Perverse Politics: The Persistence of Mass Imprisonment in the Twenty-first Century

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Articles

Over the last four decades, the U.S. prison population increased more than 500 percent.¹With more than 2.3 million people in its prisons or jails, the United States currently incarcerates a larger proportion of its occupants than any nation in the world. More than one-third of the people in state prisons are serving time for non-violent offenses, most of them property or drug offenses. When federal prisons are included, the percentage of non-violent offenders behind bars is even larger. Perhaps most concerning, the vast racial and class disparities within the nation's penal institutions raise serious civil rights issues. Given current imprisonment rates, one in three black men and one in six Hispanic men will spend some time in jail or prison at some time during their lives.²

Yet, after decades of persistent prison growth, the financial crisis of 2009 and widening state budget gaps led many commentators to speculate that the nation can no longer afford to keep so many people behind bars. In fact, the number of people in state and federal prisons declined for the third consecutive year in 2012 (down 1.7 percent).³Capitalizing on these new trends, numerous scholars and public intellectuals have heralded "the end of mass incarceration," voicing confident optimism that moral and fiscal imperatives will work to eradicate an oppressive, archaic, and now-outmoded system of racial and class oppression.⁴

The mounting and unsustainable fiscal costs of incarceration, combined with a growing conviction that the system is racially biased and excessively punitive for drug and nonviolent offenders, has drawn increasing opposition to sentencing laws from across the ideological spectrum. Despite the partisan rancor and gridlock that pervades Washington and statehouses, politicians and interest groups on both the left and right--including the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Tea Party-backed Freedom Works, and archconservative Koch Industries--are working together to downsize prison populations and overhaul sentencing laws.⁵

While the current economic downturn, combined with increasingly lenient public attitudes toward marijuana use, catalyzed a slate of reforms to state and federal sentencing and drug laws in what appears to be a "trans-partisan chorus against wanton overcriminalization,"⁶several scholars also caution against assuming that the current economic burdens...