Mass incarceration is a democracy problem, not a crime and poverty problem

Strategies to end mass incarceration vary significantly based on the analysis of the underlying causes. If we locate the causes in crime and poverty, then the analysis might focus on understanding the roots of crime, and the strategy to end mass incarceration might include: alleviating poverty, addressing mental health, improving access to housing, creating better responses and interventions for violence by ‘investing in place’, and making neighborhood improvements (increasing tree cover, adding street lights, and fixing broken porches, for example).  These interventions would reduce crime and violence and the poverty stressors associated with them. But would they reduce overall incarceration? I think the answer is no. The best evidence shows there is zero relationship between incarceration and actual crime. The mechanisms that drive incarceration aren’t particularly responsive or answerable to actual crime concerns. If some peoples’ lives are improved and they avoid future incarceration, others will be substituted in their place. 

By contrast, if we locate the cause of mass incarceration in politics, in a manner independent of legitimate concerns about crime or safety, the strategy might focus on: reducing the amount of free political capital that candidates, elected officials, self-interested system actors, and the media gain from stoking fears of crime, while increasing the amount of organized, progressive political power held by people who are most impacted by unjust systems. Increasing power may entail increasing access to voting, fostering more organized networks of people who are most impacted, ensuring that there are onramps to the issue for millions of Americans who want to see their government investing in a bright future rather than more prisons. It would include creating messaging strategies to anticipate aggressive crime rhetoric, and engaging in elections to defeat the opponents of reform. This is a major democratic project, and should be centered in strategies that promote democracy. Efforts to shape the politics of crime figure here prominently as well, but the key focus is politics, rather than aiming to solve poverty.  

Which cause does the evidence support? The big thing that changed since the early 1970s wasn’t crime and poverty; it was the politics. To take one simplistic comparison (this is a book-length argument), 50 years ago, the poverty rate in America was roughly the same as it is today (1972; 2022), but the incarceration rate was 6x lower (93 per 100,000 people, compared to 570 now). Instead, what changed was the Nixon administration and many aligned political projects claiming that the enemy of America was crime and criminals, and focusing massive resources on criminalizing and repressing people perceived as criminals. They did so for reasons that had nothing to do with crime and safety as we understand it today. This quote from Nixon’s policy director, John Ehrlichman, has always struck me:

“You want to know what [the drug war] was really all about?... 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”

What followed was years of massive federal government investment into building prisons and the entire associated criminal legal apparatus. Here are some great books that dig into this: Alexander, Stuntz, Murakawa, Gilmore.

In short, funding improved crime prevention and safety may be extremely successful at improving peoples’ lives while still not ending mass incarceration. And that is by design (again, a book-length argument): picture Mississippi for a moment – a state with conservative crime politics. But a huge number of voters, especially Black voters, are disenfranchised due to having felonies (under a constitutional provision explicitly designed to target Black voters). If those people could vote, Mississippi could flip to being a blue state. Are we talking about crime policy when it comes to reducing rampant and excessive felony prosecutions, or about democracy?

To be clear: a political strategy to end mass incarceration requires that we be savvy about crime and offer solutions to crime, because of how tightly coupled these two things are in the public mind. But we have to be clear with ourselves that the work on crime and safety is strategic political work, not an end to itself. Indeed, it is democracy work.   

What are the implications of this for developing funding strategies? Funding that calls itself “criminal justice reform” has increasingly become focused on shrinking the causes of crime and improving safety, including major efforts on alleviating poverty. These are worthy and noble goals. But success on these goals, without a political strategy, will not end mass incarceration, because they are not addressing its cause. In order to have a hope of success in ending mass incarceration, we must: 

• Continue to talk explicitly about the need to downsize the prison and jail systems;

• Strongly emphasize narratives of human rights and democracy; 

• Invest in building the political power of people and communities most impacted by incarceration, including investing in elections where feasible; 

• Remove voting restrictions for people with criminal convictions; 

• Refuse to be drawn into weedy arguments about safety when looking at a system that wildly disproportionately incarcerates every disfavored class in this country. 

Bottom line: This field needs to not get distracted, and not accept the point that we are responsible for solving poverty and violence and health. Our responsibility is to keep people free.

To close, here’s a blunt analogy: the movement to ensure that women have a right to get an abortion if they need one doesn’t spend half its time talking about improving the conditions that might lead to people needing to get abortions, or addressing their education/housing/poverty/trauma/employment needs that might put them at risk of needing more abortions in the future. The focus is on rights, policy, access. The right to freedom should be the same.  

Thank you to Zoë Towns, whose insights inspired this post.