The Politics of Mass Incarceration: Mass Incarceration: Latest Stats Show Nano-Scale Reform Remains the Dominant Trend

Last week the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) published their annual census of the nation’s prison population. After over three decades of uninterrupted yearly increases, 2014 was the fourth year in the last five in which the total number of people in Federal and state prisons fell. The figure declined from 1,576,950 to 1,561,525, a drop of about 1%. The some 700,000 people held in local jails were not included in these stats. This news from the BJS will please those who see opportunity in the increasing acknowledgement of mass incarceration in the political sphere. Proclamations by the President, Hillary Clinton as well as statements by arch-conservative forces as diverse as Rand Paul, Newt Gingrich and the Koch brothers have placed criminal justice on the electoral agenda. In 2012 no candidate made even passing mention of the two million people in the US behind bars. For anyone seeking to reverse the debacle of the US’ incarceration obsession, any decrease in the number of people behind bars is welcome. Yet a closer look at the BJS stats shows that reform remains miniscule. The overall landscape reflects the ongoing tension between the continuity of mass incarceration and the need for change. The data actually remind us that the fate of the criminal justice system has yet to be decided. More