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Mass Incarceration in the United States

By Jahwan


What is mass incarceration and how do we know it's a problem ?

Incarceration is the imprisonment of individuals that reside in a certain country. Mass incarceration refers to how the American prison system capitalizes on having an excessive amount of these prisoners. In the United States, a staggering proportion of individuals are processed by the criminal justice and prison systems. Although the United States makes up about 5% of the global population, they make up 25% of the world’s incarcerated population. One in thirty-five American adults are in some way involved with the prison system when accounting for incarceration, parole, and probation.


Since its conception, the prison system itself has been heavily rooted in racism and xenophobia. A look at the disproportionate amount of people of color, especially black people, incarcerated by the American prison system demonstrates the deeply rooted biases of the nation and its failure to reform the very organizations meant to uphold justice. For example, one in three African American men are imprisoned sometime in his life and an African American man is six times more likely to be sentenced to jail for the same crime as a white man.


This system of mass incarceration does not occur in a vacuum and is a combined result of a myriad of other issues including but not limited to the prison pipeline, poor healthcare in prisons, overcrowding, and privatization of prisons. This leads us to ask, if mass incarceration and similar prison-related issues are so deplorable, why are they still happening and how did they happen in the first place?


How did this happen?

Some may argue this is a result of America having more crime, a higher population, or the police simply being better at their jobs. However, this is extremely unlikely considering the United States has nearly the same crime percentages as the rest of the Western World.


The more accurate answer can be found when we look back at the days of slavery before the Civil War. We all learned about slavery in school and how immoral and disgusting it was, as well as many of the incremental steps taken to abolish it. In 1808, Congress banned the importation of slaves, although slave owners were still allowed to keep their slaves already present within the country’s borders. The hope of this new bill was to decrease the number of African American slaves. Instead, slave states like Alabama went from about 40,000 to over 400,000 slaves. In 1833, these states banned free black people from living in their state. The fight against slavery would take until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation declaring "that all persons held as slaves [within the rebellious states] are, and henceforward shall be free." This was in the midst of the Civil War and served to solidify that the war was no longer going to be referred to under the guise of states’ rights and would finally officially become a fight against slavery. Eventually, the Confederates surrendered, ending slavery in the United States.


However, what many schools don’t teach was that slavery was not declared illegal in all forms, and it was allowed in the form of prison labor.


Why is this still happening?

As stated earlier, slavery remained legal as a form of criminal punishment, due to America’s inability to remain economically stable without slavery. For example, when slavery was abolished, Southern states had a difficult time maintaining the economy, so they used prison labor and sharecropping to their advantage. Some states even allowed for prison workers to be leased out to plantations, a practice which wasn’t abolished until 1941.

This is clear with statistics that prove how one in three African American men will go to prison sometime in his life and how an African American man is six times more likely to be sentenced to jail for the same crime as a white man.


Because this system was created with the intention of exploiting black people and other people of color, and the system was based on punishment, laws were created in order to specifically target these populations. Since the 1970's, state and federal prisons budgets have skyrocketed because of their never-ending expansions. Around the same time, the United States began passing laws which were increasingly tough on crime. This includes enacting more vague sentencing guidelines, lengthening minimum sentences, and three strikes laws*. Some of these laws have very clear racial biases, and one prime example of this is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. This act declared that 5 grams of crack would warrant a 5-year minimum (without parole), whereas 500 grams of cocaine warranted the same sentencing. Statistically, white people were the predominant cocaine consumers while black people were more likely crack consumers. Prison incarceration rates have gone up by 700% since 1970, showing the true correlation between the genesis of these targeted laws and their effect on the growth of mass incarceration.


With these marked increases in prison funding as well as prison populations, treatment of prisoners has not improved, and prison labor often plays a hand. Arguably, prison labor is not all bad in theory. It gives prisoners a job, which is very hard for convicts to come by, and many of them want to work. The problem here lies within the unchecked power imbalance between prisoners and guards, which in many cases leads to abuse, manipulation, and exploitation of prisoners. Prisoners can be forced to work for as long as the guards deem them fit for the task, and they can be punished for not working. Sometimes punishments can be as severe as solitary confinement, a practice acknowledged by many to be extremely cruel and which contributes to the development of mental health issues in inmates as well as higher rates of recidivism upon release.


There is nothing these prisoners can do to fight for their rights because the horrendous behaviors of these prisons are perfectly legal. Many states do not require the inmates to be compensated for their work, and if they are being paid, it is usually one dollar or lower. This cheap, virtually free labor is an incentive for states to keep their incarceration levels high, and some police stations go as far as to require cops to maintain monthly arrest quotas, which correlates with the ongoing problem of police brutality and making arrests without cause. A prime example of states’ reliance on incarceration for their economy occurred in 2014 when California was ordered to release thousands of inmates to relieve overcrowding. The state argued against this as this would reduce their access to prison labor.


The effects of mass incarceration

Mass incarceration displaces the lives of many Americans across the country. Many of these ex-convicts have a hard time readjusting to life after prison. The average prison sentence is three years long, so when these prisoners get out of jail, their life is turned upside down. Guards in prisons commonly abuse their power, and in many states it is legal for cops to sexually abuse prisoners. The system allows cops to get away with so much. We fight against police brutality on the streets, and we should do the same for inmates. Additionally, half of incarcerated people face mental health issues, and about twenty-five percent have those deemed serious mental health issues. Many inmates also suffer from some sort of drug or alcohol dependency. Regardless of this, the system’s focus remains on punishment instead of rehabilitation.


Felony convictions often prove even worse as this charge pervades every aspect of life, making it difficult for felons to get housing, education, and employment difficult. In many states, felons are not even allowed to vote, preventing those most affected by policing and the prison system from voting for the reformation of these systems.


Mass incarceration is an epidemic and we need to combat it in any ways we can. Incarceration is here to protect the people, so why is it being used to aid in the oppression and suppression of these minority groups? This problem demonstrates the corruption of our policing and imprisonment systems, and how they must be rebuilt from the bottom up. We need to face these issues head-on and help the prisoners the system has let down.





*Three strikes laws~ These types of laws declared that if an American resident gets in legal trouble three times, they have to go to jail. This doesn’t account for if the crime was a petty crime, so many people are going to prison for small reasons.


 

Sources:



"States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2018" https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html



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