The United States has less than 5% of the entire Earth’s population but 25% of the Earth’s incarcerated population. Why is that?
Mass incarceration emerged as a solution during the late 1970s to rising crime, poverty, and unemployment rates, especially among black communities. With the abolition of Jim Crow laws, the South adopted mass incarceration as their new form of discrimination, thus earning the title “the new Jim Crow.”
Between 1963 and 1993, the murder rate doubled, the robbery rate quadrupled, and the aggravated assault rate quintupled. However, even when crime rates decreased, incarceration rates still increased. This is the result of the government’s series of campaigns and numerous criminal justice policies that made it infinitely easier to incarcerate an individual.
It began with Nixon’s “War on Drugs.” Since then, the U.S. government has released many laws encouraging mass incarceration. For example, in 1993, during Clinton’s presidency, the “3 Strikes, You’re Out” laws were very successful as a sentence enhancer, dealing mandatory life imprisonment to individuals who had prior convictions. Clinton also passed a “New Crime Bill” in 1994, which offered grants to states that built prisons and cut back on parole. Our current president Biden was even involved in maintaining the momentum of mass incarceration. As a senator of Delaware in the 1980s and 1990s, Biden helped pass the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, establishing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, giving harsher sentences for the possession of crack and powder cocaine, and more.
Since the 1970s, incarceration rates have increased sevenfold, from 300,000 to 2.2 million, from over-policing marginalized communities, enhancing sentences for minor crimes, restrictions upon release, excessive bail, and more.
In theory, locking up individuals who have committed crimes should benefit society. But there are holes in our system of mass incarceration, as the U.S. government has historically valued retribution over rehabilitation.
Incarcerated people are alienated from society, both literally and figuratively. Not only are they physically banished behind bars, but they are altogether shunned from society even after release. Formerly incarcerated individuals have immense difficulty securing housing and finding employment. Many have been locked up for decades, making readjustment harder. These factors make them more at risk for mental illness, drug addiction, poverty, and incarceration, perpetuating the cycle.
Incarceration also disproportionally affects black and Hispanic communities. Among all black males since the late 1970s, 1 in 4 went to prison by their mid-30s. In a blatant demonstration of prejudice and racism in America, research has also shown that white men with convicted felonies have less difficulty finding employment than black men without any criminal record.
Mass incarceration is undoubtedly still an issue today, and artists are working to bring attention to this pressing issue.
Mark Loughney (formerly incarcerated) uses pencil portraits to illustrate the scale of the U.S. prison system. He began these portraits during his time in prison, gifting his sketches to his fellow inmates. One day, lining up his portraits, Loughney recognized the sheer amount he had accumulated. That’s when he got the idea to organize his work together to illustrate the scale of America’s prison system. “The irony is that 500 faces is not even a drop in the bucket of our 2.4 million brothers, mothers, sisters, and fathers that are locked away in prisons in our country,” Loughney states.
His work was shown in an exhibit titled “Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration.” in a gallery in Scranton. He requests that viewers donate to the incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals in the portraits.
Another formerly incarcerated artist named Jesse Krimes uses intricate installations to depict incarcerated individuals’ otherwise forgotten lives and narratives. In college, he majored in sculpture and primarily worked in metalsmithing. But in prison, Krimes began working on “Purgatory,” which consisted of 300 prison-issued soap bars with imprinted mugshots from newspapers.
His installation with quilts, titled “Voices from the Heartland: Safety, Justice, and Community in Small and Rural America,” illustrates the cycle of incarceration, beginning from the Transatlantic slave trade in 1619 to the First Step Act in 2018, showing how mass incarceration is not a recent revelation, simply an extension of systemic racism.
In these quilts, he combines images from incarcerated people and inspiration from prominent artists like Van Gogh. Embedded in his work are symbols like jails, courthouses, and graph lines showing the system's disproportionate effect on black populations, which are overlayed with the stories of incarcerated individuals he has met.
In another installation, Krimes created a circular corn maze with 13 dead ends. At each dead end is a sign with the story of an incarcerated person. At the center of the labyrinth sits a singular red cell. This maze was intentionally designed to be challenging to navigate, metaphorizing what it is like to experience incarceration.