Million-Dollar Blocks - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 133

From the late 1970s, however, it has been climbing rapidly. The result has been a
tenfold increase in the standing prison population, from two hundred thousand in
1970 to two million in 2000. 67 How we respond to crime is a matter of values, deci -
sions, and policy, all the way down to the basic questions defining what counts as a
crime. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, efforts to fight poverty were systematically
replaced by the War on Drugs, including the criminalization of most drug offenses.
Crime became the surrogate for poverty and incarceration the primary response.
PovertypolicyintheUnitedStates
since1900.