THINKING OF A PLACE
CURATED BY JESSE KRIMES
Mass incarceration in the United States reflects our nation’s fixation on confinement and punishment, which is internationally unmatched and historically unprecedented. America incarcerates 2.2 million people each day. People are booked into jail 10.5 million times each year; 28,732 people per day. 1,197 people per hour, 20 people each minute. Black people are nearly 3.5 times more likely to be jailed than white people, and nearly 5 times more likely to be sent to prison--resulting in part from racial bias that permeates every facet of the justice system. Mass incarceration, including prisons, jails, police, supervision, and courts cost taxpayers $173 billion dollars annually. Another $9 billion dollars is extracted from incarcerated people and their families in bail, asset forfeiture, and other criminal justice costs. The persistence of this system of mass incarceration, in turn, relies on ignoring and erasing the stories of human beings upon whom the criminal justice system inflicts unspeakable suffering.
The recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many other Black people at the hands of police have challenged this erasure, sparking a global uprising against the nation’s racist criminal justice apparatus. We are in the midst of a national reckoning with American policing and incarceration, and the institutions’ roots in slavery, racial terror and white supremacy. The protests have also coincided with a global pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black, Latinx, poor white, and indigenous people, and has spread rapidly through the United States’ prisons and jails—turning all sentences, even minor infractions, into potential death sentences. Even outside of a pandemic, these facilities can have deadly consequences. Now, as COVID-19 continues to spread behind bars and communities call for wholesale change, this moment demands that we recognize how issues of white supremacy, police brutality, mass incarceration, and community disinvestment are intimately intertwined.
