Warehousing Era (jan 1, 1980 – jan 1, 1995)

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"1980 to 2010 will likely be remembered as a time of mass imprisonment ... American prison populations grew dramatically during the warehousing era (Figures 13-2 and 13-3)—and the increase is only now beginning to drop off. Between 1980 and 2015, state and federal prison populations more than quadrupled, from 329,000 inmates to around 1.5 million. Much of the rise in prison populations can be attributed directly to changes in sentencing laws aimed at taking drug offenders off the streets and to the resulting rapid growth in the number of incarcerated drug felons and, more recently, immigration law violators. A warehousing era report by the American Bar Association, for example, directly attributed the huge growth in the number of inmates to what it saw as a system-wide overemphasis on drug-related offenses—an emphasis that tended to imprison mostly poor, undereducated African American youths who were rarely dangerous." - Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century

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