Mass Incarceration Sociology

The era of mass incarceration began four decades ago, marking the greatest count of prisoners held in U.S. jails and prisons. When speaking of mass incarceration, more than acknowledging the numbers, the significance lies within the statistics of who the cities, states, and government are imprisoning. Out of the whopping two million people who are confined, more than 70 percent of prisoners are people of color, consistently of a poor and underprivileged background (Davis 1998: 684). Sociologists as well as psychologists’ studies bear and explain this phenomenon. The idea of social control and its relation to crime seemingly differ in groups and communities. Street crime, for instance, although is a form of formal social deviance, does not highlight

the underlying cause and effect of the people committing them. Disguised as an act of purging the society of the homeless, unemployed, and drug addicts, it can no longer be held inconspicuous to the public that this “magic” of ridding society of marginalized groups is doing more harm than good (Davis 1998: 683). While the criminal justice system is detrimental to people of color, on the opposite spectrum are the ones perpetuating the new form of Jim Crow, creating a vicious cycle of going in and out of jails, and for the short span of time a colored man is out, they are rejected from integrating back into the society that shuts them out.
Social control, a term construed by Émile Durkheim’s idea of deviance, explains what sociologist define as the act of one abiding a set of rules that are socially constructed (Conley 196). When society begins to create a list of what is considered socially right or wrong, people are bound to conform to them, willingly or subconsciously. When President Nixon declared the War on Drugs, a campaign to crack down on drug abuse, almost naturally did the public accepted the challenge to minimize what they thought was mental illness caused by drugs. What was suppose to be a political strategy to gain the support of Southern, lower-class white Republicans, soon flourished catastrophically when Reagan proposed the three-strikes law that states if a person has been convicted twice, by the third conviction life-sentence was absolute (Alexander 2013). It is a fact that these laws were explicitly stated, but the idea behind it is ultimately used to inflict this assumption that drugs are the enemy, and when police began their hunt, black men topped their list. When the public, through media that greatly emphasized the convicted being young, black males, are exposed to such biased content there is no control in that society will subconsciously associate drug offenders with black people. By the end of Reagan’s presidency, the total number of drug offenders in prison rose by 19,548 prisoners, and by 2011, total offenders counted 197,050, two-thirds of which were of drugs(Carson & Sabol 2012).
At a different angle to inspect what groups are specifically being targeted in the mass incarceration, the environment of communities of colored people shines a light on the racism and classism in the American criminal justice system.

Psychologists would concur that the environment in which a person inhabits greatly impacts said person’s life-- their opportunities and their behaviors would be two of many facets that directly and/or indirectly gets affected. In an interview with professor Victor Rios of University of California, Santa Barbara, Rios explains the term he had coined “youth control complex,” which essentially defines a system where young boys from certain communities are habitually brutalized by police and parole officers (NortonSOC 2010). Rios goes on to share his experiences with a seeming commonality event that takes place in a community such as his where boys were being harassed by officers. “The collateral consequences of this harsh policing in the inner city are...young people being marked at a very early age by the system,” Rios states. The damage of being “picked up young,” is the shadow that follows these young, black men to job interviews and to voting booths. When comparing communities with different types of environment, psychologists has proven “how social context and social cues impact the way individuals act,” a theory called the broken windows theory of deviance (Conley 213). The experiment was conducted by Stanford University psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, where he and his students placed two abandoned looking car into two different social class area to see the reaction of each neighborhood. This experiment was able to prove that by a physical deviance in just the environment alone triggers the people to act a certain way: the ghetto to wreck the car instantaneously and the pristine to avoid overall. But the most significant finding is the different response by the pristine after Zimbardo returned to display a smashed car. In

other words, the appearance and the aura of communities matters a great deal when understanding the people who resides in them. The reason for some neighborhoods to look dilapidated while others immaculate is evidently a hidden form of racism of the U.S. economy. Davis writes, “Since 1984 more than twenty new prisons have opened in California, while only one new campus university was added into the California State University system.” If the staggering comparison of facilities that the government evidently prioritize says anything, it would be that communities of the marginalized are being replaced by penitentiaries.