Jeffrey Bellin's "Mass Incarceration Nation"

Jeffrey Bellin is the Mills E. Godwin, Jr., Professor at William and Mary Law School. Prior to becoming a law professor, Bellin served as a prosecutor in Washington, DC.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How It Can Recover, and reported the following:

One of the themes of the book is that mass incarceration arose, in part, because officials funneled more and more matters to the criminal courts. These matters used to be resolved informally (outside of court) or not at all. One of the best-known examples is drug offenses. While marijuana, cocaine and heroin were illegal long before the dawn of mass incarceration in the 1970s, it used to be much less common that someone using or selling those drugs would be arrested, brought to court, or incarcerated. The same can be said for many other offenses like drunk driving, unlawful immigration, or gun possession. Page 99 is a portion of a discussion of another important example: domestic violence.

Although little discussed, a change in the policing and prosecution of assaults, and especially domestic violence, is one of the most dramatic policy changes across the era of mass incarceration. As explained on page 99, part of this change was the disappearance of once-common, non-punitive “domestic relations courts” as domestic assaults were increasingly treated, first like any other assault, and then, as a particularly serious form of the crime.

This is an important point because it reveals that among the many policy changes that led to mass incarceration are some with noble intentions. All these changes, alongside other important factors (not at all mentioned on page 99!) contributed to the dramatic rise in this nation’s incarceration rate between 1970 and today. This does not mean that we should not do everything we can to reduce the number of people incarcerated in this country. But it does suggest that getting back to the incarceration rates of the 1970s is a difficult challenge. And that process must begin with an unblinking understanding of the scope of the problem – the goal of my book.

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--Marshal Zeringue