The Challenge of Mass Incarceration in America
This study examined the scope of mass incarceration, its political significance, and its social impacts, weighing the concerns about crime control, rehabilitation, and more fundamental issues of social justice.
The United States penal population has grown every year for the past thirty-six years. The rate of imprisonment in the United States is now four times its historic average and seven times higher than in Western Europe. Even more striking than the overall level of incarceration is the concentrated force of the penal system on the most disadvantaged segments of the population. One-third of African American male high-school dropouts under age 40 are currently behind bars. Among all African American men born since the mid-1960s, more than 20 percent will go to prison, nearly twice the number that will graduate college. This extraordinary pattern of penal confinement has been called “mass incarceration,” a rate of incarceration so high that it affects not only the individual offender, but also whole social groups.
Though largely invisible in public conversations about social inequality in America, mass incarceration is a growing issue at the federal, state, and local levels and threatens to undermine the most basic goals of the civil rights movement. This study examined the scope of mass incarceration, its political and economic significance, and its social impact, weighing the concerns about crime control, rehabilitation, and more fundamental issues of social justice.
People
Sasha Abramsky
Lawrence D. Bobo
Harold Clarke
David W. Garland
Marie Gottschalk
Mark A.R. Kleiman
Candace Kruttschnitt
Nicola Lacey
Glenn Martin
Zachary Norris
Joan Petersilia
Robert J. Sampson
Dora Schriro
Jonathan Simon
William J. Stuntz
Mindy Tarlow
Loïc Wacquant
Leonard Ward
Robert Weisberg
Diane Williams
Peter Young
Publications
News & Updates
Events
Project Outcomes
The Ƶ created a task force to develop increased understanding of this issue and to promote public discussion. Members of the task force developed the Summer 2010 issue of Daedalus. In 2018 the article, "Incarceration & social inequality" by Bruce Western and Becky Pettit was the second most read Daedalus article on MIT Press in a twelve month period, eight years after the issue was published.
The project also sponsored a series of roundtable discussions, bringing together stakeholders who do not normally have an opportunity to gather, including representatives of the criminal justice community, policy-makers, community activists, and practitioners working with formerly incarcerated individuals. The meetings provided an opportunity for these groups to exchange ideas in a neutral setting and to learn from one another’s experiences. Listen to a symposium on the challenges of mass incarceration.
Project leaders also worked with officials from the executive branch, state officials, as well as Congress to provide objective information on this policy matter.