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The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any country in the world, by a significant margin. The rise of this incarceration rate, from roughly 100 per 100,000 in the early 1970s to over 700 at its peak, was the result of policy choices: mandatory minimum sentences, threestrikes laws, the war on drugs, and prosecutorial practices that prioritized conviction rates over individualized justice.

The experiment has produced enough data to evaluate. Crime rates fell substantially through the 1990s, but the evidence that incarceration was the primary driver is weak. States that incarcerated at very different rates experienced similar crime trajectories. And the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, the impact on families, communities, and civic participation; the barriers to employment, housing, and voting that follow criminal records, represent ongoing social costs that are not captured in crime statistics.

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== What evidencebased alternatives look like ==

Focused deterrence strategies, identifying the small number of individuals responsible for disproportionate shares of violent crime and delivering a credible message that the next offense will be met with the full weight of law enforcement while simultaneously offering meaningful support for those who want to exit, have demonstrated significant violence reductions in multiple cities. The approach is more targeted and more resourceefficient than mass incarceration.

Drug courts, mental health courts, and other diversion programs address the reality that a substantial proportion of people in the criminal justice system are there primarily because of untreated behavioral health conditions. Treatment in community settings produces better recidivism outcomes than incarceration for this population, at lower cost.

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''Originally published July 31, 2023 on [https://docmoates.com/blog/criminal-justice-reform-what-the-research-supports/ docmoates.com].''