Advertisement
Advertisement
After the crest of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, the United States sank into a deep economic stagnation. Cities verged on bankruptcy, modern ghettos expanded, and a tangible violent-crime wave broke out nationwide. Seemingly overnight, fear seeped into American homes. Nightly news reports were increasingly laced with ominous stories, encouraged by Hollywood magic that portrayed a new inner-city insanity and suburbanites terrified of the burgeoning rap culture.In Americans' eyes, the chaos of crime was everywhere. And it had to be stopped at any cost.Politicians answered the call to arms, waging two interconnected—and roundly bipartisan—battles: the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. Federal, state, and local governments began to spend more than a trillion dollars to combat what the majority saw as a crisis: the grungy outgrowth, in their minds, of the counterculture from the previous decade.Mandatory sentencing guidelines, harsh drug laws, and public safety initiatives seeped into policy as both prisons and police forces soared in size. A heavy crackdown on "quality of life" crimes in minority-filled neighborhoods, or what's known as "broken windows" policing, would go on to sweep the nation, perhaps most notably in New York City. And the overt flexing of authority, even with a dash of institutionalized racism, was welcomed: This was an America that not only watched Cops regularly but applauded it.Read on Broadly: Transgender Inmate Wins Historic Case Against Prison Guards Who Assaulted Her
Advertisement
Thus emerged a prerequisite for public office: being "tough" on crime. In 1988, George H. W. Bush arguably won the White House with a now infamous ad that accused his opponent, Michael Dukakis, of being soft on crime. The surprise star of the campaign was a black man named Willie Horton who, while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, got released from state prison on a weekend furlough program and raped and murdered a white woman. To dig his party out of the wilderness, Bill Clinton had to rebrand the Democratic Party as crime hawks. "We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back," he intoned on the 1992 campaign trail.In 1994, Congress went so far as to explicitly encourage states to be tougher: Under a bill known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by then-President Clinton—whose administration would oversee the largest expansion of the prison population in American history—the more people a state threw behind bars, the more money it received. It was a race to the top, and 28 states, as well as Washington, DC, dived right in, passing tougher sentencing laws.So the 5,000 jails and prisons America now has were a simple matter of supply and demand. And since 1970, the detained population in the United States has increased by 700 percent. This is why there's been such a boom in the more controversial practice of for-profit imprisonment. Incarceration—whether it's for natural-born citizens, immigrants, or anyone else behind bars in America—is recession-proof.Over the past few decades, the United States has built more jails and prisons than colleges.
Advertisement
That reevaluation of the past several decades' worth of imprisonment has also been felt on a cultural level. It's not hard to believe that a Willie Horton ad nowadays would be chastised as race baiting rather than a one-way ticket to the White House. Or that the country would rather watch The Wire or Orange Is the New Black—series that explore the more emotional complexities of criminal justice—than Cops.For both parties in Washington, it is now orthodox to believe that what America created was an overwhelming, costly behemoth of a system. And it is quickly emerging as a requirement in the coming presidential election that candidates have some kind of stance on how to fix it. After all, even former President Clinton recently admitted that what his administration did was, well, bad.Over on i-D: Photographing America's Pregnant Prisoners
Advertisement
Figuring out how to deal with these consequences and downsize the prison system is now a national project. A day before Clinton spoke, President Obama said, "Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it." He visited El Reno later that week, and also granted clemency to 46 nonviolent drug offenders—the largest single act of presidential forgiveness since the 1960s.If crime nationwide is at an all-time low, why does America still have a monstrous prison system? And why is it spending all of this money on it?
Advertisement