So Americans back then were much more likely, based on Gallup’s surveys, to say crime was “the most important problem.” And lawmakers reacted with mass incarceration, increasing the prison sentences for nearly every type of crime - especially violent ones.
Other crimes, particularly robbery, were alarmingly high as well. From the 1960s through ’90s, crime in America was unusually high: The murder rate peaked at 10.2 in 1980, compared with 4.5 in 20. What’s more, addressing violent crime was the intent of mass incarceration. At some point, you have to cut sentences for violent crimes. And neither is also releasing everyone who’s in for public order offenses. Neither is also releasing everyone who’s in for property crimes like theft and burglary. Releasing drug offenders isn’t enough to reach 50 percent of the state prison population. If those numbers aren’t enough for you, maybe this great interactive by the Marshall Project will drive home the point. Cutting 21 percent of the prison population, in the unrealistic case that all drugs were legalized, would only push the US incarceration rate to about 547 - still far above what other developed, democratic countries have. That kind of drastic reduction is needed because the US is so far above the international average for incarceration - America’s imprisonment rate is 693 inmates per 100,000 people, while the UK, France, Germany, and Canada are all below 150 per 100,000.īut the only way to get closer to other countries’ levels is by relaxing sentences for violent crimes. Criminal justice reformers have, through the bipartisan #Cut50, set out to cut the US’s prison population by 50 percent over 10 years. This isn’t merely a semantic point it’s crucial to actually addressing mass incarceration. The rest of the prison population is in for public order violations, property crimes, and lower-level offenses. But violent offenders - in for crimes like murder, assault, and robbery - make up nearly 40 percent of the prison population. The prison statistics bear this out: Drug offenders make up about 21 percent of the jail and prison population. As criminologist John Pfaff wrote in the Washington Post, “since 1990, 60 percent of the growth in state prison populations has come from locking up violent offenders.” And those state prisons make up about 86 percent of the overall US prison population. Joe Posner/Voxīut the video then asserts that it was a rise in prison sentences for drugs that led to mass incarceration - a myth widely perpetuated by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Let’s get one thing out of the way: The video is right that although black people use and sell drugs at similar rates as white people, black people are much more likely to be arrested and locked up for drugs. China, Russia, Iran, Cuba - all countries we consider autocratic and repressive. Today, we imprison more people than any other country in the world. In the 1990s, incarceration rates in the US blew up. Young men like me who hustled became the sole villain, and drug addicts lacked moral fortitude. No one wanted to talk about Reaganomics and the ending of social safety nets, the defunding of schools and the loss of jobs in cities across America.
Drugs were bad, fried your brain, and drug dealers were monsters - the sole reason neighborhoods and major cities were failing. In 1986, when I was coming of age, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the war on drugs that had been started by Richard Nixon in 1971. Specifically, a video published in the New York Times, narrated by Jay Z in cooperation with the Drug Policy Alliance, essentially makes the case that the war on drugs and its harsh, punitive sentences for drug possession and dealing led to mass incarceration - and, in particular, the racial disparities in incarceration. A popular new video on the internet is wrong.
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