Pace Law Review Volume 24 Issue 2 Spring 2004 Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Article 8 Agenda April 2004 Digging Out: As U.S. States Begin to Reduce Prison Use, Can American Turn the Corner on Its Imprisonment Binge? Vincent Schiraldi Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr Recommended Citation Vincent Schiraldi, Digging Out: As U.S. States Begin to Reduce Prison Use, Can American Turn the Corner on Its Imprisonment Binge?, 24 Pace L. Rev. 563 (2004) Available at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol24/iss2/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pace Law Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Digging Out: As U.S. States Begin to Reduce Prison Use, Can America Turn the Corner on its Imprisonment Binge? Vincent Schiraldi* The Normalization of Imprisonment The United States has just come through a period of un- precedented prison growth, the scale of which is difficult to overstate. America opened its first walled penitentiary in Phil- adelphia in 1829.1 Between then and 1989, a 160-year period, we amassed approximately 1 million inmates in our nation's prisons and jails.2 In just the next twelve years, we put another 3 million prisoners behind bars. This has rendered the prison experience an alarmingly common life event for Americans, particularly African Ameri- can and Latino males, and one that promises to be even more common for the next generation.