Mainstream criminologists once predicted prisons would fade away

Evidence

Despite the law-and-order movement against activists, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails nationwide in 1972. This was far too many for Davis and the nation’s most well-respected criminologists, many of whom were predicting that the prison system would fade away. Sound anti-prison activism and ideas were having their effect. In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals called the prison system a “failure”—a creator of crime rather than a preventer. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1048

Categorization

• SEED: The 1973 commission statement that prisons create rather than prevent crime is a striking historical counterpoint to today’s prison-industrial consensus — a possible essay on how mainstream positions invert within two generations.
• XREF: Complicates the reader’s testing of Kendi’s model: here widely-held expert opinion (anti-prison) actually preceded policy change, a partial exception to the policy-first inversion that could test the causal reversal.