percentage of americans that have done time in jail

This is why there's been such a boom in the more controversial practice of for-profit imprisonment. And since 1970, the detained population in the United States has increased by 700 percent. So the 5,000 jails and prisons America now has were a simple matter of supply and demand. It was a race to the top, and 28 states, as well as Washington, DC, dived right in, passing tougher sentencing laws. In 1994, Congress went so far as to explicitly encourage states to be tougher: Under a bill known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by then-President Clinton-whose administration would oversee the largest expansion of the prison population in American history-the more people a state threw behind bars, the more money it received. 'We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back,' he intoned on the 1992 campaign trail. To dig his party out of the wilderness, Bill Clinton had to rebrand the Democratic Party as crime hawks. The surprise star of the campaign was a black man named Willie Horton who, while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, got released from state prison on a weekend furlough program and raped and murdered a white woman. Bush arguably won the White House with a now infamous ad that accused his opponent, Michael Dukakis, of being soft on crime. Thus emerged a prerequisite for public office: being 'tough' on crime. Over the past few decades, the United States has built more jails and prisons than colleges. And the overt flexing of authority, even with a dash of institutionalized racism, was welcomed: This was an America that not only watched Cops regularly but applauded it. A heavy crackdown on 'quality of life' crimes in minority-filled neighborhoods, or what's known as 'broken windows' policing, would go on to sweep the nation, perhaps most notably in New York City. Mandatory sentencing guidelines, harsh drug laws, and public safety initiatives seeped into policy as both prisons and police forces soared in size. Federal, state, and local governments began to spend more than a trillion dollars to combat what the majority saw as a crisis: the grungy outgrowth, in their minds, of the counterculture from the previous decade. Politicians answered the call to arms, waging two interconnected-and roundly bipartisan-battles: the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. In Americans' eyes, the chaos of crime was everywhere.

Nightly news reports were increasingly laced with ominous stories, encouraged by Hollywood magic that portrayed a new inner-city insanity and suburbanites terrified of the burgeoning rap culture. Seemingly overnight, fear seeped into American homes. Cities verged on bankruptcy, modern ghettos expanded, and a tangible violent-crime wave broke out nationwide. Read on Broadly: Transgender Inmate Wins Historic Case Against Prison Guards Who Assaulted HerĪfter the crest of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, the United States sank into a deep economic stagnation. And cracks in the foundation of the prison-industrial complex are becoming more visible every day: With low crime rates and rising support for reform, elected officials and the American people are starting to wake up from their decades-long nightmare. This machine has been more than half a century in the making, the byproduct of fear, racism, and social upheaval. Yet the story of how the United States got to this dystopian place-the Atlantic once called it 'perhaps the greatest social crisis in modern American history'-is more than just a statistical one. Mass incarceration is now a signature of Americana like cowboy westerns, reality television, and cheap romance novels. And as the Washington Post reported in January, there are more Americans shipping off to prison than to two- or four-year degree programs in some parts of the country.

Over the past few decades, the United States has built more jails and prisons than colleges there are now more than 5,000 of them across the 50 states, to be precise. 'We account for twenty-five percent of the world's inmates.' 'The United States accounts for five percent of the world's population,' President Barack Obama remarked after visiting the overcrowded cells of the Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, in July. Rwanda, at 41, would fall just behind the state of New York. If states were countries, Cuba-with 510 per 100,000 persons behind bars-would rank 37 in the world for the highest percentage of its population in prison. Some nations may also be at fault for human rights violations in their prisons, but America's mass-incarceration syndrome is-like the country's attitude toward just about everything else-super-sized.

Percentage of americans that have done time in jail