The United States has the highest incarceration rate among developed countries and the rest of the world. The question of “why” is always asked. To understand the answer to this question, a step back in history is necessary. There is no specific moment in history that can indicate that this is the sole factor driving the increase in mass incarceration in the United States. On the contrary, various law enforcement campaigns as well as numerous policies have contributed to the rising rate of incarceration in the United States. The key element here is “change over time,” with each policy or campaign leading to the next and the effects accumulating on each other. That being said, the gradual growth of federal and state government power and changing views of race and crime over time are the most significant causes of the increase in mass incarceration in America. UNITED STATES. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay To understand how these causes led to mass incarceration, we need to go back to the 1920s, the era of Prohibition. . Prohibition was partly motivated by improving the health and well-being of Americans. But this was a secondary concern to the more central motivation for adopting a policy that would make it more difficult for low-income racial/ethnic minority groups to organize politically. It was at this point that the nation's underlying prejudices began to surface even more than in the past, prejudices that would persist and grow more pronounced over the next 60 years and beyond. This was evident because the government's enforcement of prohibition was overwhelmingly directed toward poorer regions and working-class neighborhoods, rather than wealthier areas. Not surprisingly, prohibition enjoyed strong support among groups like the KKK. This dry mission gave them an excuse to legitimize their anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, anti-Semitic, white supremacist agenda. At that time, supporting Prohibition meant siding with "respectable" morality and honest American values, seen as being attacked by un-American ideals. The changing view of race/ethnicity and crime was beginning to become more acceptable as a national issue. Not only did Prohibition bring traditional prejudice and racism to the forefront of political and crime debates, it also silently increased federal power as a means to help alleviate social problems. Efforts to enforce Prohibition led to an unprecedented expansion of the federal government in the 1920s, as many resources were needed to enforce and punish violators. The Federal Bureau of Prohibition was established in 1919 to monitor and enforce the law itself. Within this organization alone, the number of field agents increased by 100%, from 1,500 to 3,000 agents in 1926. There was then also an expansion of the penal system. , and different sanctions like parole were introduced because prisons were becoming overcrowded. The Federal Bureau of Prisons was also created to manage the increasingly used prisons. The FBI expanded massively and federal law enforcement expanded and used new invasive tactics like wiretaps to ferret out criminals. This directly paved the way for further expansion of the federal state in the years1970-1990, with the war on drugs. In many ways, Prohibition was the War on Drugs of the 1920s. Much of the discourse and social concerns were the same. When it came to how alcohol and drugs were perceived, they were always associated with lower class crime and ethnic/racial crime. The government gained more resources and delimited entirely new areas of application and power. Law enforcement officials, on the other hand, now had obvious targets for arrests, as certain groups were linked to Prohibition violations. Mass incarceration began during Prohibition because of the increasing emphasis on the need for more freedoms, government involvement in combating increasing crime and because race/ethnicity was increasingly increasingly associated with crime. As Prohibition laid the groundwork for the new penal state that was emerging, the War on Drugs picked up the torch that Prohibition had already lit. The War on Drugs took to the extreme what Prohibition had started in terms of racial and minority prejudice as well as expanded federal power. One of the major effects of the War on Drugs has been the slow elimination of the Fourth Amendment. For example, the Fourth Amendment provides security against unreasonable searches and seizures without probable cause or a warrant. Until the War on Drugs, the courts were “pretty strict” about upholding these rights. But a change began a few years after the start of the war on drugs in terms of the relationship between citizens and police regarding these rights. Virtually every civil liberties protected by the Constitution has been threatened by the war on drugs. This means that new legal loopholes have emerged, allowing anyone to become a target of police drug prosecution. Under the Fourth Amendment, police could not stop and search someone without a warrant unless they could prove probable cause. However, the amendment was modified after the Terry v. Ohio from the United States Supreme Court in 1968. This was amended to mean that if police officers find that the person "may be armed and currently dangerous," they have the right to conduct a limited search for weapons. Today, police no longer need to believe people are dangerous to stop and search them, provided the individual consents. Another tool law enforcement relied on during the war on drugs was pretext stops. This is a traffic stop intended not to enforce traffic laws but to search for drugs despite the absence of evidence. Like consent searches, the United States Supreme Court has authorized pretext stops with the support of the law. A motorist who refuses to consent to a search can still be arrested for minor traffic violations, or police can bring in a drug-sniffing dog to determine probable cause. The DEA has even trained its agents on how to use pretext traffic stops and consent searches as gateways to searching for drugs. Rather than training officers to spot violators, it teaches them to take a “volume approach” and ends up preying on large numbers of innocent people. While people thought they had certain rights to protect themselves from police officers, they soon discovered that the Fourth Amendment was incapable of meaningfully constraining police in the war on drugs.Mass incarceration had become even more possible because it was now legally easier to arrest people and side with the officer in finding them guilty. These new rules in the fight against drugs made it possible to bring together a large number of Americans. for minor, non-violent offenses. This is also what gave police discretion to determine who posed a threat and who did not. Coincidentally, blacks and minorities seemed to be a good fit for most officers. A drug law is different from most other types of law enforcement in that there is no clear victim. Because of the lack of clarity, law enforcement must strategize who to target and how, and there is plenty of room for opinions to creep in or mistakes to occur. Adding to this ambiguity, the media has altered its reporting to sensationalize an “us versus them” narrative, with “them” being black American drug dealers. This depiction solidified the image of a black drug-dealing criminal in the eyes of law enforcement. In many ways, the word crime has become a code word for black people. Law enforcement officials were then exposed to these images and coded language, reinforcing bias. It should be noted that unconscious and conscious cognitive biases tend to lead to discrimination, even when the person does not believe it. Regardless, once blackness and criminality became linked in public perception, prejudices solidified. It felt like people were waiting for permission to start blaming someone for crimes. As if that weren't enough, the United States Supreme Court adopted rules that maximized racial discrimination during the War on Drugs rather than protecting the rights of African Americans. The Court also made it virtually impossible to challenge racial bias in criminal justice under the Fourteenth Amendment. Rather than legally prohibiting racial discrimination in policing, the United States Supreme Court allowed it. Interestingly, many police departments publicly state that they do not engage in racial profiling when engaging in arrest tactics. This is despite the fact that they regularly use race as a stop and frisk factor. They succeed because the Court essentially allowed police to use race as a factor for this tactic. Almost all “seemingly race-neutral factors” are actually race-based. This includes targeting people who live in "high crime ghettos" or with criminal histories and, therefore, people who generally tend to be black. Police actually choose to search inner-city ghettos for drugs rather than white suburban neighborhoods. Poor blacks and minority groups are easy targets because, in many cases, they lack political power and are confined to ghetto areas. In many ways, the militarization of law enforcement in these communities can be likened to an “occupation.” Yet police are able to defend themselves against allegations of racial bias because race is never the only reason they give during stops and searches. Judges, for their part, are as hesitant as prosecutors to question police motives. This is pretty crazy, because law enforcement typically cites the large number of minorities in prison as a reason for targeting them, without realizing that their imprisonment is the precise product of this.racial profiling. It's an endless loop. The War on Drugs and court rulings so heightened the racial and ethnic tensions sparked by Prohibition that race and criminal behavior began to go hand in hand. Mass incarceration was favored because police had few restrictions on who they could arrest, with racial bias overlooked, so they were able to increase overall arrest rates while specifically targeting minorities and blacks. Politics has played a significant role in the increase in mass incarceration because much of the discourse around race and crime has actually been reinforced with the help of politicians. The rise of what politicians called the "law and order" campaign coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement. Interestingly, in the South, law enforcement officials characterized the civil rights campaign as a breakdown of law and order. They began to characterize civil rights protests as criminal acts rather than political events. At the same time, crime tended to increase due to a growing population of young adult males, whom radicals associated with the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, some black activists, concerned about the reputation of inner cities, joined some law and order campaigns. They became unwittingly complicit in the boom in mass incarceration of black men, even though, ironically, many of the legislators who launched the movements to maintain law and order were known segregationists. Law and order hysteria seemed to permeate every quarter and all sides of politics. This “law and order” rhetoric ultimately contributed to a significant realignment of political parties in the United States. At one time, the South was solidly Democratic and the North was largely Republican. Things changed when white Southern Democrats became angered by their party's support for civil rights reforms. This led Republicans to realize that they could strengthen their party by recruiting anti-black Democrats. They began by asserting that poverty was not caused by “structural factors” but by black culture. Many white working-class voters also felt threatened by Africa's sudden progress. Americans and conservatives used this fear to mobilize them. In the 1968 presidential election, the two conservative candidates campaigned on "law and order," rejecting the lawlessness of civil rights activists, and together won 57 percent of the vote. By 1972, many more voters determined their political leanings based on race rather than class. And by the time Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, 22 percent of Democrats joined the Republican Party to vote for him. After his election, his administration continued the war on drugs. The media has been used to sensationalize the use of crack and other drugs in inner-city areas and by minorities in particular. At the same time, these inner-city communities were suffering economic collapse due to a lack of blue-collar jobs, so increasing numbers of people were turning to crime and drugs as a source of income or mental relief . The United States has not followed the lead of other countries like Portugal, which faced similar outbreaks and focused on treatment and prevention. Instead, the United States introduced the death penalty for certain drug crimes, penalties..