Aberration on a Global Scale
A number of political motivations inform America’s mass incarceration. An analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative claims that each state in America is an aberration on the global scale with regards to mass incarceration. The United State’s incarceration rates compare to countries with isolated dictatorships that are recovering from civil war. For example, the New York state alone has a slightly higher incarceration rate than that of Rwanda, a country which is still prosecuting people involved with the mass genocide that occurred. This is truly shocking and displays just how many people the American government incarcerates. The infographic on the bottom displays incarceration rates of the world with American states represented as countries. As one can see, most individual states have more inmates that entire, large and complicated countries. For example, Ohio, a state with only 11.6 million people has 77,000 prisoners as opposed to Pakistan, a country with 192.1 million people, and just 75,000 prisoners.
Deterrence
The large number of people incarcerated is informed by the belief that longer sentences and more convictions leads to less crime. Between 1984 and 2009, the time typically served in state prisons increased in each category of crime. Time served for murder increased five years, three years for sexual assault and eighteen months for robbery. The increases in prison duration was used mainly as method of deterrence, but studies show that this is not entirely effective. One can see this when analyzing New York and California. Both of these states are reducing the number of incarcerations and are seeing crime rates fall quicker than the national average. On that note, the National Academy of Sciences reported in 2014 that criminals are primarily deterred by the risk of getting caught, and longer sentences have little to no effect on their deterrence.