Pros And Cons Of Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration is a term used to describe the increase in the number of incarcerated people in the United States over the past forty years. The number of people getting put in prison in the United States started to increase since the beginning of War on Drugs in 1982. “US is home to 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world's prisoners”, states the documentary 13th. There are currently more people in jail for a drug offense than the number of people in jail in 1980. The number of people incarcerated went from 40,900 in 1980 to 469,545 in 2015. The point of locking up so many people is to reduce crimes committed in the United States. Although mass incarceration might help a little, it is still not effective to reduce certain crimes. The first reason why prison populations have grown immensely over the past 40 years is youth crimes( which usually happen in big groups) and drug crimes. The people that get locked up for committing those crimes will be replaced by somebody else because of different types of personal issues. Some examples of those personal issues are income and addiction. …show more content…
Crimes are usually committed by people in their late teenage years and their early twenties. When people reach their 30s, crime rates drop. This means that they are putting a lot of people in jail for many years when they hit that age range. As the population grows, there will be more people that end up in prison. In the documentary 13th, there was a quote that said, “1 out of 4 human beings in the world are locked up here in the home of the free.” This quote gives me an idea of how many people get put in prison. But it also makes me wonder if they still consider this the home of the free if they keep putting so many people in