ineteconomics | A new model probes why the US leads the world in jailing and imprisoning people, and what it will take to reverse course.
Mass incarceration in the United States has
mushroomed to the point where we look more like the authoritarian
regimes of Eastern Europe and the Middle East than the democracies of
Western Europe. Yet it vanished from political discussions in campaigns
in the 2016 election. In a new INET Working Paper,
I describe in detail how the US arrived at this point. Drawing on a new
model that synthesizes recent research, I demonstrate how the recent
stability in the number of American prisoners indicates that we have
settled into a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. I explain why it
will hard to dislodge ourselves from this damaging and shameful status
quo.
Mass incarceration started from Nixon’s War on Drugs, in a process
described vividly by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser,
in 1994:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
This was the origin of mass incarceration in the United
States, which has been directed at African Americans from Nixon’s time
to today, when one third of black men go to prison (Bonczar, 2003; Baum,
2016; Alexander, 2010).
Federal laws were expanded in state laws that ranged from
three-strike laws to harsh penalties for possession of small amounts of
marijuana. The laws also shifted the judicial process from judges to
prosecutors, from the courtroom to offices where prosecutors pressure
accused people to plea-bargain. The threat of harsh minimum sentences
gives prosecutors the option of reducing the charge to a lesser one if
the accused is reluctant to languish in jail awaiting trial—if he or she
is unable to make bail—and then face the possibility of long years in
prison.
