The rise in incarceration started "as the states were adopting tougher sentencing laws", Pfaff said.
While incarceration starts locally in county and city jails, it of course doesn't stop there.
Before the term "mass incarceration" started appearing on the front pages of newspapers, before Obama became the first sitting President to visit a federal prison, before Democrats and Republicans began working together on criminal-justice reform, Randy Credico was screaming about the injustices of America's incarceration policies.
Guillermo Zepeda of CIDAC, a think-tank, says four out of five inmates who did not use drugs before their incarceration now start once in jail.
And if you compare the chart below with the first chart in this article, you'll find that the incarceration surge started with the onset of runway inequality.
It would bar the federal government from contracting with private incarceration companies starting two years after passage.
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics annual reports, the rate of state and federal prison incarcerations increased starting in 1973, then began decreasing around 2007.
It strives to end systemic racism and condemns institutionalization of discriminatory laws; to respect our workers by increasing the federal minimum wage and promoting a living wage; to put a stop to mass incarceration and to start investing in communities over prisons; to halt bad trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to name a few.
Even in tough-on-crime Texas, where one in every 10 US prisoners is held, incarceration levels have started to decline from a peak prison population approaching 200,000.
As our organization, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, has long argued, the ingenuity and resources that went into building newer, "better" prisons helped create the horrors of mass incarceration we are starting to undo.
Although Mandela had been sentenced to life imprisonment in a separate trial, and was about to start his incarceration on Robben Island, his sentence had been commuted from death by hanging, partly as a result of the Observer's coverage of the trial.
