The explosive growth in the U.S. prison and jail population over the past two decades, recently exceeding two million, has earned our country the highest imprisonment rate in the world. This increase is due in part to changes made in U.S. sentencing policy in the eighties and nineties during the height of the “War on Drugs,” which intensified the crack down on drug-related crimes. Many have argued that these legal revisions discriminate along class and race lines, exacerbating the already disproportionate representation in prisons of the nonwhite and the poor.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric