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13 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol'y 249 (2006)
Failed Reentry: The Challenges of Back-end Sentencing

handle is hein.journals/geojpovlp13 and id is 255 raw text is: Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy Volume XIII, Number 2, Summer 2006 POLICY PERSPECTIVE Failed Reentry: The Challenges of Back-end Sentencing Jeremy Travis* and Kirsten Christiansen** INTRODUCTION The realities of the growth in imprisonment in America are well known. Beginning in the early 1970s, the nation began to significantly increase the use of imprisonment as a response to crime. In ensuing decades, the per capita rate of imprisonment has increased every year until we now find ourselves with a rate of incarceration--488 sentenced inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents'-that has more than quadrupled. In 1973, there were slightly more than 200,000 individuals in our state and federal prisons; by 2005, those prisons, now expanded into a vast network of penitentiaries, housed about 1.5 million people. This unprecedented rate of imprisonment, now the highest of any country in the world, has led some commentators to characterize the modern era as the age of mass incarceration or mass imprisonment.''4 Less well known is the growth in a related phenomenon called back-end sentencing, the practice of sending former prisoners back to prison for parole violations. The increases in this method of incarceration have been even more * President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York; J.D., M.P.A., New York University. ** Graduate student, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. 1. PAIGE M. HARRISON & ALLEN J. BECK, U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, PRISONERS AND INMATES AT MID-YEAR 2005 1 (2006), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ pjim05.pdf. The incarceration rate including those being held in local jails (as differentiated from state and federal prisons) is 738 per 100,000 U.S. residents. Id. at 2. 2. See U.S. Dep't of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Incarceration rates for prisoners, under State or Federal jurisdiction, per 100,000 residents, 1977-98 (2000), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ dtdata.htm; U.S. Dep't of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Incarceration rate, 1980-2005, http:// www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/incrttab.htm. 3. HARRISON & BECK, supra note 1, at 1. 4. See generally, e.g., MARY PATTILLO, DAVID WEIMAN & BRUCE WESTERN, EDS., IMPRISONING AMERICA: THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF MASS INCARCERATION (2004); MARK MAUER & MEDA CHESNEY-LIND, EDS., INVISIBLE PUNISHMENT: THE COLLATERAL CONSEQUENCES OF MASS IMPRISONMENT (2002); David Garland, The Meaning of Mass Imprisonment, in MASS IMPRISONMENT: SOCIAL CAUSES AND CONSE- QUENCES (David Garland, ed., 2001). 5. See JEREMY TRAVIS, BUT THEY ALL COME BACK: FACING THE CHALLENGES OF PRISONER REENTRY (2005).

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