The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any country on earth — a fact that is often noted and rarely explained by the factors that incarceration is supposed to respond to (crime rates, which are not uniquely high). The causes are political, economic, and racial: the war on drugs, mandatory minimums, the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and the persistent racialization of both crime and punishment. To understand mass incarceration is to understand it as a system of social control rather than a response to harm — and to ask what justice would actually require in its place.
Each step builds on the last.