The misinformation campaign by activists and the media has gone unchallenged for too long. Mass incarceration is a fabricated and misleading term. Younger generations have never known a time when it has not been part of the vernacular. The messaging is catchy and deceptive: The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country.
Today, put ‘mass incarceration’ in the search bar of Google or YouTube and you will get same cluster of jumbled stats from Vox, The Atlantic, Tedx Talks, Al Jazeera, The New Yorker, RT (Russia Today), NowThis News, and taxpayer funded NPR. In their stories, vicious criminals and their families are victims of this horrific system designed to destroy marginalized communities.
Message wise, they have been very effective. Youth in college (and sadly, even younger students) are familiar with the term and what it is alleged to represent. If you are wondering why police recruiting at colleges are spinning their wheels, students have been indoctrinated to view police as the societal oppressor.
Do you remember this being widely reported?In 2019 the rate of imprisonment decreased 3% from 2018 to its lowest point in 24 years.
The report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2019, says:
“THE COMBINED STATE AND FEDERAL IMPRISONMENT RATE FOR 2019 (419 PER 100,000 U.S. RESIDENTS), BASED ON SENTENCED PRISONERS (THOSE SENTENCED TO MORE THAN ONE YEAR), DECREASED 3% FROM 2018 (432 PER 100,000 U.S. RESIDENTS).”
It continues to say:
“This was the LOWEST IMPRISONMENT RATE IN 24 YEARS, DATING BACK TO 1995.” And “SINCE 2009, THE IMPRISONMENT RATE-THE PORTION OF U.S. RESIDENTS WHO ARE IN PRISON HAS DROPPED 17% OVERALL…”and “IN 2019, THE IMPRISONMENT RATE OF BLACK RESIDENTS WAS THE LOWEST RATE IN 30 YEARS, SINCE 1989.”
While imprisonment was trending downward, our society, accustomed to the false narrative of prison populations growing and spiraling out of control while supervised by undertrained private prison guards practicing sadistic cruelty while people were receiving outrageous sentences for petty crimes was another expansion of unjust detentions.
Another myth busted by this report, while “…46% of sentenced federal prisoners were serving time for a drug offense (99% for drug trafficking), and 8% were serving time for a violent offense.”
According to the latest report by BJS, Prisoners in 2021,
“From yearend 2020 to yearend 2021, the number of persons under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities in the United States declined 1%, from 1,221,200 to 1,204,300. While the total number of persons held under the jurisdiction of state correctional authorities declined 2% during this period, the count of these persons in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) increased more than 3%. “
A popular red herring, private prisons also experienced a decline in population.
“At yearend 2021, private facilities contracted to states or the BOP held 96,700 persons, a 3% decrease from yearend 2020.”
For decades, we have been engaged by entertainment, literature and articles that describe the corrections role in our criminal justice process as overwrought, sadistic and overcrowded. In the 1970s, films like Escape from New York we were presented as a glimpse into the grim future that awaited us should we not repent now.
More commonplace in our culture, we have seen popular shows including Orange is the New Black and Wentworth Prison, portraying the inmates as mischievous free spirits and the privatized prison guards as corrupt and sadistic.
While interviewing a graduate student for an internship, I asked him to furnish a copy of a project that he was proud of and that was reflective of his abilities. He furnished a book review on The New Jim Crow, a book that he had been assigned to read a part of his university’s criminal justice curriculum. Several years ago, Netflix produced and distributed a related documentary called Thirteenth to link the passage of the 13th Amendment to the new function of the prison system as the legal substitute for slavery.
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EVERYONE IS TO BLAME EXCEPT CRIME AND CRIMINALS
Is the United States that bad? Our youth are being indoctrinated and conditioned to believe so. Others, more reasonable voices, say it speaks to the effectiveness our criminal justice system. In 2015, Heather Mac Donald testified to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary and made the following points:
It is crime, not incarceration, that squelches freedom and enterprise in urban areas. And there have been no more successful government programs for liberating inner-city residents from fear and disorder than proactive policing and the incapacitation of criminals.
Compared to the costs of crime, prison is a bargain. The federal system spends about $6 billion on incarceration, the state system spent $37 billion in 2010 on institutional corrections. The economic, social, and psychological costs of uncontrolled crime and drug trafficking dwarf such outlays. And prison spending is a minute fraction of the $1.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars devoted to means-tested federal welfare programs, as Senator Sessions has documented.
Check out her full testimony in the link above.
In a City Journal article written by Charles Fain Lehman titled: Yes, New York’s Bail Reform Has Increased Crime Lehman uses public stats from an official open data site for the State of New York and establishes that prior to bail reform rearrests … were ‘around 17 to 18 percent’ but the short term increase is three to five percentage points. If that sounds nominal to you, consider the basis is 200,000 arrests. The 2021 and 2022 data aren’t fully in but it is trending negatively for public safety.
Activists have fun comparing the US to other Western European countries that don’t have American crime rates. What they don’t tell you is that our violent crime and homicide rate is five to seven times higher. In our vast country, most of the area is as safe or much safer than anywhere else in the world and our violent crime is disproportionately concentrated in small sections of urban areas. Back to imprisonment, trusting the stats from countries that regularly furnish blatantly false data is how we establish that we are the worst?
When compared to the rest of the world, are we just trusting the other countries for accurate stats on those detained? As far as safety, nations do exist where you would be justified believing that you as safe or safer than in the US. Perhaps Switzerland, maybe Singapore, and perhaps Japan. You likely would not feel that way in El Salvador, Haiti, Jamaica, Somalia or Greece. Brazil has two thirds the United States population and has 50% more officer involved shootings resulting in death.
Suddenly, we are accepting all the data from Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and North Korea and communist China as gospel. We know there are more than 1,000 honor killings in Pakistan every year. In China:
“More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in China’s Xinjiang region. The reeducation camps are just one part of the government’s crackdown on Uyghurs. The Chinese government has imprisoned more than one million people since 2017 and subjected those not detained to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labor, and forced sterilizations.”
That doesn’t even count their prisons for criminal justice violations. North Korea’s 2021 population is roughly 26 million people. Do they count as captives?
On February 9, 2023, President Ortega of Nicaragua flew 222 political prisoners to Washington D.C., whose crime was disagreeing with a dictator. Stripped of their citizenship, they are stateless. Media wise, it didn’t have the traction of Governor DeSantis transporting 49 illegal alien volunteers to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
However, El Salvador has a new policy to deal with its record level crime. Recently the annual homicide rate there was 1 in 299, a chilling thought when you are in an auditorium with 298 other people. It was the global murder rate record holder for years.
When El Salvador began making mass arrests of people with suspected gang affiliations last year, President Nayib Bukele ordered the construction of what would be the largest prison in Latin America. This week, Bukele rolled out the completed project, a sprawling campus 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of the capital, that could eventually house 40,000 inmates.
Given the outrageous crimes that everyone is seeing committed on the streets nationwide, I support additional incarceration.
Everyone who bears, or has borne, the weight of the badge knows at least one killer still on the street whose incarceration will save lives. When New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton employed the strategies of James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, the BIPOC lives saved would fill stadiums. Murders plunged from 2,000 to less than 300 in the city that never sleeps. This will be revisited in future articles.
Street level officers need to know the truth about incarceration, especially the good news. Normally, with news this good, someone is planning a parade.
Law enforcement leaders must address incarceration head on. Weak leaders will blow this off as a corrections issue and make excuses that they should stay in their lane but the facts are clear. The motive for this activism is to discredit and ultimately destroy the criminal justice system but the primary target is the police, as those in contact with the public on a daily basis and function as the feeder to the system.
The true courageous leaders will be easy to spot. They’ll be the ones ready to respond with the truth and send the liars packing.
Please keep all our officers and deputies in your prayers!
By holding the line and representing truth, over and over and over again, courageous leaders will prevail. Thank you for bringing an interesting topic to the forefront yet again!
I’m glad that you mentioned how college indoctrinate students.
One of the law schools I applied to - the day I took the LSAT - had posters up - advertising an anti-police speaker.
Once in law school - I sat through multiple “panel discussions” where there was never a single “pro-police” or objective panelist.
By holding the line and representing truth, over and over and over again, courageous leaders will prevail. Thank you for bringing an interesting topic to the forefront yet again!