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By Ronald Fraser

Reacting to a sharp rise in violent crimes, state and federal officials in the 1970s climbed aboard the politically popular "tough on crime" bandwagon. New laws, including punitive war-on-drug laws, began to swell the number of non-violent offenders (and violent ones too) behind bars.

By 2012, with only five percent of the world's population but nearly 25 percent of the world's prisoners, America became the world's incarceration capital as federal, state and local inmates topped 2.2 million – nearly seven times the number in 1972.

A recent report from the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, titled, "The Growth of Incarceration in the United States," is perhaps the most exhaustive attempt yet — 444 pages — to explain America's prison boom. The report concludes, "The best single proximate explanation of the rise in incarceration is not rising crime, but the policy choices made by legislators to greatly increase the use of imprisonment as a response to crime."

From 1929 to 1974 the incarceration rate for all crimes in the United States – defined as the total number of all inmates in state and federal prisons, for every 100,000 population — hovered around 110. But, by 2012 longer sentences and mandatory minimum prison time for minor offenses, especially drug-related crimes, pushed the incarceration rate to 471.

Looking at drug-related crimes alone, as state prison admissions for drug-related offenses also skyrocketed, according to the Council, from 10,000 in 1980 to 157,000 in 2008.

Tough-on-crime law-makers, according to the report, abandoned three key principles — moral guidelines — that, prior to the 1970s, served to underpin the legitimacy of prisons and limited the severity of punishments. In the absence of these guidelines the Council found that both state and federal prison policies shifted "from a focus on rehabilitation as the predominant purpose of punishment to just deserts, or retribution, as the primary goal."

Fairness: Punishments are deserved and just only when they fit the seriousness of the crime. But, as rehabilitation lost credibility in the 1970s, the adoption of mandatory minimum sentences, three-strike laws and other measures that readily imposed prison time filled the gap.

"Such laws," the Council reports, "often disconnected the severity of punishments from the seriousness of crimes. Low–level drug crimes often were punished as severely as serious acts of violence."

Racial Disparities: The imprisonment rate in 2010 for blacks was 4.6 times higher than for whites and black offenders were mainly poor and from severely disadvantaged communities. This has compounded the negative effects of imprisonment on families and children.

"When punishments are unduly severe and affect large numbers of people in particular communities," the Council warns, "crime may flourish as justice institutions lose legitimacy."

Citizenship: Prison terms should not be so severe or long lasting as to violate an individual's fundamental status a member of society. When attempting to readjust to society, ex-convicts are unduly penalized when their voting rights, access to credit and jobs, housing assistance, education aid and other social benefits are cut off.

What to do? For me, the report's lasting message is:

Many states are now taking steps to reduce the size of their prison populations — not because it is the morally right thing to do — but because too many prisons are straining state budgets. Instead, the real problem is that too many government leaders are abusing their power and needlessly putting untold thousands of non-violent Americans behind bars.

"The American experiment in mass incarceration," states a recent New York Times editorial, "has been a moral, social, and economic disaster. It cannot end soon enough."

Prison policies in America will remain adrift until our justice system is guided once again by moral principles, not punishment for punishment's sake.

Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization. Write him at: fraserr@erols.com.