The Causes Of Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration is the rate of incarcerating individuals at an extremely high rate. This is something that began long ago when the states and federal government begin to build up numbers of prison facilities with no one to fill them, in which this forced them to conduct a mass incarceration to ensure they were not building these prisons for no reason. According to Mears and Cochran (2015), counting both the prisons and the county jails in America the incarceration rate is at 716 per 100,000 residents of the states. Mass incarceration was something that existed centuries ago, but did not really take off until about 1973 with the “War on Drugs,” expanding consequent decades under Regan, Clinton, and both Bushes administration, (Liberty Equality Fraternity and

Cause number two, public demands for increased punitive sanctioning, is where the policy makers usually states that they are representation of the “people,” but if we actually think about it they cannot know the wants of the public as a whole, heightened (Mears & Joshua C, 2015). This is a great cause of mass incarceration due to the fact the policy makers took what they were hearing and ran with it, but as stated before they could not have known what the mass majority of the public wanted. This cause can actually vary depending on who the question is asked to and how the question is asked. In cause number three, conservatism, race, moral panics, and the politicization of crimes, possibly the most commonly recognized potential cause for punitive turn in the American criminal justice system is the politicization of crime, (Mears & Joshua C, 2015). However, the changes in crimes does not lead to heightened punitiveness, but instead the rise of the get-tough polices