TPM Reader JL says we need to look beyond murder rates to race to really understand the roots of mass incarceration in the USA …
You make a fair point that when murder rates go up, people’s concerns about their safety will go up, and those concerns will probably find their way into public policy. But I think you go too far when you say that “it’s wildly unrealistic to think you wouldn’t have a generation plus of draconian laws tied to people’s fears of violence and personal safety.” Going as far overboard as we did required a lot more than a rising murder rate.
To see why, let’s step back a bit. The United States has a higher rate of incarceration than any country on earth (with the possible of exception of North Korea, which isn’t saying much). We’ve got less than 5% of the world’s population and nearly 25% of its prisoners. Our sentences are, on average, roughly twice as high as the English, three times as high as the Canadians, and five-to-10 times as high as the French. The racial disparities in the enforcement of these laws are too notorious to bother spelling out here. Is it likely that a society’s policing and sentencing will toughen up a bit when crime increases? Sure. But to go as preposterously far as we did? Something else was going on. And that had a lot to do with race.
Remember that in the late 60s and early 70s, the civil rights movement was just ending. Politicians were looking for ways to appeal to racist sentiments without using explicitly racial language. Talking tough on crime was a great way to do that. In 1968, Nixon ran an ad showing an elderly white woman walking fearfully down an urban street in the dark while the narrator intoned about “freedom from fear” and said to “vote as if your whole world depended on it.” For many white Americans, it must indeed have felt that their world was slipping away as they saw their racial privileges vanish. And since the image of crime was in large measure the image of blacks, crime became a rhetorical proxy.
In 1971, Nixon declared the War on Drugs. Reagan upped it with new mandatory minimums in the 1980s, as did Clinton in the 90s. And while an awful lot of white people have now been ensnared in this system — just ask poor rural whites about meth enforcement — the political opportunism in the early days is inextricable from race. It’s no coincidence that the countries with the most draconian laws tend to be the most diverse: it’s a lot easier to “other” people in such societies. And that “othering” is central to the birth of mass incarceration in the United States.
