Criminal Justice Overview: Mass Incarceration

As of 2019, there were more than 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. While this is the lowest incarceration rate since 1995, the U.S. still incarcerates more people per capita than any other country on the planet.

Instead of addressing the root causes of crime such as mental illness or poverty, the U.S. waits for the crimes to occur and then hides away the perpetrators at an exorbitant cost.

The country spends an annual total of:

• More than $80.7 billion on public prisons
• $3.9 billion on private prisons

This doesn’t account for the $2.9 billion burden placed upon the families of incarcerated individuals for additional expenses. When accounting for the total annual cost of mass incarceration, including policing, public defense, bail, healthcare, and prisoner costs the U.S. spends an estimated $182 billion a year.

The U.S. has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. A 10-year study found that 66% of prisoners released in 2008 were arrested within three years, and 82% of released prisoners were arrested within 10 years. Since the 1960s, the U.S. incarceration rate has more than tripled, this jump can largely be attributed to the decimation of rehabilitation services.

In addition to the sentences served for crimes, inmates also pay collateral consequences.

• Forty-three states, and D.C., suspend driver’s licenses due to unpaid court debts, as a result, millions of people have lost their driver’s licenses because they are too poor to pay.
• The unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people sits at 27%, which is higher than the unemployment rate during the Great Depression. This is largely due to discrimination in the job market against former felons, lingering criminal records, and gaps in employment history.
• Formerly incarcerated folks are 10 times more likely to experience homelessness after release, perpetuating ongoing homelessness, addiction, and incarceration.

Evidence suggests that intervention programs for at-risk youth, victims of assault, and those suffering from addiction are critical for stopping crime before it happens. Prioritizing rehabilitation and re-entry programs is another effective method at preventing crime and saves money in the long run. Even violent criminals need access to rehabilitation programs. Many criminals are victims themselves, with more than 68% of inmates experiencing childhood abuse.

Inmates who can participate in any educational program while incarcerated are 43% less likely to reoffend than their counterparts.

An emerging practice in the criminal justice sector is restorative justice, which reshapes the conversation of justice as retribution and focuses on justice as repair. Early studies have shown that restorative justice programs “are effective at both reducing recidivism and increasing victim satisfaction with the justice process.”

BIPOC Communities

Black Americans are five times more likely to be stopped without reason than white Americans. Despite making up just under 1% of the population, Native people make up 2.3% of the prison population, and Native women make up 2.5% of women in jails and prisons. Though the U.S. does not keep records on Asian Americans in the prison system, Southeast Asians are five times more likely to be deported for criminal offenses than other immigrants.

Children

Each year, more than 250,000 children, some not even teenagers, are prosecuted in adult criminal courts and subjected to adult criminal consequences, more than any other wealthy nation on the planet. Additionally, 36 states allow children under the age of 18 to serve time in adult prisons where they are at nine times higher risk for suicide, as well as a higher risk for sexual and physical assault. Some states require “sight and sound” separation to shield kids from sexual violence, but in practice, this results in children being held in solitary confinement for up to 22 hours a day for weeks resulting in mental health issues. Thirteen states have no minimum age for trying children as adults. Each year judges transfer dozens of children under the age of 14 to adult courts, more than half of these children are Black or Hispanic.

Children with incarcerated parents are more likely to:

• Drop out of school
• Be diagnosed with a learning disability
• Be at an increased risk for mental health disorders including PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

Women and LGBTQ+ People

Women constitute the fastest-growing population in jails and prisons in the U.S. Women coming to jails and prisons are typically in more vulnerable positions than men due to increased risks for drug addiction, mental illness, and histories of abuse. Nearly one-third of all incarcerated women have been detained for issues related to sex work.

One in six trans people and over half of trans-POC have been incarcerated in their lifetime. Queer people, especially queer BIPOC, immigrants, and trans women are more likely to be sex workers. The passage of laws such as SESTA/FOSTA have made sex work more dangerous by cracking down on online networks where sex workers could screen clients and flag potentially dangerous clients for other sex workers. The bill penalizes “the facilitation of prostitution” which carries a 10-year prison sentence. This has forced many sex workers onto the streets where there is an increased risk for violence, incarceration, and significantly decreased wages. This is especially true for Black trans women who are more likely to be stopped and harassed by police. The criminalization of sex work and drug use avoids the root causes – often discrimination, mental health, and poverty – making sex workers’ jobs more dangerous and leaving them vulnerable to abuse by clients and by law enforcement officers.

Poverty

People who enter the carceral system are overwhelmingly poor with two-thirds of detainees in jail reporting annual incomes around $16,000 for men and $11,000 for women prior to arrest. The median bail for a felony sits at $10,000. Roughly 550,000 Americans, who have not yet been convicted of a crime, are sitting in jails largely because they cannot afford bail. Nearly 75% of these individuals are accused of committing low-level drug offenses.

If not for the explosion of mass incarceration, the number of people living in poverty would drop by more than 20%.

One year after release, 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed in large part due to bias against job applicants with criminal records.

Furthermore, people with criminal records are often disqualified from living in government subsidized housing, receiving SNAP benefits, and a number of other government programs designed to alleviate poverty.

War on Drugs

“Tough on crime” policies, enacted in the 1970s, were successful in backlogging criminal courts, forcing predominantly low-income people to sit in jail awaiting trial. These policies served to expand the power of police, allowing officers to “Stop-and-Frisk'' anyone for “reasonable suspicion.” Racial bias in policing ensured that police officers could terrorize BIPOC communities and search and arrest anyone that could be perceived to be associated with gang violence or in proximity to drug use.

Amongst the most long-lasting and devastating criminal justice policies is the “War on Drugs.”

The number of people serving prison sentences for non-violent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.

In 1987, Congress passed the “Anti-Drug Abuse Act,” which allocated $1.7 billion for the war on drugs and created mandatory minimums for drug possession. Under mandatory minimum sentencing, possession of five grams of crack automatically incurred a five-year sentence vs. 500 grams of cocaine necessary for the same sentence. Considering 80% of crack users were Black, these sentences ensured that more Black people were incarcerated for longer. During the 1990s, anti-drug policy culminated in the Violent Crime Control and Safe Street Act, which expanded the death penalty more than any bill in modern times, gutted protections such as habeas corpus, put 100,000 more police officers on the streets, and sanctioned the trying of 13-year-olds as adults. This bill has been widely criticized for sanctioning racial profiling, criminalizing poverty, and being a major contributing factor to mass incarceration.

Mandatory minimums have ensured that thousands of people will die in prison for non-violent drug offenses. Forty thousand people are currently serving jail time for cannabis which has since become a multi-billion dollar industry.