Mass Incarceration and Systemic Racism in the United States
American prisons are essentially big businesses, housing more inmates than any other country in the world and profiting off their captivity. Overrepresented among American prisoners are Black men and people of color, and this is no coincidence — the deliberate over-policing of urban neighborhoods inflates the rate of incarceration for these groups. Angela Davis famously criticizes the US prison system in “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, where she points out not only that minorities are disproportionately affected by policing, but also that mass incarceration has not improved crime rates. She goes on to advocate for prison abolition, comparing the prison system to slavery and Jim Crow. Indeed, the modern carceral system funnels Black Americans into prisons through over-policing and the war on drugs, thereby stripping them of their civil liberties. Most notably, felony disenfranchisement serves as a form of modern voter suppression, particularly for Black men — today, 1 in 13 Black men in the US is barred from voting because of a previous felony conviction.
Nancy Reagan speaks at an anti-drug rally in 1987, part of the US war on drugs. (US National Archives / Wikimedia Commons).
Prison abolitionists like Davis believe America’s prisons are too deeply flawed to be fixed through legislative reform alone. Rather, they advocate for a complete overhaul of the system and the implementation of community programs focused on rehabilitation. There is certainly something to be said for a rehabilitation-oriented approach to justice — Norway’s prison model, for example, encourages inmates to learn a trade during their sentence and allows them access to education. As a result, the recidivism rate in Norway is just 25% after 5 years of release, compared to a staggering 77% in the US. Part of the US’ problem with recidivism is the fact that many of its prisons are for-profit businesses, meaning their executives earn more money the more prisoners they contain. Naturally, these institutions have little incentive to rehabilitate inmates to prevent their return, and convicts subsequently become stuck in a cycle of reoffense and imprisonment.
Currently, the majority of inmates in US prisons are not serving time for a violent offense. Nearly 50% of prisoners currently in jail are convicted of drug-related crimes, for which Black Americans are imprisoned at 13.4 times the rate of whites despite equal rates of drug use between the communities. As Angela Davis points out, mass incarceration is not improving rates of crime. Instead, it encourages the imprisonment of more citizens for low-level, non-violent offenses. High levels of incarceration are costly for average Americans, too — taxpayers spend 80 billion dollars a year keeping inmates in prison when much of that cost would be better spent on crime prevention programs that actually keep communities safer.
All this considered, the American prison system requires broad reform at the very least. Though total abolition is unlikely to be feasible in the short term and raises debate over the place of violent criminals in rehabilitation programs, sweeping reform is the first step toward much-needed improvement. Criminal justice reform is a pressing human rights issue, and the dignity and well-being of millions of prisoners depends on swift action. The American justice system cannot be allowed to continue over-policing, unfairly imprisoning and disenfranchising people of color.
