Mass incarceration is a term used to describe the extremely high rate of incarceration in the United States for both adults and youth. It is a network of policing, prosecution, incarceration, surveillance, debt, and social control that is rooted in, builds upon, and reproduces economic and racial inequality and oppression. The United States incarcerates more people, in both absolute numbers and per capita, than any other nation in the world. The following are some key features of mass incarceration:

• An enormous, racist carceral system: The United States criminalizes and incarcerates more of its own people than any other country in the history of the world. The system is rooted in, builds upon, and reproduces economic and racial inequality and oppression.

• A broad set of harms inflicted far beyond prison walls: Mass incarceration describes a constant surge of shockwaves inflicting harm and trauma on people and communities across the country. Through policing, surveillance, debt, and other forms of punishment, mass incarceration extends far beyond prison walls. Once a person has been entangled in the system, its harms are indefinite: discrimination in employment and housing, economic and educational deprivation, disenfranchisement as voters and jurors, trauma from an inherently violent carceral system, families separated, and community bonds broken.

• Collateral consequences: People living with a conviction record face nearly 50,000 federal, state, and local legal restrictions that consistently impair them from freely pursuing the American dream. These collateral consequences drive re-arrest and significantly contribute to extraordinary high rates of recidivism. Once labeled as a felon, a persons right to employment, affordable housing, education opportunities and schooling, the right to vote, access to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and other public benefits are forcefully ripped away.

• Fiscal cost: Our prison system costs taxpayers at least $80 billion per year. This money should be spent building up, not further harming, communities. Investments, not incarceration, is how we improve safety.

• Over-policing in redlined and marginalized communities: The war on drugs has disproportionately targeted millions of people of color and led to the increasing rate of mass incarceration. Longer sentencing for minor crimes and endless restrictions after being released are factors that sustain its impact.

To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our criminal legal system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcera...