In Heather Ann Thompson’s essay, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History”, She brings valuable points to the importance and impact that mass incarceration had on the United States. She begins her essay talking about a large number of people incarcerated in the United States and explains that “Between 1970 and 2010 more people were incarcerated in the United States than were imprisoned in any other country…” and “by 2006… The American prison population had by that year increased more rapidly than had the resident population as a whole.” She continues talking about the population of prisoners and brings up some troubling statistics, where “African American men experienced the highest imprisonment rate of all racial groups, male or female.” She goes on to end her Introduction with a powerful calling card to all historians and the idea that they should more closely explore and “consider the reverberations of this never-before-seen Phenomenon.”
From here, Heather Thompson moves onto her first point where she begins the talk about the effect of mass incarceration on urban cities. She began outlining the ideas of why urban areas began to become centers for poverty, noting deindustrialization, white flight, mass suburbanization, and she believes mass incarceration also played a huge role in this crisis. One of the largest influencers was African Americans being left out of the New Deal’s equal citizenship and the privilege of presumed honesty where whites enjoyed these privileges as explained in her essay. Urban areas were targeted with drug laws where most African Americans lived.
Thompson explains that because of prison riots and protests Rockefeller decided to take a hard line and ended up being tough on crime and because of that not only did the New York prison population skyrocket but these drug laws spread across the United States. Oddly enough African Americans weren’t even leading in drug use, Thompson noted that through studies and surveys that White students used drugs at a much higher rate than African American students. She then talks about how by 1976 prison terms lengthened substantially, this mainly due to mandatory sentencing laws. Because of these laws they “put a serious financial strain on public coffers…”. This even began to affect schools, where school officials began hiring security staff. This ultimately led to an escalation of policing non-violent behaviors.
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Thompson then continued talking about the instability of cities, parents being incarcerated and the health impacts of mass incarceration. She explained how because of the level of mass incarceration individuals were unable to contribute to their cities and even worse some of these people had children who in a lot of cases were left alone. In her essay, she brought up a case in which a 9-year-old was left alone with his baby brother after his parents were taken and it took two weeks for someone to notice and put him in foster care. She continued explaining that even returning parents had the odds against them, not only was it difficult for ex-offenders to find work but felons were banned from welfare programs leaving a lot of people with no options which would just increase crime even more. Children of prisoners most often had lasting psychological problems as well.
On top of this, prisons were a powerhouse for diseases and when people got out of prison and returned to their communities those diseases spread. Thompson especially noted HIV and Tuberculosis being major issues in prisons and because of mass incarceration, urban centers were at a higher risk of getting those diseases upon return. Thompson’s second point had to deal with the effect of mass incarceration on the labor movement in the United States. Due to the number of prisons and how many people were in them, prisons began to sell labor to private employers. This caused a lot of issues because not only could employers pay lower wages than normal, but they didn’t have to worry about welfare services and liability responsibilities.
Prisons essentially became businesses which Thompson pointed out that this undermined the labor movement in America and caused a lot more issues than it solved. Jobs as prison guards paid well and were desirable, because of this and the fact that prisons were starting to be run as businesses and for profit, the emergence of more prisons began to appear. While prisons were adding more jobs, but because there were more prisons, more companies began depending on prison labor and there were often examples of companies re-opening primarily in prisons which led to people losing jobs. Thompson noted that “There was clear evidence that free-world wages had been cut and jobs had been eliminated as result of prison labor in the later postwar period as well”.
Thompson’s final point was how mass incarceration was a major point in the rise of the right in postwar America. Some believed that the shift to the right was because of increasing crime rates. While crime was increasing, the way we measured crime had changed over the time period and in fact, violent crimes were at a low. Thompson suggests that voters were reacting to media hype and racial paranoia other than looking at hard facts, all while the Democrats were fighting the problem head-on. President Johnson spoke to Congress and was very clear that “streets must be safe”. Democrats launched multiple campaigns that provided more officer training and other benefits to improve the available resources to fight crime and “…The Johnson administration itself believe that the country needed more law and order”.
Thompson noted the irony that this law-and-order era created by the Democrats would eventually be the party’s undoing. The reason for this was because states were passing laws that took away voting rights of ex-criminals after the famous court case, Richardson v. Ramirez, and “by the year 2000, 1.8 million African Americans had been barred from the polls because of felon disfranchisement laws and, as one legal scholar pointed out, “the potential black electorate vote” had been decimated””. This didn’t stop over time either Thompson also said, “By 2006 forty-eight states had passed laws that took away prisoners’ voting rights, and with more than 47 million Americans (one-fourth of the adult population) having a criminal record by that year, there is little doubt that the nation’s political process had been fundamentally altered”.
In conclusion, Heather Ann Thompson brought light to the prison systems in the United States while showing the how mass incarceration affected multiple areas throughout the post-war period. Thompson wanted historians to look at how mass incarceration played a role in how the United States has changed in addition to events such as white flight, and suburbanization. She believed that “No historical episode – no matter how epic it may have been – would have, on its own, caused changes as drastic and sweeping as those that took place in this period”.
