Land of the Free? Far from it.
The Dividing Line's latest: Why the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
If all the people incarcerated in the United States lived in one city, it would be the 5th largest city in the nation. As of 2022, there are 1.8 million people incarcerated in the United States, or slightly larger than Phoenix, Arizona (1.6M). While mass incarceration is often justified as a strategy to improve public safety, its impact in many cases has been deeply harmful. Long prison sentences, limited rehabilitative services, and inefficient crime reporting systems show how mass incarceration often undermines its stated goal of reducing harm.
These visuals are all interactive and available with more information at this link here.
The increase in incarceration began in the late 1970s when the Nixon administration declared a ‘war on drugs’ and promised to be ‘tough on crime’. In 1980 the incarcerated population exploded, with a huge increase for the next 30 years. Mandatory minimums, three strike laws, and low-level drug offenses put far more behind bars than ever. Across the country, in all states, from large cities to small towns, incarceration grew. But even with these punitive measures, the violent crime rate also continued to increase.
The US has a higher incarceration rate than El Salvador or Rwanda.
Several countries experienced a similar increase in crime between 1972 and 1991, but very few expanded incarceration in the same way as the US. Even as crime rates fell between 1991 and 2009, incarceration continued to expand. Compared to other countries, the US has a significantly higher incarceration rate when controlling for the nation’s violent crime rate. The US has a higher incarceration rate than El Salvador or Rwanda. Even in places like Botswana or Ecuador that have far higher violent crime rates that are triple and quadruple what they are in America, their incarceration rates are one-third lower.
Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana have the highest incarceration rates in the United States. 17 states have a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world.
Black and Latino individuals are incarcerated more than 5 times the rate of people who are White. This reflects long standing issues of racial bias in our policies and policing. Punitive policies often involve targeting minority groups. While the US has a long history of incarcerating Black Americans, law enforcement agencies have recently turned their gaze onto immigrant communities. However, research shows that immigrants, many of whom are people of color, have a lower crime rate than native born Americans.
Closing Thoughts
Mass Incarceration has not been shown to improve public safety. Increasing punitive measures often deepens challenges faced by individuals and communities, while doing little to prevent future crime. Having more research-based policies with proven results and investments in rehabilitation is the only way we can move forward. While incarceration rates have been falling, the US is still struggling with a multi-decade long legacy of mass incarceration. Mike Wessler at the Prison Policy Initiative has the final word on America’s choice for the future:
“America's forty-year experiment with mass incarceration has been an abysmal failure. Punitive and racist policies have destroyed lives and communities, wasted taxpayer dollars, and not made communities safer. The country has a choice: it can double down on the misguided so-called "tough-on-crime" policies that created this crisis, or it can choose a new path forward By investing in communities, expanding access to treatment, and increasing economic opportunities, America has the chance to close the books on the era of mass incarceration once and for all. The question is, will the country take advantage of this opportunity?”
5 Great Organizations to Connect With and Support:
Prison Policy Initiative: Non-profit that produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization, and sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society.
The Sentencing Project: The Sentencing Project advocates for effective and humane responses to crime that minimize imprisonment and criminalization of youth and adults by promoting racial, ethnic, economic, and gender justice.
Vera Institute of Justice: A national organization that partners with impacted communities and government leaders for change. Their goal is to end the criminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.
Equal Justice Initiative: The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (WISLY ): Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction and A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a dystopian novel that delivers a searing critique of the U.S. prison-industrial complex with footnotes and real incarceration statistics.
So much to say on this, as I've been making my own webpage on the relationship between violent crime and incarceration to study the issue myself:
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/murder_prison
* The historical data from Vera is only jail data, which is smaller than the share in prisons. You have to make a lot of assumptions to treat it as "the incarceration rate".
* About the history part 1: incarceration rates were stable from around 1960 - 1980 while murder rates doubled (worse if you control for improvements in medical care) and there was an explosion in serial killings. Like school shootings today, the latter were small in absolute numbers but terrifying and impacted public opinion.
This was an era when the USA led the world in rehabilitation efforts and theory. Progressives of the time believed that almost anyone could be rehabilitated, and important figures like LBJ and MLK believed reducing poverty would solve crime. A shocking number of sex offenders were released "cured" and then went on to rape and murder enough children and women to earn their own wikipedia pages.
The era culminated in the infamous "nothing works" evidence review published around 1975 or so. And despite plummeting poverty due to the introductions of Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc... the murder rate actually *increased* substantially.
* About the history part 2: In response, incarceration rates began to rise in the 80s and peaked in the early 2000s. During this period, homicide rates fell. That doesn't prove causality, but it's certainly suggestive of it being a contributing factor. And btw, the graphic on today's post cuts off right when the big decrease in jailed inmates correlates with a sharp increase in homicides.
* A basic understanding of recidivism data makes the "incarceration doesn't reduce crime" argument simply untenable: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/18upr9yfup0514.pdf
45% of prisoners are rearrested after 1 year, 75% after 3. The median prisoner has been arrested a dozen times and convicted of 6 crimes. There are more prisoners with 20+ prior arrests than first time arrestees. Basic common sense would tell you locking them up prevents a LOT of crime.
* Violent crime rates are almost useless when making international comparisons, because definitions and reporting rates vary so much. They are practically useless even for state comparisons, as richer states have less violent crime but also report more of what they do have. That's why I used homicides (which is still far from perfect) for all comparisons on my webpage.
* The "People of Color" label obscures more than it illuminates, as census categories like Asian and Black have virtually nothing in common when it comes to crime statistics. Breaking down into more relevant groupings, Blacks are incarcerated (prison + jails) at around 4 times the rate of Whites. (and Whites 4 times the rate of Asians fwiw). But Blacks are committing over 10 times the rate of homicides.
If you control incarceration rate by the homicide, as today's post's scatterplot attempts to, the Black census category appears to be the most under-incarcerated, with 46 incarcerated person per annual homicide. For Whites, it's 95 locked up per homicide, and Hispanics 89 per. This can even be seen looking at geographical incarceration rates, as the very White Mountain West locks up people at a higher rate than states like Maryland or Illinois, and nearly as much as the much more violent Deep South does.
Anyways - this is already a tl;dr; post, so I'll quit. But I hope you can be open to some of these critiques. No one has a monopoly on truth when it comes to complex social questions.
This one hit hard because it’s not new, but it’s still happening. Still devastating. Still ignored.
Mass incarceration in this country isn’t a broken system. It’s a functioning one: built to extract, dehumanize, and erase. And it’s been one of the things that’s haunted me for years as I’ve worked in coaching, leadership, and equity spaces.
We lock people up at a rate that outpaces entire countries. We criminalize poverty. We punish vulnerability. We separate families and call it “justice.”
As someone leading the U.S. work for the Global Loneliness Action Project and coaching leaders trying to rebuild from this mess, we see the human toll every day. This isn’t just a policy failure. It’s an emotional infrastructure collapse.
Jeremy, thank you for putting this front and center. We need this kind of clarity, this kind of fire. Keep going. We’re with you.