Election season is in full swing, and across the country the politics of fear and hatred are once again gaining momentum. The rhetoric is nothing original: Rightwing hopefuls are scapegoating migrants, belittling the civil rights activism of disadvantaged communities, and using racially coded language to agitate centuries-old anxiety about the white majority being replaced.
And according to national polls, it’s working. Republicans are poised to gain control of the U.S. Congress. The botched attempts on their presidential nominee’s life have united and energized them. Democrats have undeniably been revitalized since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place, but they still can’t break out of polling deadlocks in must-win swing states. This election will put the rights of many of America’s least powerful in serious danger.
For those of us who are directly impacted by the prison system, the 2024 elections threaten every aspect of daily life, and even life itself. Though justice reform has made appreciable progress over the last few years, another Donald Trump term and a wave of Republican victories could catapult mass incarceration and military-style policing into another era of radical expansion.
The mass incarceration era began in the 1980s under circumstances that should sound somewhat familiar—political opportunists used an uptick in violence and an obscenely sensationalized drug epidemic to provoke and exploit public fear. Convinced the United States was facing imminent peril, terrified Americans abruptly became willing to send police in armored vehicles into the poorest neighborhoods to terrorize the people who lived there, strip resources from impoverished children, put people in prison for life, and in some cases execute them.
The irony, we know now, is that by 1994, when mass incarceration and militarized policing shifted into overdrive, violence was already plummeting across the country. It would continue to steadily decrease year after year. But public fear campaigns continued. It became clear that it was the perception of danger that mattered most. Competing for media attention and votes, politicians’ rhetoric became increasingly dire. Democrats under the leadership of President Bill Clinton, afraid of conceding the “tough on crime” position to Republicans, passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994. They justified it by warning of wholesale murder in suburban streets and the outright collapse of civilization, carried out by mythical beings they called child superpredators.
At the same time, political promises regarding public safety were escalating as well, reaching their zenith with the promise that the government could not just make voters safer but could make them absolutely safe, all the time. Absolute safety was achievable, politicians from both parties told the public, through intensified policing and a massive expansion of incarceration. These two interrelated illusions—that absolute safety can be realized, and that incarceration will bring it about—embedded themselves deep within the American consciousness and became the ideological foundation for mass incarceration.
Mass incarceration is a product of our imagination. It has generated countless physical effects, and its consequences for people’s lives have been very real. But it’s just an idea, built on false promises. Nothing holds us back from remaking our sentencing policies or police forces. We created them, and we have the power to change them in any way we choose.
First, we will need to change our minds. The future of the justice system depends entirely on public perception. So long as people believe they are in danger, and believe in the illusion that locking away an enormous number of people will make them safe, mass incarceration will persist.
In the years since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there has been a renewed effort to rouse public fear of crime. Republicans recognize that their positions on practically every issue are too extreme to win statewide or national elections—unless voters can be made to feel afraid. Take Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio: Both candidates have maintained that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pets even though they know there is no evidence that this occurred. Their anti-immigrant rhetoric has resulted in threats of violence, including bomb threats at schools.
The spasm of violence that coincided with the economic downturn and social turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic has settled—but as in 1994, it’s the perception of crime that matters. What happens next will be determined by the public imagination, not by any legitimate threat to public safety.
We are living on a knife’s edge. America’s perception of justice could swing wildly in either direction, at any time—and that shift could be the deciding factor in our next elections. Roughly one hundred million people in the United States are directly impacted by the justice system as of 2023. If the 2024 elections put the party of scapegoating, retribution, and prisons back in power, and mass incarceration undergoes another major expansion, the system could rapidly ensnare one hundred million more. For those of us whose lives are already dominated by mass incarceration, we could rapidly go from being directly impacted to being crushed. We can hope that this time critical thinking and compassion will win out over panic and reflexive cruelty. But the tremendously disquieting fact is that things could go either way.