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Download infographic Mass incarceration and public safety Incarceration has some impact on crime, but the impact is one of diminishing returns.Ĭrime rates have declined substantially since the early 1990s, but studies suggest that rising imprisonment has not played a major role in this trend. Data source: Bureau of Justice Statistics. This estimate is based on data from 2001. Lifetime Likelihood of Imprisonment for U.S.

For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. Mass incarceration has not touched all communities equally The racial impact of mass incarcerationīlack men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Latinos are 2.5 times as likely. One in seven people in prison are serving life with parole, life without parole, or virtual life (50 years or more). This population has nearly quintupled since 1984. The number of people serving life sentences endures even while serious, violent crime has been declining for the past 20 years and little public safety benefit has been demonstrated to correlate with increasingly lengthy sentences. Most are not high-level actors in the drug trade, and most have no prior criminal record for a violent offense. At the state level, the number of people in prison for drug offenses has increased nine-fold since 1980, although it has begun declining in recent years. By 2004, people convicted on federal drug offenses were expected to serve almost three times that length: 62 months in prison.Īt the federal level, people incarcerated on a drug conviction make up nearly half the prison population. Furthermore, harsh sentencing laws such as mandatory minimums keep many people convicted of drug offenses in prison for longer periods of time: in 1986, people released after serving time for a federal drug offense had spent an average of 22 months in prison. Since its official beginning in the 1980s, the number of Americans incarcerated for drug offenses has skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 430,926 in 2019. Sentencing policies of the War on Drugs era resulted in dramatic growth in incarceration for drug offenses. We started sending more people to prison.

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