Coming to fruition in the 1980s, the United States began to enact extensive legal reforms that worked to create a more punitive society. These reforms include mandatory minimum sentences, trying juveniles as adults, three strikes and you’re out laws, truth in sentencing practices, and many other policies and practices which served to increase reliance on imprisonment in response to crime. As a result, U.S. society has been pegged with a “mass incarceration” structure. A recent report has concluded that nearly 1 in 100 U.S. adults are incarcerated and nearly 7.3 million Americans are either in prison or under parole. Although these reforms were intended to apply to all citizens regardless of race, this has not proven to be the reality. Statistically, these punitive reforms have disproportionately impacted African Americans. Specifically, those who are uneducated and/or live in low-income areas. Some have renamed the emergence of the “mass incarceration” society as rather the emergence of “racialized mass incarceration.” The numbers are much more alarming for African Americans behind bars; nearly 1 in 15 African Americans are incarcerated and more narrowly 1 in 9 African American men are incarcerated. These numbers point to an obvious discrimination towards blacks in the U.S. criminal justice system.