Fifty Years of Mass Incarceration

2023 marks 50 years since the beginning of mass incarceration in 1973, when the U.S. prison population started increasing every single year for nearly four decades, according to Nazgol Ghandnoosh. Ghandnoosh, who works for The Sentencing Project, shared some sobering numbers: today, over five million people are under supervision by the criminal legal system, and nearly two million people, disproportionately Black, are living in prisons and jails. During this conversation, she delved into the different costs of incarceration – both on the incarcerated and on our society – and highlighted efforts needed to bring down our prison population.