The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world. This is a governance choice, made over decades, whose causes and consequences are well-documented.
The Choice and Its Making
The United States' incarceration rate — approximately five times the average of other high-income democracies — is the cumulative product of specific governance choices made at multiple levels of government across the four decades from approximately 1970 to 2010. The mandatory minimum sentences that removed judicial discretion from sentencing decisions. The three-strikes laws that imposed life sentences for a third felony conviction regardless of the offense. The war on drugs that directed criminal justice resources toward drug offenses and produced the massive increase in drug offense incarcerations that is the primary driver of the incarceration rate increase. The truth in sentencing provisions that eliminated parole and required prisoners to serve the full term of their sentences. The private prison industry whose profit model created a constituency for maintaining high incarceration rates. Each of these choices was made by specific actors, in specific political contexts, for specific reasons — and their aggregate produced the mass incarceration system.
The consequences of mass incarceration are documented and significant. The incarceration of millions of people disrupts the families, communities, and labour markets where incarcerated people were embedded. The employment barriers, the voting disenfranchisement, and the social stigma that criminal records create reduce the life prospects of formerly incarcerated people in ways that increase the conditions associated with crime. And the racial disparity in incarceration — Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white Americans — reflects the operation of racial disparities at every decision point in the criminal justice process from policing to sentencing.
Mass incarceration is the governance choice that the United States made about how to respond to crime, poverty, addiction, and social disorder. It is a choice that other comparable countries did not make and that produced different outcomes. The question of whether to make a different choice is a governance question — one whose answer determines the life trajectories of millions of people who have no voice in making it.
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