US incarceration rose sevenfold since the early 1970s

Evidence

In the early 1970s, our prisons and jails held fewer than 350,000 people; since then, that number has increased to about 2.3 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole. In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 people incarcerated for drug offenses; today that number is about 450,000. For more than three decades, our country has spent billions of dollars every year not only on constructing prisons and jails but also on policing and funding a carceral system that has ensnared millions. More than 200,000 Americans are currently condemned to life sentences or virtual life sentences (fifty years or longer). — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 835

Categorization

• XREF: The sevenfold post-1970s spike is the measurable anchor for the claim that mass incarceration is recent, not continuous with slavery — the core temporality question of the book’s argument. — connects to: Modern US mass incarceration dwarfs prior decades and falls on people of color. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 22