Defining the Problem

            Mass incarceration is a major issue facing the United States today. America is number one in the world in number of prisoners per capita, and has been for quite some time now. As of 2013 American incarceration rates were 716 per 100,000 citizens, which is much higher than other industrialized countries (Wing 2013, paragraph 2).  A New York Times article by Adam Liptak puts this into perspective, “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners” (paragraph 1). As you can imagine, this leads to more tax money being spent on running and maintaining these prisons. It also tears apart families and communities. People are ripped away from their families and sent to jail for nonviolent offenses such as probation violations and drug possession. Prisons should be used to keep violent criminals off the streets, but they are essentially turning into a place to hold members of society that we don’t know how to handle.  Instead of really looking into the reasons why people commit crimes and addressing that, we just lock up offenders and throw away the key. Treatment and programming should be our response to crime, not a solution that won’t benefit the offender at all. Sure prison can be a wake up call for some, but if they don’t have the resources or ability to change on their own, this wake up call will only work for so long.

            President Johnson’s war on crime, which was declared in 1965, is often cited as the cause of mass incarceration. The war on drugs declared by President Regan in 1982 is also cited as a cause (Alexander 2010, p.5). The war on crime and the war on drugs allocated more resources for police departments. According to Alexander, when the war on drugs was declared, police officers did not like the federal government telling them which type of crime to focus their efforts on. Especially since they thought they should focus on more serious and violent crime. In response, the federal government offered grants to departments that made fighting the war on drugs a top priority (2010, p.73).  The war on drugs also led to police officers riding the line between constitutional and unconstitutional when it comes to searching individuals and their property. The Supreme Court ruled in a number of cases that police officers were allowed to search an individual and their belongings if the individual consented to the search (Alexander 2010, p. 62). Since most people do not refuse when asked by a police officer to do so, this led to an increase in drug related arrests.

Another major part of the problem is the mandatory sentences imposed for drug crimes.  The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted mandatory minimums for drug crimes. This took discretion away from the judges, which means they cannot take mitigating factors into account such as a first offense.

By defining mass incarceration this way, we are assuming that our high incarceration rates are caused by political decisions such as declaring war on drugs and crime. When we point to these “wars” declared by Presidents and claim these are the sole causes, we take blame away from individuals. Yes, most offenders are products of their environment, an environment that exists to keep certain people down, but is that the sole cause for their criminal behavior? Also, we are assuming that crime rates would not have risen without these wars. The increased crime rates could be due to more violence on television and violent video games.  Yes, we are assuming the war on crime and the war on drugs are the cause of mass incarceration, but with the data and information available, it is hard not to.

References

Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press.

Liptak, A. (2008, April 23). Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Wing, N. (2013, August 13). Here Are All of the Nations That Incarcerate More of Their Population Than The U.S. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/incarceration-rate-per-capita_n_3745291.html