Publication Title
Crime and Justice
Volume
53
Page
347
Year
2024
Abstract
Mass incarceration, among Western countries a uniquely American phenomenon, resulted from a transformation of American criminal justice systems. Indeterminate sentencing systems in which legislatures established maximum sentences, prosecutors processed cases, judges decided who went to prison, and parole boards decided how long people stayed there were replaced by determinate systems in which legislatures prescribed minimum sentences, prosecutors made the key charging and sentencing decisions, judges processed cases and sentenced minor crimes, and parole boards lost much of their authority. Parole boards and judges become largely irrelevant whenever prosecutors file charges subject to mandatory sentence, three-strikes, truth-in-sentencing, and life without parole laws. The explanation for the changes and mass incarceration is that developments beginning in the 1960s—White resentment of the civil rights movement, rising crime rates, and politicization of the criminal law—interacted with long-term characteristics of American history and culture. Four are fundamental: chronic, centuries-old racial conflict and three inheritances from America’s frontier history (election of local prosecutors, moral judgmentalism associated with fundamentalist Protestantism, and widespread fatalism about and indifference to human suffering).
Recommended Citation
Michael Tonry, Why Mass Incarceration is Uniquely American, 53 Crime and Justice 347 (2024), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/1151.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
