In response to the dramatic surge in crime in the 1960s, lawmakers across the country and at all levels of government responded with a novel and dangerous policy known today as mass incarceration. Sociologist David Garland defines mass incarceration as the policies that produce a national imprisonment rate that exceeds the historical and comparative norm for similar societies. Since then, the U.S. incarceration rate has skyrocketed to 715 per 100,000, the highest in the world (Russia is a distant second at 584 per 100,000).

We can look to changes in criminal law over the past decades to explain how we achieved this unprecedented rate. Drug crimes account for much of the increase in prison populations. In 12 years, the prison population with drug convictions leapt from 6% in 1979 to 25% in 1991 at the state level and from 25% to 56% at the federal level and these numbers continue to grow. In addition, the courts have become increasing punitive. Arrest rates increased, and defendants are convicted at higher rates for longer sentences. Mass incarceration expanded the net of criminality to include drug offenses and public order offending, such as loitering and drinking in public. It catches more people and punishes more of them more harshly, by adding drug charges, mandatory minimums, and three strikes penalties to their sentences.

With all these policies in place, it is no wonder that correctional departments are struggling to keep up. Massachusetts specifically increased correctional spending by 127% so that it now rivals spending even on public universities. Our courts can’t keep up with the deluge of trials and appeals. And still, rather than stop and wonder whether mass incarceration is actually keeping us safe, states plunges forward blindly, building more prisons, double bunking inmates, making it even harder for people with records to get jobs and housing, and cutting rehabilitation services for people with addictions and without high school diplomas and job skills.

Mass incarceration is not making us safer, but less so. It is nearly impossible for people with criminal records to get jobs, so they often return to crime in order to support themselves and their families. Sixty percent of former offenders recidivate (commit another crime) within 3 years of their release from prison. One in 10 black children have a parent in prison; one in three black children whose parents have no gone to college will lose a parent to prison by the time they are 14. The unemployment rate for black men is estimated between 30 and 60%, and black people are seven times more likely to go to prison that white people. The greatest crime of all is that our politicians and policymakers can look at these numbers and persist in the ignorant and unjust policies that brought them about.

In October, the Mass. Dept. of Corrections announced that it will start double bunking inmates at Shirley Prison in order to keep up with the massive influx of inmates. Before we think about the implications of such a policy, it is more important to know what politicians are doing to stem that flow. So far, the answer is nothing. They would rather strain the state’s resources to maintain a popular and highly politicized policy that is actually hurting our state. Double bunking is exactly the sort of short term solution that will sustain the problem of mass incarceration. As long as we keep building more prisons, hiring more correctional officers, and cramming more inmates in cells built for one, we condone a flawed and unjust legal system. Politicians seem to think it is working, when all the evidence, from the inner city to within the prisons themselves, points to the contrary. But why is this specific policy is so harmful? In addition to being symptomatic of our government’s complicity – if not its deliberate attempts – to lock up the poor black males of our cities puts too many citizens in a harsh environment.

Prisons are not safe places: they create more crime than they cure and the risk of victimization by violent or sexual assault is at least times more for people in prison than in normal society. It is despicable that we take away people’s liberty and dignity so readily under mass incarceration. Worse, while under the state’s so-called care, they are placed in toxic, dangerous, and frightening environments, and we are surprised when they commit more crimes after their release. Increasing the number of correctional officers and placing people in solitary confinement is not going to make prisons better but worse. We ought to look at reforming the laws and prisons that produce crime, rather than persisting in this folly and injustice.

People who have committed crimes are not the dregs of society to be dispensed with as politicians deem necessary. Policies that are unjust to criminals are still unjust in an absolute sense. Mass incarceration is not working. Correctional facilities themselves are struggling to handle this ludicrous practice of locking up our most disadvantaged citizens. At best, it is impractical and expensive. At worst, as a trip to a prison and a conversation with an inmate will prove, it is inhumane, unjust and unconscionable.


Rachel M Singh ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is the co-director of the Suffolk County House of Correction prison tutoring program and is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.