From Mass Incarceration to Invisible Incarceration

The United States has the highest number of incarcerated people worldwide with a prison population of 2.2 million in 2016 (Gramlich 2018). Mass incarceration is the historically unprecedented number of people incarcerated, and the fact that this population is disproportionately made up of Black and Brown men. This is a result of “law and order” political rhetoric, the prison industrial complex, the war on drugs, and changes in sentencing in the United States. Some argue that mass incarceration began to end in the United States in 2008, as this coincides with a decline in the United States prison populations for the first time in over thirty years (Gramlich 2018). However, the carceral state has not receded. Rather, mass incarceration has merely transformed, with the increased reliance on alternatives such as mass probation, e-carceration, and immigrant detention centers (Alexander 2020; Phelps 2020). Through a historical-comparative analysis of secondary data, I explore whether certain geographical areas in the United States that implemented criminal justice reforms have seen the size or racial composition of their prison populations decline. I analyze data from the Department of Justice and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to evaluate the extent of new forms of social control, such as e-carceration and new populations of prisoners incarcerated through immigrant detention. I study the criminal justice reform movement by comparing California and Georgia. I gather data on criminal justice reform laws from newspaper articles and political thinktank reports. My findings show that while incarceration in the current era exemplifies characteristics of mass incarceration through the dehumanizing rhetoric and racially disproportionate impact seen in immigrant detention centers and e-carceration, there has been a shift to invisible incarceration. Invisible incarceration is a multi-faceted concept that shows while there has been an increase in immigrant detention and parole populations, these alternative forms of incarceration are statistically, geographically, and socially hidden. Therefore, instead of beginning to end mass incarceration, the United States has shifted forms of incarceration to allow for continued social control of deviant populations.Bachelor of Art