There are currently 2.2 million Americans in jail. If you include those on probation or parole there are almost seven million Americans under correctional supervision. The US has 5 per cent of the world’s population, but 25 per cent of its prisoners.
This has not always been the case. For much of the 20th century, the United States’ incarceration rate was similar to those of other countries. Heather Thompson, professor of history at Temple University, argues that the current level of incarceration has its roots in the political unrest of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
'African-Americans were frustrated with the pace of legal change and began to take to the streets in lots of protest,’ she says. ‘Almost overnight those protests were seen as, pitched as, understood as, particularly by white politicians, disorder, crime, the rabble-rousing of a criminal element.’
It has almost been a dollar for dollar trade-off; as more money goes to the prison system there is less money available for higher education, which means that these universities are receiving less state support [and] tuition rates are rising across the country.
Urban areas were left behind. Poverty grew. In 1974 Nixon began a second war, this time on drugs. Ronald Reagan made it a signature of his presidency.
The war on drugs established the drug problem as a criminal problem rather than a medical one, and from that point on the US criminal justice system change dramatically.
‘We begin to pass more draconian drug laws and more punitive laws for minor infractions overall, and then we begin to fill our prisons,’ says Professor Thompson. ‘We see this, as historians, as very much a political response to really a civil rights revolution. Then, of course, it takes on a life of its own in response to rising drug crime and so forth.’
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According to Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, the war on drugs has had a series of profound impacts on the American criminal justice system.
‘The first is that our prosecutors, our police have many opportunities to exercise their discretion, whether to pick somebody up or not for crime ... and as politicians were talking tougher, police officers and prosecutors read these tea leaves and began to use their discretion in a more punitive way,’ she says.
‘Coupled on top of that is then we had legislators passing types of laws that really are unheard of in other countries. We passed strict mandatory minimum laws, we passed habitual offenders laws, we passed three strikes laws.’
In some states, the three strikes laws have resulted in people serving 25 years to life for crimes as minor as stealing golf clubs, video tapes, change from cars, or even pieces of pizza.
‘What's unique about the drug war compared to crimes like murder, rape, robbery, where it doesn't matter much who the perpetrator is, there will be a strong and vigorous law enforcement response, drug law enforcement is highly discretionary,’ says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project in Washington DC. ‘The level of arrests, where those arrests are made, whether you go after only the kingpins of the trade or the street corner sellers, these are decisions made at state and local levels with very significant consequences.
‘Essentially drug use in well-off communities was treated as a family issue, a public health issue. When suburban parents find out that their teenage daughter is using drugs, they don't call the police ... they find the best treatment program that they can and they have the resources to take advantage of that.
‘When it's a very similar problem in a low income community of colour we become much more likely to define the problem as a criminal justice issue and then there is no shortage of police and prosecutors to respond to that.’
The result has been a dramatic increase in the number of African Americans in jail. African-Americans are incarcerated at six times the rate of whites in the United States, and for young black men the rate is nine times higher.
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Heather Thompson argues that this targeting of black communities has had a devastating impact on a number of levels.
‘For society in general, when you disproportionately police black communities and when you disproportionately police young black men ... you send a signal to the broader society that there is something inherently criminalistic about black people,’ she says.
Even the types of drugs used by African-Americans are singled out for harsher punishment. Crack cocaine and powder cocaine, for example, are the same substance chemically, yet carry very different sentences.
According to Marc Mauer, the United States today spends about $80 billion a year on incarcerating its citizens. ‘It usually works out to about $25,000 or $30,000 [per prisoner] a year,’ he says.
‘Particularly at the state level, this huge prison build-up has had a very serious impact on other services, particularly higher education, which is a major component of state budgets.
‘It has almost been a dollar for dollar trade-off; as more money goes to the prison system there is less money available for higher education, which means that these universities are receiving less state support [and] tuition rates are rising across the country.
‘Twenty years from now do we want to have more prison cells or do we want to have more college classrooms?’
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Rear Vision puts contemporary events in their historical context, answering the question, ‘How did it come to this?’