Compulsory Confinement and Mandatory Sentencing: Defining Eras in the Making of the Carceral State

The war on drugs was essential to the rise of mass incarceration, setting the stage for a revision of criminal statutes, generally, while also influencing the expansion and paramilitarization of urban policing. As a result, more people went to prison and for longer periods of time. This paper examines shifts between punitive and rehabilitative approaches to narcotics and asks how historians should interpret and periodize shifting penal philosophies as important antecedents to the punitive turn that created mass incarceration.

New York’s 1973 Rockefeller drug laws created severe mandatory sentences, up to life imprisonment, for drug possession violations. While the Rockefeller laws marked a watershed moment in the punitive turn, they were not unprecedented. Federal drug laws in 1951 and 1956 introduced mandatory minimum sentences in response to rising alarm around adolescent heroin use. These laws inaugurated the theory that long, mandatory prison sentences and strong law enforcement at the street level would cure the nation’s drug problem. However, the postwar punitive fury was short-lived. By 1962, new state and federal laws replaced criminal prosecution with treatment, often in the form of compulsory confinement. In the subsequent decade punitive justice policy was abandoned and replaced with a public health approach. Given the punitive turn in the 1970s and its continuity with the ideological framework of the early postwar period, the experimental and rehabilitative 1960s may seem like a blip in penal and drug policy. However, the hegemonic embrace of treatment over prisons in the 1960s implies that the eventual punitive turn was far from inevitable. The compulsory confinement programs suggest a moment of possibility in which incarceration was not the predominate response to drug panic; but it also underscores how programs designed in opposition to the earlier punitive regime were themselves unwitting contributors to the making of mass incarceration.