From [HERE] The US prides itself on being a nation built on freedom, justice, and individual rights. And yet the evolution of its system of mass incarceration — a system that cannot be defined without reference to shocking racial disparities — seems to directly contradict these founding principles.

The US prison population dwarfs those of nearly every other country. As of Dec. 2023, the US had some 1.8 million incarcerated individuals. China trailed with just under 1.7 million — but these figures are incomparable when factoring in the fact that China’s general population size is more than quadruple that of the US.

And among the US prison population, more than 37 percent of those incarcerated are Black. This is particularly unnerving because Black people make up only 13 percent of the country’s total population.

How did we get here?

Beginning in the 1970s, the idea of protecting public safety by implementing policies that were “tough on crime” became increasingly politically valuable. Philosophy Professor Shari Stone-Mediatore describes these policies as “stiff criminal codes, long prison sentences, laws that facilitate police search and seizure, laws that make it more difficult to challenge a wrongful conviction, and stringent parole boards.” Taken together, these policies laid the groundwork for the expansion of the US criminal justice system.

It was against this backdrop that President Richard Nixon launched his so-called “War on Drugs,” aimed at combatting drug addiction through punitive measures, and formed the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which enforces drug laws and works to limit drug supplies. Years later, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984created longer sentences for people convicted of drug crimes. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws and harsh penalties that arose from the “tough on crime” policies combined to cause a surge in the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses — a trend that continues to this day.

This heightened criminal enforcement occurred in the aftermath of the deinstitutionalization movement — US policies aimed at reducing the number of individuals confined to psychiatric institutions. During the 1950s and 1960s, the number of patients committed to such facilities was approximately triple that of the country’s prison population, according to a 2013 journal article published by the University of Chicago. As pressure mounted to reduce inpatient populations, pressure also increased to impose harsh sentences against drug users, leading legal scholars Steven Raphael and Michael A. Stoll to conclude at the time that “a sizable portion of the mentally ill behind bars would not have been incarcerated in years past.”

In 1975, the incarcerated population surpassed the committed population and has continued to rise in the ensuing decades. Since the start of the 1970s, the US prison population has expanded by 500%. [MORE]