The Jailer's Reckoning

Tackles the debate of what is driving mass incarceration in America and assesses the political, social, and economic impact across the 50 states.

The U.S. incarcerates four times more people per capita than Australia, five times more than the United Kingdom, six times more than Canada, and eight times more than Germany. The United States contains more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world’s biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? How has having the world’s biggest population of ex-prisoners shaped us socially, economically, and politically?

In this landmark book, Kevin B. Smith explains that the United States became the world’s biggest jailer because politicians wanted to do something about a very real problem with violent crime. That effort was accelerated by a variety of partisan and socio-demographic trends that started to significantly reshape state political environments in the 1980s and 1990s. The force of those trends varied from state to state, but ultimately led to not just historically unprecedented levels of incarceration, but equally unprecedented numbers of ex-prisoners. Serving time behind bars is now a normalized social experience—it affects a majority of Americans directly or indirectly. There is a clear price, a jailer’s reckoning, to be paid for this. As this book shows, it is a society with declining levels of civic cohesion, reduced economic prospects, and less political engagement. Mass incarceration turns out to be something of a hidden bomb, a social explosion that inflicts enormous civic collateral damage.