The United States does not lead the world in happiness, education, or life expectancy—but it does lead in

incarceration. With over 1.8 million people imprisoned at the start of 2025, the carceral system has become one of America’s defining institutions, outpacing authoritarian regimes like China, Cuba, and Turkmenistan [1]. Yet, this staggering incarceration rate does not translate to greater safety. In 2016, the Brennan Center found that nearly 40 percent of people behind bars posed no threat to public safety [2] and that the U.S. failed to rank among the top 15 safest nations globally [3]. These outcomes expose a deeper issue. So, how did the prison system become this vast, punitive, and ineffective? Mass incarceration in the United States is not the result of rising crime rates or the number of criminals; rather it is a consequence of unethical economic incentives and a racially disparate political system. These interconnected forces shaped the modern prison industry under the guise of national economic growth and community safety. Without a doubt, they systematically harm communities of color while allowing private corporations to capitalize on incarceration at the expense of public welfare and accountability.

This article traces the legal and historical roots of the carceral state and argues that mass incarceration in the

United States is a self-sustaining entity created by the War on Crime control strategies, the War on Drug policies weaponized against Black communities, and the economic incentives of for-profit prisons.

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[1] Statista Research Department, Countries with the Largest Number of Prisoners, as of December 2023 (in 1,000s), (Jan. 8, 2024), https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-the-most-prisoners/.​

[2] Statista Research Department, Countries with the Largest Number of Prisoners per 100,000 of the National Population, as of January 2024, Statista (Jan. 8, 2024), https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-the-most-prisoners-per-100-000-inhabitants/.​

[3] World Population Review, Safest Countries in the World 2025, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/safest-countries-in-the-world.​

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A Brief History

In the discussion on crime, it is essential to understand the creation of the convict lease system, which came to

fruition in the post-Reconstruction South as a means to sustain racial subjugation and economic exploitation after the abolition of slavery [4]. Although Black Americans were ‘emancipated’ through the 13th Amendment, the States designed laws to overtly criminalize them, disproportionately arresting them for minor [5] or fabricated offenses. Once convicted of a crime, labor contractors funneled individuals into a system where their labor was leased to private industries, which kept them shackled; all men were free, “except as a punishment for crime [6].” Thus, the State became a “dealer in crime [7],” profiting from Black incarceration while positioning punishment as a tool of social control rather than justice [8]. Once slavery inherently linked Black people to crime, society undeniably linked them to the prison system, thus setting the scene for the War on Crime. Rather than abolishing the lease system, it was modernized. Today, the US private prison system continues to function as an economic enterprise that thrives on the criminalization of Black communities.

 

[4] Angela Y. Davis, From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison, in The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Joy James ed., 1998), 88.

[5] Davis, supra note 4, at 75. 

[6] U.S. Const. amend. XIII.

[7] Davis, supra note 4, at 89.

[8] Davis, supra note 4, at 85. 

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The War on Crime: Criminalizing Poverty

The War on Crime reframed poverty as a dangerous threat rather than a social public health issue, justifying the

expansion of police presence and surveillance in low-income Black neighborhoods during the late 1960s and 1970s. In the mid-1960s, the Johnson Administration’s Crime Commission initially identified crime as a consequence of poverty, inadequate housing, and unemployment. Supporting the goals of the Great Society, the Commission emphasized that “warring on poverty… is warring on crime,” advocating for job training, early education, welfare reform, and housing investment [9]. Despite recognizing the socioeconomic roots of crime, mounting conservative pressure steered policymakers toward a punitive approach. The final Crime Commission recommendations supported the saturation of urban areas with surveillance equipment and policing, believing that these tactics would restore order [10]. Once ghettos [11] were portrayed as public safety threats, rising concern about crime in urban neighborhoods allowed politicians to shift focus from poverty alleviation and instead fund police presence. Black neighborhoods became the target of police militarization under the goal of crime control with federal funding for urban policing rising by 2,900% between 1965 and 1970 [12]. The uprisings from communities that followed this policing surge were labeled as signs of moral [13] and social decay rather than public outcries in response to decades of racialized economic exclusion and criminalization.

In 1968, Congress formalized the punitive approach with the Safe Streets Act, which invested $400 million in

“seed money” to promote modernized policing and help each state build its criminal justice apparatus [14]. Congress had also passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which increased War on Crime spending from $10 million in 1965 to nearly $850 million by 1973, financing over 80,000 crime control projects [15]. These supported funding initiatives informed Reagan’s drug policy focus in the next political war.

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[9] Elizabeth Hinton, “War on Crime” to War on the Black Community, Boston Rev. (June 21, 2016), https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/elizabeth-hinton-kerner-commission-crime-commission/.​

[10] Hinton, supra note 9.

[11] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright Publ’g Corp. 2017). 

[12] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 73–74 (New Press 2010).

[13] Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America 1–14 (Harv. Univ. Press 2010).

[14] Hinton, supra note 9, at 2.

[15] Hinton, supra note 9, at 3.

 

The War on Drugs

According to 2025 FBI Crime Data, someone in the United States is arrested for a drug offense every 35

seconds, and over 85% are for possession alone [16]. The catalyst for a system designed for rapid incarcerations was the War on Drugs, which unified most of the American public around aggressive policing strategies in low-income urban neighborhoods.

President Richard Nixon publicly identified drug-abuse as a national threat after a rise in drug-related juvenile

arrests and street crime between 1960 and 1967. By 1971, Nixon officially declared a War on Drugs and labeled it as “public enemy number 1 [17]." Nixon implemented the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973 to enforce this new agenda. The DEA would later propose the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and introduce the infamously racialized 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine [18].

Next, the Administration launched media campaigns to publicize dramatized horror stories about Black crack

users and dealers in ghetto communities [19] to ensure drug use was viewed as a national security threat. Public opinion played a key role in sustaining this punitive approach. Hence, media narratives demonized Blackness—casting this identity as inherently criminal. Politicians capitalized on these fear-driven motives to expand policing and harsh sentencing policies, reinforcing their popularity at the ballot box [20]. The Administration pushed the narrative of “tough on crime” to justify policies such as mandatory sentencing, three strikes laws, and truth-in-sentencing laws, which severely limit parole eligibility and keep people in prison longer [21]. However, in satisfying the public, these measures eliminate critical judicial discretion and function as blanket punishments which prioritize efficiency over justice.

The Supreme Court consistently fortified these policies by ruling in the governments favor through challenges

brought against 4th Amendment violations, each decision diminishing constitutional rights. They created precedents like Terry v. Ohio, [22] which further sanctioned police overreach, and later Whren v. US, [23] which granted officers broad discretion to target minor infractions as pretexts for drug investigations. The encouragement of aggressive policing practices such as SWAT raids, buy-and-bust operations, and relentless stop-and-frisk tactics exploited the hypersegregation of Black communities. Constrained within ghettos, abandoned by the State, residents became easy targets, and this violence became everyday realities for these communities [24].

As a direct consequence of the extreme policing, drug laws, and mandatory sentencing, Black men are

incarcerated at a rate nearly six times that of White men; one in three Black men born in 2001 is projected to be imprisoned at some point in their lifetime [25] 

Despite its tough-on-crime posture, the failure of the War on Drugs to mitigate the true harms of usage is

undeniable. In 2023, 105,007 people died from accidental overdoses, with Black and Native communities facing the highest rates [26]. In 2024 alone, the Drug Enforcement Agency spent $3.3 billion, amounting to $6,300 per minute, [27] and yet overdose deaths in the US continue to rise. Today, 1 in 3 Americans has lost someone they know to overdose, and two-thirds support eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession [28]. These figures highlight a stark reality: persistent misdirected punitive-based drug policies have failed to curb the drug epidemic and continue to harm marginalized communities disproportionally.

 

[16] Crime Trends, FBI Crime Data Explorer, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend (last visited Apr. 21, 2025).

[17] Timeline: America's War on Drugs, NPR (Apr. 2, 2007), https://www.npr.org/2007/04/02/9252490/timeline-americas-war-on-drugs.​

[18] Matthew D. Lassiter, Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs, 102 J. Am. Hist. 14-15 (2015).

[19] Alexander, supra 12, at 102.

[20] Sander Grimmelikhuijsen & Kees van den Bos, Specifying the Information Effect: Reference Points and Procedural Justifications Affect Legal Attitudes in Four Survey Experiments, 17 J. Experimental Criminology 321 (2021).

[21] Justice Policy Institute, Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies (June 2011).

[22] Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968). 

[23] Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996).  

[24] Alexander, supra 12, at 73.

[25] Ashley Nellis, The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons, The Sentencing Project (2021), https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/.

[26] Poll Results on American Attitudes Toward War on Drugs, ACLU (June 9, 2021), https://www.aclu.org/documents/poll-results-american-attitudes-toward-war-drugs.​

[27] Department of Justice (DOJ) | Spending Profile, https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-ofjustice.  

[28] Alene Kennedy-Hendricks et al., Experience of Personal Loss Due to Drug Overdose Among U.S. Adults, 5 JAMA Health Forum e241262 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.1262.

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The Rise of the Incarceration Economy

As prisons overflowed, bipartisan investment in incarceration continued – largely influenced by private prison

companies with powerful lobbyists who advocated for harsher legislation - and culminated in the 1994 Crime Bill, which demanded prison expansion and longer sentences. For context, a private or “for-profit” prison or is a facility managed by a corporation through a government contract, either by taking over an existing public   facility or by constructing and operating a private one. These companies charge a daily rate per person to cover costs and generate profit, making incarceration a business [29]. The largest private prison companies are Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), GEO Group, and CoreCivic, which reported a combined revenue of over $4.5 billion in 2020 [30]. While these corporations often frame themselves as responding to existing demand for prison space, they have actively worked to generate and cultivate that demand [31]. In 2016 and 2017, private prisons and the companies that serviced them spent $12.4 million on lobbying state lawmakers or state campaigns, according to the National Institute on Money in Politics [32]. These companies have leveraged their expanding resources to advocate for policies that increase incarceration rates, effectively shaping the market in which they profit [33]. Many of these companies operate under government contracts that include “bed quotas” or occupancy guarantees, [34] requiring states to maintain a minimum percentage of filled prison beds, often between 90 and 100 percent, regardless of actual crime rates [35]  These arrangements, which financially penalize states for declining prison populations, mirror the logic of the convict lease system: the State guarantees labor, or bodies, for private profit [36]. Much like the leasing system, where Black individuals were funneled into prison labor to replace chattel slavery, modern private prisons (often with minimal oversight, substandard conditions, and inadequate rehabilitative programming) [37]capitalize on the criminalization of marginalized communities to generate wealth. Recent policies aimed at detaining immigrants who committed low-level civil violations or visa overstays also benefit these detention facilities, like CoreCivic. Again, these expanded mandatory detentions, based primarily on civil violations rather than criminal ones, of individuals who pose no threat to public safety are solely a business endeavor [38].

The CEO of CoreCivic, Damon Hininger, lauded the surge in incarceration during their earnings call from

February of 2025, saying in his 32 years of working there, “This is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company.” [39] During an earnings call from November 7th of 2024, the founder of the GEO Group, George Zoley, stated, “[This company] was built for this unique moment during our nation’s history… and the opportunities that it will bring.”[40] These private prison companies and detention facilities publicly and boldly claim the harsh crackdowns will result in their most significant profit increase and represents an “exciting time” for their companies. The profit motive embedded in these facilities ensures that rehabilitation remains secondary to financial gain, effectively transforming mass incarceration into a business of social control. Longer sentences and harsher laws keep prison beds full, not for public safety, but for shareholder gain [41].

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[29] Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies, Justice Policy Institute (2011), https://justicepolicy.org/research/2614/.

[30] Austin Nielsen-Reagan, The Profitability of Inhumanity: How Corporate Power Gives Rise to Forced Labor in Privatized Immigration Detention, Harv. L. Sch. Systemic Just. Project (2021), https://systemicjustice.org/article/the-profitability-of-inhumanity/.

[31] Justice Policy Institute (2011), supra 28.

[32] OpenSecrets, For-profit Prisons Lobbying, https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying?cycle=2024&ind=G7000 (last visited Apr. 24, 2025).​

[33] Alexi Jones, The Company Store: A Deeper Look at Prison Commissaries, Prison Policy Initiative (2019), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/commissary.html.

[34] Justice Policy Institute (2011).

[35] Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and “Low-Crime Taxes” Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations, In the Public Interest (2013), https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/Criminal-Lockup-Quota-Report.pdf.

[36] Bianca Tylek, Ending the Incarceration Industry’s Toxic Relationship with Mass Incarceration, Brennan Center for Justice (2021), https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/ending-incarceration-industrys-toxic-relationship-mass-incarceration.

[37] Davis, From the Prison of Slavery, supra 4, 74–95.

[38] American Immigration Council, Prosecuting People for Coming to the United States (Aug. 23, 2021), https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigration-prosecutions.​

[39] CoreCivic, Inc. (CXW) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript, Seeking Alpha (Feb. 11, 2025), https://seekingalpha.com/article/4757210-corecivic-inc-cxw-q4-2024-earnings-call-transcript.

[40] Geo Group (GEO) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript, The Motley Fool (Nov. 7, 2024), https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/11/07/geo-group-geo-q3-2024-earnings-call-transcript/.​

[41] Ava DuVernay. “13TH.” Netflix, 26 Sept. 2016.

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Beyond Crime: A System Built to Last 

Prisons typically offer inadequate programs to address the root causes of crime, and the experience of

imprisonment often exacerbates those underlying factors — reinforcing poverty, trauma, economic marginalization, and social alienation. ​Regardless, US criminal justice policies have prioritized harsh sentencing and incarceration resulting in higher recidivism rates and further destabilization of communities [42]. Deterrence expert Daniel Nagin states that empirical research consistently shows that the severity of punishment has minimal impact on deterring crime; instead, the certainty of being apprehended is far more influential in preventing offenses [43]. Longer prison sentences do not meaningfully deter crime. Instead, they burden communities already facing economic and social hardship without reducing recidivism or improving outcomes. In short, the key justifications for mass incarceration (reducing drug harms, rehabilitating offenders, and deterring crime) are not supported by the evidence; on the contrary, overly punitive policies often undermine these goals.

These outcomes support a broader critique that policymakers and private interests have designed the U.S. prison

system to generate revenue and control a population, even during periods when crime was declining [44]​. This dynamic has been described as the “prison-industrial complex,” referring to the intertwining of gaining political popularity and private profit interests that fueled the carceral boom [45]. The prison boom served vested interests as prison contractors and a host of ancillary industries profited from a growing incarcerated population, and politicians (aided by sensationalized media narratives) gained political capital by appearing “tough on crime,” often by exploiting race-based fears [46]​. Decades of federal funding incentives actively rewarded states and localities for putting more people behind bars for longer sentences, irrespective of actual public safety needs [47]. Research from the University of Wisconsin reveals that individuals housed in private prisons serve significantly longer sentences, averaging 60 to 90 additional days, due in large part to an increase in disciplinary infractions that delay parole eligibility. These extended terms do not correlate with reduced recidivism, undermining claims that longer sentences improve public safety [48]. These conditions reflect a broader institutional logic in which financial imperatives supersede rehabilitative goals and raise concerns about the efficacy and ethics of profit-driven incarceration. 

Ineffective criminal justice policies rooted in racial stereotypes define mass incarceration in America. The War on

Crime and Drugs dramatically expanded the prison population and has forever changed the criminal system. Despite recent reforms to some sentencing laws, racial disparities in drug-related arrests and incarceration persist, revealing the enduring influence of these punitive foundations. For instance, Black individuals constitute 28% of those arrested for drug offenses, despite comprising only 14% of the U.S. population and using drugs at similar rates to other racial groups [49]. Communities do not trust their law enforcement to keep them safe, leading to legal estrangement and the inability to bridge the gap between public safety and community wellbeing.  

This structural discrimination, embedded in policies and practices leads to the stigmatization of felony records,

serves as a blueprint for modern racialized control by stripping incarcerated and recently released individuals of their civil rights, economic opportunities, and social standing. On reintegration, persons suffering from addiction issues are now convicted felons, as drug possession is generally charged as a felony offense, and face lifelong barriers to employment, housing, and education, echoing segregation’s exclusionary tactics. With two million people currently incarcerated, three million on probation, and seventy-eight million carrying a criminal record, [50] mass incarceration is no accident—it is a business model built on criminalizing Black communities. The system does not seek to reduce crime; it aims to sustain itself. 

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[42] Recidivism, National Institute of Justice, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism.

[43] Five Things About Deterrence, National Institute of Justice (2016), https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence.

[44] EBSCO, supra note 37.

[45] EBSCO Research Starters, Prison–Industrial Complex, EBSCO, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/prison-industrial-complex.​

[46] EBSCO, supra note 37.

[47] Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Federal Funding that Fuels Mass Incarceration, Brennan Center for Justice (June 7, 2021), https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/federal-funding-fuels-mass-incarceration.​

[48] Jirs Meuris, Do Private Prisons Distort Justice? Wis. Sch. of Bus. (Mar. 16, 2023), https://business.wisc.edu/news/do-private-prisons-distort-justice/.

[49] FBI. FBI Crime Data Explorer.

[50] Wendy Sawyer & Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025, Prison Policy Initiative (Mar. 11, 2025), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html.​