to hundreds of online short courses for a year by subscribing to our Unlimited package. Build your knowledge with top universities and organisations. Learn more about how FutureLearn is transforming access to education. Learn more about this course. The U. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience.

At the state level, the number of people in prison for drug offenses has increased nine-fold since , although it has begun declining in recent years. Most are not high-level actors in the drug trade, and most have no prior criminal record for a violent offense. Download chart We started sending people to prison for much longer terms. Download chart The number of people serving life sentences endures even while serious, violent crime has been declining for the past 20 years and little public safety benefit has been demonstrated to correlate with increasingly lengthy sentences.

This population has nearly quintupled since One in seven people in prison are serving life with parole, life without parole, or virtual life 50 years or more.

Mass incarceration has not touched all communities equally The racial impact of mass incarceration Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Latinos are 2. For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. In an effort to target Black people and hippies, Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in schedule one, the most restrictive drug category, rejecting a unanimous recommendation by a commission he himself had appointed.

The war on drugs, which officially began in June , was expanded during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of established increased penalties for violations of the Controlled Substances Act and mandatory minimum sentences for some drug users, including the to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine sentences leading to increased racial disparities in incarceration rates.

Indeed, this ought not surprise us given that the infamous crime bill which likely contributed to mass incarceration —a bill voted for by many prominent Democrats including Joe Biden who helped write it and Bernie Sanders —arrived a full three years after the peak of homicides and violent crime it was meant to address.

In other words, our nation panicked and overreacted, contributing to the immoral and unnecessary rise of mass incarceration. That is not a mistake that we should make again. When we connect all three charts, however, we find a story that is far more optimistic than what is currently found in the headlines of many major newspapers. And while was a rough year, if recent trends prevail, the U.

We do not believe that we should or must pay the price of incarcerating more people in our nation than any other nation in the world to maintain order and safety. Nor do we think that a proper consideration of the data should push us toward embracing another surge in mass incarceration as a result of the most recent upticks in homicide and violent crime. First, we need to address gun violence and rising homicides as the problems they emphatically are, rather than simply assume that they will resolve automatically post-pandemic.

It will take time for normalcy to be reestablished, including social norms that inform public morality and public order. One thing that broken windows theory got right in our view is that chaos and disorder invite more chaos and disorder, and that means order will need to be established principally within civil society itself , rather than it simply emerging organically.

To be clear, that does mean we need to identify violent offenders who will need to be taken off the streets and imprisoned—at least for a time, with a goal of rehabilitation for these offenders. And that also means that contrary to certain progressive talking points, we cannot fully replace police officers with social workers or strip departments of the necessary financial resources needed to patrol streets, investigate crimes, and otherwise work to uphold safety and order.

Though of course, policing as institution and practice must still be held accountable , and that means we must simultaneously pursue , including drastically altering qualified immunity.

Second, we need to more fully address underlying drivers of crime to lower crime rates while continuing the recent multi-year decline in incarceration. City leaders should explore ways of reducing economic precarity and poverty, while increasing public social cohesion, better citizen-police relationships, and a more equitable distribution of city budget.