Mass Incarceration Definition

The United States civilization rejects hangings, lynching, floggings and disemboweling, yet caging millions of people for decades at a time has been established as an acceptable humane sanction. America is home to about one-twentieth of the world’s population, yet we house a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Since the mid 1970s, the American prison population has boomed, multiplying sevenfold while the population has only increased by fifty percent. My research will illustrate that over the last few decades, state and federal governments have locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before and mandatory sentencing is the primary driving force of mass-incarceration. There is no standard definition for the term "mass incarceration" but it can be defined by breaking up the word. The term mass is an adjective defined according to Webster's New World College Dictionary as “a large number.” Incarceration is the noun form of the verb to incarcerate, which is defined in the same dictionary as "to imprison, to shut up; confine." One could logically reason that mass incarceration can be defined as the imprisonment of a

The basic facts are not in dispute because more than 2.2 million people are currently incarcerated in United States jails and prisons, a five hundred percent increase over the past forty years. Although the United States accounts for about five percent of the world’s population, it houses nearly twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. The per capita incarceration rate in the United States is about one and a half times that of second-place Rwanda and third-place Russia, and more than six times the rate of neighboring Canada. Another 4.75 million Americans are subject to state supervision imposed by probation or