Changing demographics of mass incarceration

  After decades of constructing a system of mass incarceration, it appears that our nation is beginning to turn the tide.

  Some of the Deep South states that incarcerate the highest percentage of their residents – like Louisiana, Georgia, and Mississippi – have enacted reforms that are beginning to bring down their prison populations. At the same time, the federal prison population has decreased by 40,000 since peaking at 219,000 in 2013.

  But it’s just a beginning. It will take much more reform to end the era of mass incarceration. It’s a period that began in the early 1970s – just after the civil rights movement – when President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” following a “law and order” presidential campaign calculated to appeal to white anxieties about the changing social order.