1096 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy
drugs. As a result, the number of Americans in prison rose dramatically, most of
them incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses.
During the 1990s, thanks to the waning of the crack epidemic and more
effective urban police tactics, crime rates dropped dramatically across the
country. But because of the sentencing laws of the previous two decades, this
did nothing to stem the increase of the prison population. In 2011, it reached
2.3 million, ten times the figure of 1970. Several million more individuals were
on parole, on probation, or under some other kind of criminal supervision.
These figures dwarfed those of every other Western society.
As the prison population grew, a “ prison- industrial complex” emerged.
Struggling communities battered by deindustrialization saw prisons as a
source of jobs and income. Between 1990 and 1995, the federal government and
the states constructed more than 200 new prisons. In 2008, five states spent
more money on their prison systems than on higher education. Convict labor,
a practice the labor movement had managed to curtail in the late nineteenth
century, revived in the late twentieth. Private companies in Oregon “leased”
prisoners for three dollars per day. A call to Trans World Airlines for a flight
reservation was likely to be answered by a California inmate.
The Burden of Imprisonment
Members of racial minorities experienced most strongly the paradox of grow-
ing islands of unfreedom in a nation that prided itself on liberty. In 1950, whites
accounted for 70 percent of the nation’s prison population and non- whites
30 percent. By 2010, these figures had been reversed. One reason was that severe
penalties faced those convicted of using or selling crack, a particularly potent
form of cocaine concentrated among the urban poor, while the use of powder
cocaine, the drug of choice in suburban America, led to far lighter sentences.
The percentage of the black population in prison stood five times higher
than the proportion for white Americans. More than one- quarter of all black
men could expect to serve time in prison at some time during their lives. A crim-
inal record made it very difficult for ex- prisoners to find jobs. Partly because so
many young men were in prison, blacks had a significantly lower rate of mar-
riage than other Americans. Their children became “prison orphans,” forced to
live with relatives or in foster homes.
Blacks convicted of crimes were also more likely than whites to receive
the death penalty. In 1972, the Supreme Court had temporarily suspended
states’ use of this punishment. But the Court soon allowed it to resume, despite
evidence of racial disparities in its application. Even as western Europe and
other countries abolished the death penalty, the United States executed over
1,400 persons between 1977 and 2015. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville had