Healther Ann Thompson, examines the impact of mass incarceration and its historical significance, and emphasizes how mass incarceration must be considered in all studies that examine urban crisis. Urban crisis refers to:
A. Urban crisis refers to the change in the global city, following the war on drugs, that led to the implementation of punitive controls, leading to the dis-enfrenchisement of community members who were more likely be targeted by law enforcement agents due to their poverty than their racial composition. In this view urban crisis is a decay in the morality fabric of the city.
B. Urban crisis refers to the change in industrial centers, following the civil rights protests, and is defined by myriad manifestations including population loss, escalating poverty, a compromised educational system, poor public health, shuttered residential areas and businesses, and an ever-widening racial divide over income, incarceration, employment, civil rights and class mobility.
C. The prevalence and increase in black and brown homocides, which created the need for a system of population control. It was not a punitive turn that led to the urban crisis but rather the violent natures of nonwhite people that drove to the creation of mass incarceration.