The Big Picture: what you need to know about mass incarceration

I’ve been reflecting lately on what are the most important things for people to know about the system of mass incarceration in order to engage meaningfully with the issue. There’s no real substitute for sustained reading and engagement. That said, here is my current list of the most important things to know. I welcome your feedback on this high level overview, which integrates the work of many organizing leaders and scholars (especially: Kaba, Stuntz, Gilmore, Davis, Alexander, Stevenson, López). 

What's going on 

Note: there are many possible citations for the points below. I didn’t spend the time to look them all up again. If you have a specific question, put it in the comments and I will try to chase down a good cite for you.

1. The American criminal legal system is extremely large and expensive, uniquely so in the developed world; 

2. It’s very bad, causing economic and psychological devastation to people inside prison (including guards, who have shorter life expectancy and much higher suicide rates than the general population – one reason why there is a 30% vacancy rate for corrections jobs right now), and to their families and communities on the outside, across multiple generations. This system has been a hidden factor dragging down progress across many domains, from poverty alleviation, to improving education outcomes to women’s economic independence;  

3. It is extremely racist and captures the most vulnerable people in society, who are disproportionately poor, disabled, crime and trauma survivors, and members of disfavored racial groups;   

4. Its effects are broadly distributed. The 10 largest jails contain less than 15% of the total jail population, and the top 10 states contain less than half the total prison population. Winning big campaigns against the worst jails and changing laws in the worst states will be impactful only if those fights build national momentum that spreads organically. This has happened successfully in the prosecutor elections work;

5. If your goals are improving safety and reducing harm, it doesn’t work. 

   1. There is zero relationship between incarceration and crime;    

   2. The criminal legal system delivers worse results than alternatives, because its tendency to foster violence and destabilization are criminogenic.    

How we got here 

1. Racial control: The U.S. prison population grew very slowly until the early 1970s, when it shot up to extreme heights, which we call mass incarceration. This occurred after the civil rights movement forced the end of Jim Crow. U.S. chattel slavery, black codes, lynching, convict leasing, chain gangs, Jim Crow, and then mass incarceration evolved in succession to enforce racial control. To really understand this, visit the Legacy Museum! 

2. Dignity: In America, dignity is contingent and is something you can lose upon being accused of a crime. Even slavery is permitted under the 13th Amendment if you’ve been convicted of a crime. Our grotesque prison conditions, cruelly long sentences, death penalty and family separations would all be out of the question if we understood human dignity as absolute. 

3. Crime fears: Politicians, political interest groups, and aligned media have used fear of crime to win elections and drive bad policies for decades. The legacies of presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton are all prime examples; this has played out in localities across the U.S., especially where suburban voters were made to fear people living in cities. Gallup polling shows us: Americans consistently think crime is going up, even when it’s not, and Democrats are far more likely to say crime is going up when a Republican is the President, and Republicans are more likely to say crime is going up when a Democrat is the President. In other words, “crime” is a vessel for other fears. 

4. One way ratchet: For multiple political and psychological reasons, it’s much easier to build a prison than close one (see Susanville), to make laws that increase prison time when the evidence says that will make things worse than to strike those laws down, or to keep someone on supervision when it’s unnecessary than to release them. This is true across the board.  

Given all the above, what will it take to end mass incarceration?

1. There is no silver bullet. This issue is complex to solve – more like curing cancer than fixing a broken leg. It will take a thriving movement ecology and sophisticated funding. 

2. There are three main drivers of the problem that must all be addressed: political (the interests of powerful players that benefit from the status quo to win elections and increase their budgets, which can be reshaped by expanding the political power of impacted communities); social (structural conditions like poverty, lack of health care, and homelessness, plus legacies of trauma, stigma, and shame that drive people into the system); and technical (the morass of policies and bureaucracies whose path dependencies keep us stuck in a situation that does not work and does not serve people). 

3. Solutions are abundant, and the more we address the drivers above, the more these solutions can take root. The first main group of solutions could be summarized as “stop doing harmful things and don’t replace them with other things.” For example, we can stop prosecuting people for low-level misdemeanors, which research has shown actually increases crime. Similarly, we can release people much sooner from prison, and reduce the amount of supervision by probation and parole.  Second, we need to build the positive infrastructure that we want to see grow. This includes increasing access to non-punitive accountability through restorative justice, building non-punitive welfare systems and non-punitive reentry systems, increasing individual and community healing infrastructure (such as trauma recovery centers), and putting safety budgets into the hands of local communities for non-police interventions like better garbage collection and home repair that do well at reducing crime. 

4. Because mass incarceration is so big and so broad, ending it is going to require large-scale decentralized participation by people living in thousands of counties around the country. We currently have nowhere near enough capacity for this. The field needs to absorb a lot more people right now to do useful work, including making contact with millions of people impacted by incarceration who have no idea this field exists. 

How should donors spend money to end mass incarceration? 

1. There is a robust and vibrant field of people doing this work, including many leaders with personal or family experiences of incarceration. While the approach of designing and building a new organization to make a particular intervention may be attractive to some donors, this is rarely the most effective or impactful investment. There is plenty of good work underway that needs to grow, and there are brilliant emerging leaders deserving investment. When in doubt, direct your money towards work led by people most impacted by incarceration.

2. Given the powerful entrenched political interests holding this system in place, winning transformative change will require robust investments into political organizing, to build new political capital. There is room on the margins for smart technical interventions – for example, the fantastic work that Recidiviz is doing – but long term change is going to require that directly impacted people become more politically powerful than they have been, and there is no shortcut to this. Good arguments and pilot demonstrations will not be sufficient.  

3. Funding well requires learning a lot of information. If you’re not going to do your own very deep dive into the issues, then consider following others who have done it! Some good options: research existing funders to find ones that fit your style and values and match their investments; contribute to an existing fund such as Borealis, Life Comes From It, the Participatory Defense Network, or the Just Impact Fund; follow recommendations like these; or go for direct mutual aid and give to your local commissary fund (which should look something like this).