Crime and Justice Atlas

How Justice Is Served
Foundational Concepts

Mass Incarceration

Also Known As Hyperincarceration Term used by sociologist Loic Wacquant for the same phenomenon, emphasizing its concentration among specific populations rather than a uniform rise.

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The sustained, disproportionately high rate of imprisonment that developed in the United States from the 1970s onward. By 2021 over five million people were under criminal justice supervision and nearly two million incarcerated, and the country, with five percent of the world's population, held about twenty percent of its incarcerated persons before prison populations began a decline of roughly twenty five percent from 2009 to 2021.

Facts
DomainSourced to the subject's own account
Criminal justice policy 1
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Associated With

The federal prison system the Bureau administers is one of the largest single components of the United States' mass incarceration total.

Policy analysts attribute the scale of United States incarceration substantially to sentencing built around incapacitation.

Sources
1. Wikipedia: Incarceration in the United States
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The country comprises 5% of the world's population while having 20% of the world's incarcerated persons.
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