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Foundational Concept

Mass Incarceration

Also Known As Hyperincarceration Term used by sociologist Loic Wacquant for the same phenomenon, emphasizing its concentration among specific populations rather than a uniform rise.
Corrections and Institutional Life

The sustained, disproportionately high rate of imprisonment that developed in the United States from the 1970s onward. By 2021 over five million people were under criminal justice supervision and nearly two million incarcerated, and the country, with five percent of the world's population, held about twenty percent of its incarcerated persons before prison populations began a decline of roughly twenty five percent from 2009 to 2021. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
DomainSourced to the subject's own account
Criminal justice policy 1
Connections

Associated With

David Garland's The Culture of Control (2001) is a leading sociological analysis of the political and cultural drivers behind the late-twentieth-century rise in punitiveness and mass incarceration.

The federal prison system the Bureau administers is one of the largest single components of the United States' mass incarceration total.

Policy analysts attribute the scale of United States incarceration substantially to sentencing built around incapacitation.

Source Wikipedia: Incarceration in the United States

Katherine Beckett's Making Crime Pay (1997) analyzes how political discourse constructed the crime and punishment agenda behind the late-twentieth-century rise in incarceration.

Loic Wacquant's Punishing the Poor connects mass incarceration to neoliberal economic policy and the punitive management of urban poverty.

Michael Tonry is a leading contemporary sentencing scholar who has written extensively on United States mass incarceration and its racial disparities, notably in Punishing Race (2011).

The Sentencing Project, founded 1986, frames its own core mission and 30-plus years of advocacy explicitly as fighting mass incarceration.

Source The Sentencing Project: About
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Incarceration in the United States
Lead section
Quote, Lead section
The country comprises 5% of the world's population while having 20% of the world's incarcerated persons.
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The Sentencing Project: About
  • Associated With: The Sentencing Project
  • In Group: Imprisonment and Institutional Life, Featured campaign text
    America’s 50-year experiment with mass incarceration has been a profound moral and policy failure.
View the Source
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