America’s prison population

The statistics that paint the portrait of American prisons could hardly be starker.

The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest rate of incarceration.

The two million people behind bars in America are locked out of society, but their exclusion doesn’t stop there. Some states prevent former felons from voting and more than seven million Americans are under some form of restriction, such as probation or parole.

The enormity of those totals becomes even more concerning when one considers who those inmates are.

African Americans and Latinos make up more than 70% of federal prison populations and the majority of inmates in state prisons. African Americans comprise only a third of the overall US population.

The inequalities also transcend gender; almost three times as many black women are behind bars as white women.

It is hardly surprising, then, that mass incarceration has had a profound impact on the very foundations of American democracy.

Disenfranchisement policies affected almost two million African Americans by the turn of the millennium. Had they voted, their decisions would have impacted the results of seven U.S. Senate races between 1970 and 1998 and also two presidential elections, in 2000 and 2004.

The effects of mass incarceration have also been felt in the rise of the American right, the decline of the labour movement, and the crisis in American inner-city areas, as well as shaping suburban development, state boundaries and the distribution of government resources.

Mass incarceration has always had an effect on the nation’s health — 22% of prisoners reported ever having TB, Hepatitis B and C, HIV, AIDs, or other STDs, compared to just 5% of the population at large.

However, never has that reality been laid so bare as now.

For as COVID-19 spreads with ease through American prisons, it is clear that mass incarceration will also influence the number — and the demographic composition — of deaths in the United States.

In that context, coronavirus might just prove to be a death sentence, and minority groups will pay the highest price.

Behind the inequalities

However, the larger question is not whether the demographic of America’s prison population is so large and so unrepresentative, but why it has become so.

The history of the U.S. “carceral state” — America’s web of prisons and the processes and infrastructure that surround it— is a relatively new historiographical sub-field, but it is a growing and important one.

One of the central questions is that of agency — of whom the carceral state was set up to serve.

In 2010, the author and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The book argued that imprisonment disproportionately affected black Americans as a means of social control.

Since Alexander’s seminal work, other historians have added to the debate, confirming that, in many cases, white Americans favoured the expansion of the prison system to support their own lifestyles.

For Michael Lassiter, this endorsement manifested in the dichotomous media tropes of the black, urban drug pusher and the white, suburban ‘impossible criminal.’

Both groups were stereotyped by the media and the law for their drug use, but these were preconceptions that ultimately favoured white communities over their black counterparts. Black drug use was progressively criminalised, while drug use in middle-class white households was increasingly tolerated.

But while parents’ groups and other social movements turned public opinion in their favour, there were many in American society who had a different reason for supporting carceral expansion.

Heather Ann Thompson won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Blood in the Water, an account of the Attica prison uprising in 1971. Her work shows that many white men, in particular, supported prison construction because prisons created much-needed employment.

Prisons were disproportionately constructed in areas with densely-white populations, and prison construction became a guarantee of electoral success for local public officials.

Such an outcome was an unhappy corollary of an economic situation that transcended race; just as deprivation pushed some into drugs, gangs, and crime, it forced others to push for job creation in the growing prison sector.

And while white men often ended up guarding their black counterparts, ‘it is hard not to see both groups as losing out by the end’ (Jen Manion).