During the 1960s, the nation’s prison population had declined. But in the 1970s, with urban crime rates rising, politicians of both parties sought to convey the image of being “tough on crime.” They insisted that the judicial system should focus on locking up criminals for long periods rather than rehabilitating them. They treated drug addiction as a violation of the law rather than as a disease. State governments greatly increased the penalties for crime and reduced the possibility of parole. Successive presidents launched “wars” on the use of illegal drugs. As a result, the number of Americans in prison rose dramatically, most of them incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses.
During the 1990s, thanks to the waning of the “crack” epidemic and more effective urban police tactics, crime rates dropped dramatically across the country. But because of the sentencing laws of the previous two decades, this did nothing to stem the increase of the prison population. In 2008, it reached 2.3 million, ten times the figure of 1970. Several million more individuals were on parole, probation, or under some other kind of criminal supervision. These figures dwarfed those of every other Western society.
As the prison population grew, a “prison-industrial complex” emerged. Struggling communities battered by deindustrialization saw prisons as a source of jobs and income. Between 1990 and 1995, the federal government and the states constructed more than 200 new prisons. In 2008, five states spent more money on their prison systems than on higher education. Convict labor, a practice the labor movement had managed to curtail in the late nineteenth century, revived in the late twentieth. Private companies in Oregon “leased” prisoners for three dollars per day. A call to Trans World Airlines for a flight reservation was likely to be answered by a California inmate.