Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. More than two million people are currently behind bars, a disproportionate number of whom are young Black men. Researchers have traced the origins of the US prison boom to the 1970s, a period that marked a dramatic shift in attitudes towards crime and punishment. Reacting to the perceived immorality and social upheaval of the civil rights era, conservative policy makers and commentators identified moral corruption and social disorder as the driving forces behind crime, displacing other explanatory factors such as poverty, urban decay, and other social ills. Policies favoring rehabilitation and reform gave way to containment and retribution, leading to a dramatic swell in the prison population.

Nowhere is this emphasis on morality and social order more apparent than in the war on drugs. Launched by President Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, the policy on focused national attention and vast public resources on the entwined problems of drug use and drug distribution. The number of people imprisoned for drug crimes skyrocketed:

Between 1980 and 1990, the annual number of drug offenders admitted to state prisons increased tenfold. In 1980, roughly one out of every fifteen offenders admitted to prison had been convicted of a drug crime; one decade later, this figure had jumped to one out of every three […] By the late 1990s, a higher proportion of state prison admissions were for drug crimes than for violent crimes.