The great penal leap backward: incarceration in America from Nixon to Clinton

In 1967, as the Vietnam War and race riots were roiling the country, President Lyndon B. Johnson received a report on America’s judicial and correctional institutions from a group of government experts. The Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice related that the inmate count in federal penitentiaries and state prisons was slowly diminishing, by about 1 per cent per annum (President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967). That year, America’s penal establishments held some 426,000 inmates, projected to grow to 523,000 in 1975 as a by-product of national demographic trends. Neither prison overcrowding nor the inflation of the population behind bars was on the horizon, even as crime rates were steadily rising. Indeed, the federal government professed to accelerate this downward carceral drift through the expanded use of probation and parole and the generalization of community sanctions aimed at diverting offenders from confinement. Six years later, it was Richard Nixon’s turn to receive a report on the evolution of the US carceral system. The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals noted that the population under lock had stopped receding. But it nonetheless recommended a ten-year moratorium on the construction of large correctional facilities as well as the phasing out of establishments for the detention of juveniles. It counselled shifting away decisively from the country’s ‘pervasive overemphasis on custody’ because it was proven that ‘the prison, the reformatory, and the jail have achieved nothing but a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it’ (National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, 1973: 597).