ABSTRACT
Even with crime rates at historically low rates in most of the nation’s major cities, America’s incarcerated population remains at above two million. This number is not just the largest in the world, but is also unprecedented in American history. Even with wars, economic downturns, and periodic rises in the crime rate, America never incarcerated more than 200,000 people in a single year until President Nixon’s politically motivated “war on drugs” in the early 1970s. It was a war that linked criminality and race and set in motion three and half decades of harsh get-tough-on-drugs and crime policies that had conservative and liberal policy makers alike scrambling to be seen as the toughest on crime. The result of these policies was that from the 1980s through the early 1990s there was a steep climb in the incarcerated population, an increase that could only be partially attributed to the crime rate. Then, and has been the case since the early 1990s through to the present day, the rise and maintenance of the mass incarceration and its racial disparities are almost wholly attributable to the tough drugs and crime policies (Schmitt et al., 2010).
