The Incarceration Boom in the United States
After 1980 something dramatic happened. The US incarceration rate started climbing, and it has continued to climb. Our current incarceration rate is approximately 450 sentenced prisoners for every 100,000 people. In contrast, most other industrialized countries resemble the United States before 1970. For particular subgroups of prisoners the picture is far worse. For African Americans the rate is just under 2000 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 population. In 1992 over half of all African-American men in Baltimore aged 18-35 on any given day were under some form of control by the criminal justice system.
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The dramatic increase in incarceration rates cannot be explained by our crime rates. Homicide rates in the United States are much higher than those of comparable countries, but homicide convictions account for an insignificant number of sentenced prisoners. In general, other crime rates in the United States are high, but they remain in ranges that overlap with comparable rates in other countries--for example, one can point to industrialized countries with higher auto theft rates than the United States. And while there is much contested terrain about changes in U.S. crime rates since 1970, it is generally conceded that the crime rates have not changed dramatically and that movements up and down in the incarceration rate have not correlated with crime rate changes.
What has changed are policy decisions about who to lock up. Since 1980, 84 percent of the increase in State and Federal prison admissions has occurred among non-violent offenders. A third of the increase is due to incarcerating drug offenders. The United States now has a higher rate of incarceration for drug offenses than its average rate of incarceration for all offenses between 1920 and 1970.
From the late 1970s on, incarceration rates rose dramatically because prosecution and sentencing policies changed. Most of those changes involved legislative policy, but parole board actions and discretionary judicial sentencing practices also contributed to the increase In the most general sense, the attitudes reflected in those changes seem to include the beliefs that crime is rampant in the United States, that the typical criminal is violent and different from other people, and that the solution is to lock enough criminals up.
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