The American prison system imprisons one quarter of the world's population, reflecting an incarceration rate unmatched by other countries (Larson, Fourth City 1). Though the drastic increase in the prison population formally began in 1973, scholars traditionally attribute the rise of mass incarceration to a hardening of public opinion in the prior decade rooted in politically-driven “tough on crime” sentiment and intense vilification of the criminal archetype (Mauer 18). While public obduracy towards those who commit crimes has likely played a causal role in rising imprisonment, mass incarceration increases negative public perceptions of incarcerated people by inducing cognitive dissonance, an incompatibility between simultaneously held cognitions (Dyer 6). Ideological representations of incarcerated people as subhuman or evil have evolved, in part, as a means to justify the depravity of incarnation, thereby partially alleviating cognitive dissonance. Thus, mass incarceration can be understood as a self-perpetuating cycle, wherein the need to reduce shame for the system further exacerbates negative public attitudes towards incarcerated people. Efforts focused on reforming the criminal justice system must disrupt this cycle, challenging the perceived ideological division between the American public and the incarcerated by demonstrating the humanity of incarcerated people. 

The public’s complicity in the retributive justice system, which promotes abusive punishment, conflicts with the simultaneous moral condemnation of unjust treatment. Within American prisons, incarcerated individuals suffer abhorrent conditions and dehumanizing treatment that involves both physical and mental abuse. American society, however, remains not only complacent towards but also supportive of retributive justice, the idea that justice systems should primarily aim to punish offenders for their crimes, rather than to rehabilitate them. A poll conducted in 2021 determined that 60% of surveyed Americans favor the death penalty for those convicted of murder despite the fact that a majority recognize the possibility of innocent people being put to death (Pew Research Center 4). Advocacy for the death penalty at the potential expense of innocent lives reflects a quintessential lack of support for rehabilitative justice initiatives, subsequently exemplifying the punitive nature of the American public’s criminal justice mindset. A 2016 report by Bettina Muenster and Jennifer Trone entitled “Why is America So Punitive?” suggests that American culture’s “penchant for individualism and myopic focus on personal responsibility” results in “widespread punitive attitudes” towards criminal offenders (Muenster & Trone 342). This high esteem for “personal responsibility” motivates the American desire for retributive justice by encouraging the public to blame crime solely on the individual who commits it while neglecting systemic factors that impel criminality, including racism and poverty. Despite the punitive nature of the American prison system, research indicates that, outside of the criminal legal sphere, people are “averse to harming others,” and are less likely to support inhumane punishments, such as torture (Houck 4). However, by willingly participating in a society that relies on the incarcerated population as a labor force, and by neglecting to encourage prison reform, the public further reinforces the abuses that occur within prisons, indirectly supporting inhumane treatment of incarcerated people (Larson, “Retributive Justice”). The generally held belief that abusive treatment is wrong conflicts with the public’s complicity in the retributive criminal justice system, creating cognitive dissonance, an uncomfortable incompatibility of concurrent beliefs.

Cognitive dissonance surrounding punishment of criminality motivates the public to dehumanize incarcerated people as a means of justifying these people’s treatment within the prison system. The insufficient justification paradigm, proposed by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) suggests that, when we have insufficient justification for a cognitively dissonant behavior, we shift our attitudes to justify the behavior (Dyer 6). Historically, dehumanization of an oppressed group is a means of providing external justification that preserves the conscience of the oppressor. In her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, Joy DeGrue Leary argues that slaveowners “[removed] cognitive dissonance” by “casting the people they enslaved as less than human” (Leary 124). Subjecting a human being to unspeakable abuses is morally uncomfortable, and therefore, to maintain slaveholding practices, slave owners mentally recharacterized the people they enslaved as subhuman and deserving of exploitation. Public perceptions of incarcerated people as non-humans similarly resolves cognitive dissonance by providing external justification. In an article for The Marshall Project, author Lisette Bamenga suggests that dehumanizing language surrounding incarceration is indicative of the public’s rationalization of prison abuse. In common discourse, members of the general public often refer to incarcerated people with “prison labels” such as “‘offender’ or ‘inmate,’” terms that define incarcerated people as ‘“things’ rather than people” (Bamenga 1). Bamenga argues that the divorcing of incarcerated people from their human qualities “[serves] to justify poor conditions in jails and prisons and [makes] it OK to deny people basic needs” (1). This programmed dehumanization of incarcerated people in everyday language reflects a broader stereotyping by the public, one that depicts those who have committed crimes as indiscriminately condemnable objects. Members of the public adopt the attitude that because incarcerated people are irredeemable and less than human, they deserve abusive treatment. This leads to the conclusion that it is acceptable to condone retributive justice.

The American public willingly engages in the persecution of incarcerated people to clearly define themselves as belonging to a “good and moral” group. This manufactured ideological distinction further resolves cognitive dissonance by othering incarcerated people. In his manuscript entitled “Mass Incarceration and the Theory of Punishment,” Vincent Chiao describes the retributive view of criminal justice as stemming from a desire to “manifest our moral convictions by punishing the wicked” (Chiao 19). This mindset suggests that a retributive response to criminality bonds the broader American society by demonstrating a collective renunciation and othering of “wickedness” and adherence to “our” shared moral code. The idea that inhumane punishment of those who commit crimes promotes an “important social aim” reduces cognitive dissonance by allowing the public to justify condemnation of incarcerated people in the name of moral integrity (4). Importantly, this dissonance reduction method further exacerbates a perceived divide between the “bad” incarcerated population and the “good” general public. Legislative decisions made by the public reflect this social distancing effect. Susan Stabile’s article “Othering and the Law” suggests that public conception of the “legal strategies designed to address needs and conditions of different groups of persons” is heavily influenced by the fact that “often, the population subset we are talking about is not viewed as ‘us’” but as “irrevocably other” (Stabile 395). In America, incarcerated individuals lose the right to vote, preventing them from exerting influence over judgements of criminal law by othering them. Subsequently, the power of legislative decision-making primarily lies with communities who do not observe or experience the direct effects of incarceration. This voting body decides on laws which, given their position of privilege, they expect to fall upon the “other” rather than themselves. Legislative bias sustains the perceived moral divide between the incarcerated population and the general public by attributing power to delineate right from wrong to the nonincarcerated public alone.

To encourage the public to consciously acknowledge the moral depravity of the prison system, rather than subconsciously justify its abuses, reform efforts must minimize the socially constructed separation between incarcerated people and the public sphere. In contrast to the American public’s punitive attitude, individuals who are directly impacted by crime favor rehabilitation rather than retributive justice. A New York Times article entitled “Reckoning with Violence” reports that “90 percent of [violent crime] survivors in New York City… want the person who harmed them in a restorative justice process — one that offers support to survivors while empowering them to help decide how perpetrators of violence can repair the damage they’ve done” (Alexander 2). Survivors of crime, because they have been personally affected by criminal action, are able to conceptualize criminality as “the person who harmed them” rather than an amorphous and threatening force. The fact that these survivors want more than simply punishment for perpetrators of crime suggests that diversifying the public’s understanding of the incarcerated community may increase support for restorative criminal justice practices over punitive ones. The restorative justice model aims to remove the state obstacle that separates perpetrator and victim by facilitating opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and problem solving across this divide (Larson, “Retributive Justice”). In a book chapter entitled “The Paradox of Forgiveness in Restorative Justice,” authors Marilyn Armour and Mark Umbreit explain that restorative justice reestablishes connectivity between incarcerated people and the public by allowing both incarcerated people and survivors of crime to “recognize their own transgressions and respond on the basis of commonalities rather than differences” (Armour & Umbreit 6). The open dialogues at the center of restorative justice practices, because they emphasize “commonalities” between incarcerated individuals and the public, minimize the perceived moral divide between these groups and humanze incarcerated individuals in the eyes of the public. If broader society views incarcerated people as akin to themselves, it will be more difficult to continue justifying the abuses that occur within American prisons. Subsequently, a restorative approach may combat the dissonance-reducing depersonalization and vilification of incarcerated people that sustains public support in mass incarceration. 

Like the restorative justice model, prison writing functions primarily to humanize the voices of incarcerated people and, thus, reading and promoting prison writings is critical to further minimizing the separation between incarcerated people and the American public. Because the public is intentionally kept from understanding the degree of abuse that takes place within the prison system, a misunderstanding that is reinforced by cognitive dissonance, prison writing should be viewed as expositional (Larson, “Retributive Justice”). Thus, prison writings, because they contradict the commonly-perpetuated characterizations of incarceration, encourage the public to recognize the moral depravity of the prison system. In Fourth City, a collection of written works by incarcerated people, editor Doran Larson notes the public’s tendency to view incarcerated people as a “faceless mass” (Larson, Fourth City 4). Larson suggests that prison writings can “[help] us decipher the faces inside this confined city,” and he encourages readers to take prison writings as evidence of the thriving community the incarcerated population constitutes (5). Prison writings, like the retributive justice model, challenge the collective representation of incarcerated people as subhuman by helping the public to “decipher” individuality. To demonstrate their individuality, incarcerated authors often juxtapose the dehumanization they experience, both within the prison system and at the hands of the public, with their deeply human emotions, actions, and perceptions. In his essay entitled “Friendship,” incarcerated author George Whitham describes his conception that, from the prison system's point of view, “the moment [incarcerated people] picked up [their] con numbers, [they] no longer existed as humans; [they] were now the sum of [their] con numbers” (38). Whitham goes on to describe his deeply personal friendship with another incarcerated man, Billy, who developed liver cancer. Ultimately, Whitham concludes that, through this loving and compassionate friendship, he “finally [came to] recognize [himself] as a caring human being who's not just a con number or a statistic” (40). By depicting the process which ultimately led him to recognize his own humanity, a journey mediated by the emotions of love and loss, Whitham highlights his “caring human” nature to the reader. Prison writing, by revealing the humanity of the author, encourages the public to form suspicions about the unequivocal categorization of incarcerated people as bad, evil, and unlike general society. By posing direct evidence to contradict these reductive ideological representations, prison writings challenge the dissonance reduction strategies that preserve American complacency with the state of criminal justice and, subsequently encourages the public to be uncomfortable with the abuses of mass incarceration. 

Methods that promote interaction between the American public and the incarcerated community are critical to recognizing the humanity and sameness of incarcerated people. This recognition prevents the public from rationalizing the prison system as a structure that condemns evil and promotes morality, forcing the public to instead experience the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that results from living in a country that commits unspeakable abuses against its incarcerated people. It is this widespread discomfort that will ultimately move the public to support incarceration reform. In a conversation with formerly incarcerated author Ken Hartman in his book, Mother California, Hartman suggested that America’s “long history of race and class based dehumanization” fuels the perception that incarcerated people are “fundamentally evil” (Hartman, “Question and Answer on ‘Mother California’”). To disrupt the cyclical nature of this perceptual bias, Hartman hopes readers of his work will learn that “people in prison are no different from you” (Hartman, “Question and Answer on ‘Mother California’”). To restructure their own cognitive representations of incarcerated people, the American public must seek out and attend to the voices and works of an illustrative collection of incarcerated authors from varied backgrounds. Collectively, these suppressed writings allow for the realization that the American prison system perpetuates against its own people the same violence it claims to punish.