Christian "Alex" Gonzalez is a first year mathematics major at UT Austin. He wrote this post for AMS 311s “Prison Art, Literature, and Protest.”

Largely owing to the police crackdowns that accompanied Nixon and Reagan’s platforms of “law and order,” along with popular public opinion throughout the 1990s that felons should face tougher consequences and longer sentences, the post-1980s U.S. has seen both a boom in prison populations and a sharp decline in rehabilitative education available for prisoners.

To understand the crisis that this upward trend in prison growth has posed for U.S. inmates and minorities, one must first recognize the prison’s history and its original function—to rehabilitate. As Ruth Gilmore notes in the New York Times Magazine, imprisonment as a form of punishment itself first rose as a reaction to traditional English corporal punishment. “The penitentiary movement in both England and the United States in the early 19th century was motivated in part by the demand for more humanitarian punishment. Prison was the reform” (4). Only recently in modern history has prison risen to become the de facto mode of punishment rather than an imagined alternative. Complete with new human rights violations and practically zero efforts at rehabilitation, the contemporary prison stands in stark contrast to its philosophical origins as being a “humane alternative to beatings or tortures or death,” instead becoming a “fixed feature of modern life” that enforces lower class oppression (Gilmore 4). Whether or not that fixture in our social consciousness stems from the onslaught of prison images found in popular media, as Angela Davis argues in her book Are Prisons Obsolete, the prison system has nonetheless become a well into which society deposits its “undesirables,” a process often justified through society’s attitude toward imprisonment as a “fate reserved for the ‘evildoers’” (Davis 16). What’s worse is the manner in which this fate is typically reserved for people of color; as taken from a study done by the Pew Research Center, African Americans are currently incarcerated at a rate of 1,501 per 100,000 adults, almost double that of Hispanic people (797 per 100,000) and nearly six times that of white people (268 per 100,000). As for the ramifications that accompany being physically placed in a prison, Davis’s “well” truly nails the idea. The deeper the state of incarceration, the deeper the trap. This fact was explored personally in George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, where being assigned to Max Row virtually condemned an inmate to life in prison unless they begged and grovelled their way out. Even with begging, one “could count on one hand the number of people who have been paroled to the streets from [Max Row] proper…To go from here to the outside world is unthinkable” (pp. 21-22).

However, for as awful and far-removed from rehabilitative care the prison system currently is, hope persisted at one point in the form of prison education programs. These programs, often kept afloat by federal Pell Grants, provided a way out for prisoners not only through recreational activities like reading and discussion group participation, but also through the application of learned knowledge and acquired degrees to the outside job market. Ranging from writing sessions to career technical education, prisoners interested in learning held the opportunity to truly reform their future and worldview—regardless of the circumstances that led to their incarceration. Higher education programs were once widespread in prisons as well: from 1965 to 1973, during a time New York professor Lee Bernstein dubbed the “Black Arts Movement,” the number of college-level programs in U.S. prisons increased “over fifteen-fold to 182.” Ten years later, there were “350 programs in forty-five states, with roughly 10 percent of all inmates attending a prison college” (Bernstein 298). To see the positive effect college programs had on prisoners, it’s useful to look at the statistics for prisoners who did and did not participate. According to 2011 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, prisoners without access to higher education programs (the norm for U.S. facilities) had recidivism rates of about 68 percent within three years of release and 77 percent within five, with more than 56 percent of rearrests being made within the first year after release. However, prisoners who participated in education programs saw their recidivism rates cut by over 43 percent, with higher degrees corresponding to lower return rates (Northwestern pp. 1-2). While some argue that these drops in recidivism rates came less from the availability of educational programs and more from the prisoners’ own motivations to seek freedom, the wide-scale effect higher education programs had regardless is enough to prove their worth in effort and funding. However, it is important to acknowledge that—like prison populations and the spread of U.S. racial inequality in general—equal access to these educational programs was not guaranteed for minorities. As discussed in Bernstein’s novel, the figures for African and Hispanic American inmates in 1960s-1970s prison classrooms maintained an uneven proportion when compared to their white counterparts. For example, while San Quentin State Prison in California was “54 percent white in 1969, its college program was 70 percent white. The figures for African Americans were 20.2 percent in program vs. 30 percent in the general population, for Chicanos, 9.2 percent vs. 15 percent” (Bernstein 299). Regardless, the opportunity for escape that higher education programs provided can not be overstated. Though educational exclusion was (and still is) a reality for minorities in and out of prison, having those higher education systems in place provided a strong safety net for a population that’s otherwise frequently ignored by society.

However, despite the clear benefits higher education programs pose to prison inmates, the number of such programs offered in the U.S. has dwindled to a historic low. Spurred on by the aforementioned tough views on crime held by the public, policy officials felt the need to cut federal funding for not only prison education programs, but prison rehabilitative care in general. Bernstein brings up the efforts of conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who first proposed the ban on Pell Grants for incarcerated people (312). The greatest offender, however, was Bill Clinton’s signed 1994 Crime Bill, which included provisions that massively upscaled prison construction and eliminated prisoners from eligibility for federal Pell Grants (thus making good on Helms’s ban). The latter is the more significant; by removing funding from an overwhelmingly poor population like incarcerated people, whose in-prison college programs largely depend on federal grants (tuition isn’t exactly a thing), higher educational programs for inmates were essentially eliminated. (Sawyer pp. 1-2) The drive to cut Pell grants didn’t necessarily stem from a shortage of funds or budgetary concerns, either—in fact, it was quite the opposite. Even at their peak in the 1980s, when an estimated “772 higher education programs were operating in 1,287 correctional facilities across the nation,” Pell aid for prisons only made up “less than 1 percent of total Pell spending” (Sawyer 2). The same 1994 bill that outright cut federal aid for prisoners also allocated $9.7 billion in funding for prison management and construction, $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs, an additional $2.1 billion for the FBI and other Justice Department components, and even more funding for 100,000 new police officers (“Law Enforcement Act of 1994”). If the presence of funds wasn’t an issue (it normally isn’t, anyway), it might seem strange then that a seemingly inconsequential program in terms of cost with such great importance for hundreds of thousands was eliminated outright. However, just like with prisons in general, a deeper look at social context is imperative.

It’s no accident that prison systems emerged as a mode of suppression just as segregation was finishing up its last rounds. After all, the historic consolidation of power seen amongst U.S. elites has always revolved around exploiting fear to silence opposition; one need only look at the systems of indentured servitude in the colonial era, slavery in the 1800s, chain gangs following the Civil War, and segregation in the 1900s to spot this pattern. However, to say the move from racially separated facilities to racially motivated prison systems was intentionally deliberate isn’t exactly true, either. As Gilmore explains in her article, “Prisons are not a result of a desire by ‘bad’ people to lock up poor people and people of color. The state did not wake up one morning and say, ‘Let’s be mean to black people.’ All these other things had to happen that made it turn out like this” (14). Though public prisons don’t operate off of a for-profit motive, understanding their position in the nation’s capitalist system offers a clearer perspective behind their boom in the 1980s. For one, public prisons run on government funding rather than profits; what this entails is their direct competition with other state agencies (education, health care, police, etc.) for revenue, especially since the majority of money given to jails inevitably goes toward prisoner upkeep and staff salaries. When the social-welfare side of government shrinks during times of strict “austerity” (as Gilmore puts it), this competition kicks in and public prisons subsequently receive funding that traditionally would’ve gone elsewhere (12-13). By increasing funding for public prisons, correctional officers’ unions naturally enjoy a similar surge in power and thus become better able to enact their pro-prison policies when lobbying. Combine this fact with the economic crisis left behind under Jimmy Carter and Reagan’s answer to the growing call for heightened defense spending, both of which enforced that “austere” atmosphere needed, and you get a decently-sized origin story behind the 1980s prison boom (Gilmore 12, “United States Presidential Election” 10).

However, to identify why the 1980s prison boom happened (i.e. the spark that lit the fuse), Reagan’s War on Drugs is by far the most documented cause. Predicated on the “tough on crime” stances of the era, the War on Drugs brought massive amounts of people into the prison system by criminalizing drug use and heavily raising the punishments for offenders. What’s worse, as exemplified by the infamous 100-to-1 powder to crack cocaine sentencing disparity, the War on Drugs disproportionately targeted people of color and bolstered disintegration in communities already suffering from corporations seeking cheap labor overseas (Davis 16, 109). In attacking vulnerable people devastated by the economy passed under Nixon and Carter, Reagan essentially turned classes’ worth of citizens into “perfect candidates for prison,” feeding the prison complex already growing at the behest of powerful correctional officers’ unions (Davis 16, Gilmore 12). Starting with around 300,000 in 1980, the number of U.S. prisoners reached 700,000 within a decade and tripled from there to over 2,100,000 by 2008, resulting in the U.S. containing nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population (Davis 10). The exploitation of fear from the previous paragraph comes into play with how quickly the nation adapted to this outgrowth; as Davis explains on an individual level, “no one wants to go to prison…Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives” (15). This disconnection from reality, being a coping mechanism in and of itself, thus falls prey to the coping mechanisms that society enforces—particularly racism. To avoid thinking of prison as a reality for ourselves, we reserve it as a fate “reserved for others, a fate reserved for the ‘evildoers’” who, in the collective imagination, are often “fantasized as people of color” (16). When prison numbers exploded in the 1980s, the action of filling and constructing even more prisons simply became secondhand to the officials in charge. What may have been a problem for a decade expanded across generations, as the utility of shoving society’s undesirables into cages became more and more accepted as commonplace amongst the public. This, then, is part of the reason why many saw fit the removal of funding for upper educational programs for prisoners. Money wasn’t the issue; rather, it was the unwanted potential of having a class of people demonized as “evildoers” becoming empowered enough to make their way back into society. It was the ignorance developed by the public over years of being separated by the prison-susceptible population, ignorance born from the public’s innately-developed fear stretching across decades, that disregarded the potential for hundreds of thousands.

To be sure, not all prisoners convicted after the Reagan era were there for non-violent crimes like drug possession or petty robbery; in fact, violent offenders continue to constitute nearly fifty percent of incarcerated people nationwide while drug offenders only compose less than twenty (Gilmore 19). However, acknowledging this fact doesn’t downplay the reality of incarceration; rather, it prevents us from falling into the “myth,” as Gilmore dubs it, of narratives that have us almost offhandedly believing that prisons should be reserved for individuals who truly commit serious crimes. Violent crime or not, prisons have still grown exponentially since the Reagan era and are still exacting policies that deprive their populations of freedom, all while avoiding the very problems that led to their growth in the first place. If even necessary, prisons should be an absolute last resort for offenders—only put in place after extensive effort to rehabilitate the prisoner in question or changing the legislation that led to their conviction. Continuing the practice of policing as it is, where prisons or excessive fines replace the process of addressing wrongs rightfully, only sinks society deeper into the well of abusing easy substitutes like prison. Enforcing change is what’s necessary—change that has us assessing motives and reforming conditions instead of locking away people the second they veer from words written on paper.

Works Cited

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete?: an Open Media Book. ReadHowYouWant, 2010.

Bernstein, Lee. “Prison Writers and the Black Arts Movement.” America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, pp. 297–316. 

Kushner, Rachel. “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Apr. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/ magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html.

Gramlich, John. “Black Imprisonment Rate in the U.S. Has Fallen by a Third since 2006.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 6 Aug. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ 2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/.

Jackson, George, and Jonathan Jackson. Soledad Brother: the Prison Letters of George Jackson. Lawrence Hill Books, 2006.

Northwestern Prison Education Program, Northwestern University, sites.northwestern.edu/npep/ benefits-of-prison-education/.

Sawyer, Wendy. “Since You Asked: How Did the 1994 Crime Bill Affect Prison College Programs?” Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/08/22/college- in-prison/. 

“United States Presidential Election of 1980.” Edited by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, 28 Oct. 2019, www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1980/General-election-campaign. 

“Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.” National Criminal Justice Reference Service, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/billfs.txt.