Although the mass incarceration prison boom technically did not begin until 1970, slavery is the root cause of the problem. This is because of the racist views slavery created and made popular. In 1865 when the 13th Amendment was passed slaves were freed, but this did not fully free black Americans. The amendment allowed people to be enslaved if they were criminals. Slaves were needed to rebuild the economy after the Civil War, so people took this loophole and ran with it. It caused one of the first “prison booms'' and black people were arrested and convicted for minor crimes. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized black people, and the Black Code and Jim Crow Laws criminalized black people. These racist views that slavery created are what causes minorities to have a higher incarcerated population than white people.

Nixon, Johnson, and others related street crime with civil rights activism. Nixon created the idea of a “War on Drugs.” This meant that drug issues and drug dependencies were condemned as a crime issue, not a health issue. In 1970 politicians began to push for “increasingly punitive policies,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This was when the first large prison population boom occurred. 

• The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners.

• In 2018 more than 10.7 million people entered jails and prisons, the equivalent of locking up every single person in Greece, Portugal, or Sweden.

• In 1978, the United States incarcerated 182 people for every 100,000 residents. By 2003, that figure was 710. 

Education: When people get out of prison they do not receive many educational opportunities.

Race: We have taken the principle of slavery and merely changed it to fit the present society. We have gone from slavery to Jim Crow Laws, to mass incarceration. There is no  other country that incarcerates as many racial and ethnic minorities as the U.S.

Gender: For females in general, the female population in prisons is six times higher than it was in the 1980s, and the rate of growth of the women population in prison has been two times higher than that of men.

Economic Inequality: Formerly incarcerated people have fewer opportunities to get a job, get paid lower wages, have less of a social network, and overall are not as economically stable.