Written May 2021

INTRODUCTION

Mass incarceration describes the phenomenon of rapid and racially disproportionate prison growth in the United States. For much of American history the U.S. prison population remained fairly stable at around 100 prisoners per 100,000 people. In the early 1970s the rate of incarceration took a stark upward turn. Over the next decade the population nearly doubled. By the turn of the century, incarceration rates reached over 450 prisoners per 100,000 population.¹ To further complicate this phenomenon, there is a clear racial division within the prison population. Black Americans constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population but make up 40 percent of the correctional population. Whites, alternatively, make up 64 percent of the U.S. population and 39 percent of the correctional population.⁵ Other races are reflected in the documentation of the prison population, however in the framing of this paper I will focus on the relationship between incarceration and anti-Black racism.

A variety of neoliberal policies and campaigns popularized in the 1970s contributed to the exponential increase of people incarcerated in prisons and jails.³ The foremost contributors to this expansion were political campaigns such as the war on drugs and war on crime that continued into the 21st century. These campaigns were carried out on the state and federal levels but permeated the American consciousness due to news media and entertainment media’s coverage. This created attitudes toward crime that demonized poverty, drug users, and above all, Black Americans. The tough on crime rhetoric resulted in legislation that criminalized non-violent crime in harsher ways with lengthened sentences.³ The convergence of propaganda, racist attitudes, and social control ultimately resulted in our current crisis of Mass Incarceration.

In academic articles related to mass incarceration it is often referred to as a ‘failed experiment.’ Marginalized communities are disproportionally impacted, families are torn apart, and taxpayers foot the bill. So, they ask, why does it continue? In this paper I will argue that mass incarceration is not a failed experiment. It has been intentionally constructed under the interests of white supremacy, state control, and pursuit of private financial profit. Mass incarceration is the latest iteration of race-making institutions in the United States and lives up to the legacies of its successors. It is in fact incredibly successful, which can be revealed through a historical overview of the criminalization of Black people and an analysis of neoliberal policy that facilitated prison expansion. Ultimately, I will grapple with the question – if mass incarceration is fulfilling its purpose, how can it be dismantled?

HISTORICAL ROOTS OF RACISM & MASS INCARCERATION

In this section I will discuss the connection between slavery and mass incarceration using the theories set forth by Loic Wacquant (2002) regarding the “four peculiar institutions” of racial domination. These race-making institutions include: Chattel Slavery from 1619-1865, Jim Crow from 1865-1965, the Ghetto from 1915-1968, and the Hyperghetto and Prison from 1968- present. Wacquant (2002) explains that the main purposes of these institutions are ethnoracial enclosure and the free or cheap extraction of labor. The categories he sets forth illuminate not only similarities, but the direct correlation between slavery and mass incarceration.

Slavery and mass incarceration are widely compared and hold striking similarities. The plantation acted as a type of prison in which white landowners were permitted to imprison Black people and force them into labor as a means to generate profit for the landowner.⁸ This system was upheld by the Federal government until 1865 when Congress ratified the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery in its present form but permitted it “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” (Bill of Rights, 1865). Ultimately, this amendment allowed for the continuation of forced labor and constricting of people’s movement based on racial lines and criminalization. It assured that so long as the State can criminalize Black people, they can legally enslave them.

After the supposed abolition of slavery and end of the Civil War, white elites and politicians grappled with how they could sustain the racial enclosure of the plantation and forced labor of freedpeople. In an effort to maintain the existing structures of oppression, Southern states enacted legislation that restricted the free movement and economic capacity of Black people by criminalizing their behaviors and identity. This is known as the Jim Crow era. Vagrancy laws required travelling Black people to have proof of employment or receive a fine and be arrested. If they were unable to pay the fine, they could effectively be sold back into slavery by the Sheriff.⁶ The Freedman’s Bureau, a Federal agency with the stated purpose of redistributing land to freed people, encouraged or coerced them to return to the very plantations where they had been imprisoned only a year prior. Segregation in all public spaces was permitted and staunchly upheld by either racist State or interpersonal violence/murder.⁶ As Wacquant (2002) explains, segregation and returning land to white enslavers assured the subjugation of Black Americans under white rule via economic and social means.

In hopes of escaping the racist structures of the South, many Black people fled North in what is known as the Great Migration, a period that lasted for over 50 years. At this point we encounter a new institution – the ghetto. The ghetto is a racial enclosure with the intent of maintaining ethnoracial domination, what Wacquant refers to as an “ethnoracial prison”.⁸ It functioned by pushing Black people into neighborhoods that were overcrowded and service-deprived and forcing them into exploitative work that was unstable, underpaid, and dangerous. The mass migration created an abundance of laborers while white supremacist attitudes and laws ensured that Black workers were economically dependent on whites. Due to tireless work by Black revolutionaries and activists, the legal structures that upheld racial domination began to be deconstructed, which lightened the power of racial enclosures. Additionally, shifting economic structures and an influx of immigration into working class communities made the ghetto ineffective as a means to extract cheap labor.⁸

Wacquant argues that unlike the prior three stages, the Prison does not exist for economic purposes, but rather to remove individuals who breach the hegemonic “sociomoral integrity” of society from the public view. It is important to note that the Prison produces racial definitions and attitudes by conflating criminality with Blackness. Prisoners experience segregation in politics, education, employment, and welfare. They experience a kind of ‘social death’ in which they can no longer freely participate in society and are instead subject to invasive surveillance and exclusionary practices.⁸ Imprisonment is a traumatizing experience that is detrimental to mental health, family bonds, community relationships and civic participation.

NEOLIBERAL LEGISLATION

The prison reemerged in the public conscious due to shifting political messaging and images portrayed in news and entertainment media. Conservatives capitalized on the social unrest of the 1960s by equating the Civil Rights movement with Black criminality, appealing to the fear and racist attitudes of their constituents. To conservatives, by making sentencing laws and policing more punitive they could remove undesirable individuals from the public view and control those that have not entered the carceral system. Republican President Nixon’s “War on Drugs” invigorated prison growth in the 1970s. The war on drugs was essentially a war on the Black community and on people addicted to drugs. The administration funded anti-drug use initiatives, including the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The war on drugs was an intentional effort to imprison Black people, which Nixon aide John Ehrlichman admitted. He says:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Drug Policy Initiative, 2016.

This quote is probably the clearest instance of the intentionality of carceral state building. The administration recognized a social crisis that threatened State control and racial inequality. They made the decision to move on to new rhetoric that maintained racist structures and reshaped attitudes around race and crime.

In the 1980s, anti-drug and anti-Black sentiment was formalized under President Reagan. Arrests for non-violent crime, specifically drug use and selling, rose exponentially. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was signed into law in 1986, which created mandatory minimum sentencing that disproportional effected Black people and funneled money into fighting the drug war.³ Crack cocaine (used primarily by Black people at the time) was penalized harder than powder cocaine (used primarily by wealthy whites). The seemingly colorblind sentencing laws exacerbated inequality in the criminal justice system by imposing racially coded practices.
Many liberals, on the other hand, advocated for ‘deracializing’ the carceral state. They argued that if individual racism was legislated out of the criminal justice system and replaced with standardized punishment, then racism would not be an issue.³ These reforms accelerated prison expansion by funding the very institutions they attempted to fix – allocating funding to law enforcement to ‘professionalize’ the force. The tough on crime theory quickly became a part of the U.S.’s hegemonic beliefs on crime and punishment.³ Conservatives and liberals had a sort of tug of war – who could be tougher on crime? President Clinton’s war on crime was an extension of the war on drugs’ logic, promoting the idea that harsh punishments will deter crime. Funding for social services and wages of Federal employees was rerouted to bolster policing efforts and use law enforcement to address social issues.² The language used to advocate for longer sentencing was racially coded, with phrasing such as “super predators” used as a stand in for young Black men. To control this population they lengthened and expanded the scope of mandatory minimums, funded community policing, cut welfare spending, and instated many other neoliberal policies.³ Ultimately, the conjunction of this racialized propaganda and punishment spiked the number of imprisoned people in the United States.

We have now briefly examined the historical events that contributed to our current crisis of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is a rebirth of race-making in the United States. It reflects the legacies of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto as a means for racial repression and control. Each iteration arose from a need to restructure racial violence to fit the social context of the time with the ultimate goal of maintaining white supremacy and ensuring the extraction of cheap labor from Black Americans. Policy and messaging of the neoliberal era that expanded the carceral state simply repackaged racial oppression with coded language and reformist ideals. The intention of these policies is clear and effective. It can be argued that some reform was merely failed experimentation, however the hyper-criminalization of Black Americans is a deliberate move to perpetuate racial subjugation.

CONCLUSION: BEYOND MASS INCARCERATION

Mass incarceration has a deep history in the United States and can be overwhelming at times. However, mass incarceration does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a larger ecosystem known as the Prison Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial Complex is an economy based on the endless pursuit of profit by private and State interests by expanding the carceral state. This includes defense and surveillance technology, militarized police forces, prison labor, and is directly linked to the U.S.’s imperialist military agenda. In future investigation, I will attempt to identify the beneficiaries of the Prison Industrial Complex. Recognizing who profits off this industry will allow us to create a framework for combating its expansion. Boycotting companies that use prison labor or export weapons of war internationally could be largely influential, as well as advocating for policy that deconstructs rather than expanding the Prison Industrial Complex. Understanding the economy that encompasses mass incarceration is fundamental to deconstructing it.

As widespread protests regarding state violence erupt across the country, American residents and politicians will be forced to recon with the consequences of mass incarceration. We are seeing reforms such as marijuana legalization and the early release of people in jails due to COVID-19. The tough on crime sentiment of the late 20th century is fading, so we will soon reach a crisis in which the State must decide how to maintain white supremacist, capitalist exploitation. At this conjuncture abolitionists will have the opportunity to reshape the way the carceral state operates and how white supremacy structures society. As abolition becomes more mainstream and the tireless work of abolitionists continues, we can see coalition building that may be sufficient to dismantle it.

REFERENCES

• ¹ Drug Policy Initiative. (2016). Press Release: Top Adviser to Richard Nixon Admitted that ‘War on Drugs’ was Policy Tool to Go After Anti-War Protesters and ‘Black People.’ Retrieved from https://drugpolicy.org/press-release/2016/03/top-adviser-richard-nixon-admitted-war-drugs-was-policy-tool-go-after-anti
  
• ² Gilmore, Ruth W. (2018). Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, California.
• ³ Murakawa, Naomi. (2014). The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Oxford University Press, NY.
  
• ⁴ Prison Policy Initiative. Incarceration Rate 1925-2001 [graph]. Retrieved from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/incarcerationrate.html (Original Graph created by Peter Wagner, 2003).
  
• ⁵ Sawyer, Wendy. (2020). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020. Retrieved from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html#slideshows/slideshow3/1
  
• ⁶ The American YAWP. (Evolving, collaborative document). Chapter 15: Reconstruction. Retrieved from http://www.americanyawp.com/text/15-reconstruction/
  
• ⁷ U.S. Bill of Rights. amend. XIII.
  
• ⁸ Wacquant, Loic. (2002). From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US. New Left Review, 13, p. 41-60.