ABSTRACT
In a sense, mass incarceration is an example of how individual self-interest among tenants, landlords, homeowners, politicians, police officers, poorly schooled young people, and customers in illegal markets link up to create a monumental collective failure that resists reform. But economic theory strongly suggests that Prasch may have been right—perhaps this is all one massive accident—in the parlance of economics, a vast incentive failure. Bob Prasch once observed: It may be that America's taste for using jails to control crime is what a free market society does when it can't face the fact that lightly regulated capitalism is a miserable social failure. The United States, as a nation, is unable to move away from the toxic mix of structural inequality and race-based mass incarceration because all of the major players in the game are trapped by their own self-interest, much like Prisoner's Dilemma leads to the worst possible outcome when everyone acts on their dominant strategy.
