"Although I agreed that the jailing of so many black men was a tragedy, I also shared how a term he used, "mass incarceration"—to describe what, in his view, was a national epidemic of locking up too many people—struck the ears of those of us who had dedicated much of our lives to trying to reduce crime in minority neighborhoods....I thought the term was both inaccurate and insulting to a lot of good people in law enforcement who cared deeply about helping people trapped in dangerous neighborhoods. It was inaccurate in the sense that there was nothing "mass" about the incarceration: every defendant was charged individually, represented individually by counsel, convicted by a court individually, reviewed on appeal individually, and incarcerated. That added up to a lot of people in jail, but there was nothing "mass" about it, I said. And the insulting part, I explained, was the way it cast as illegitimate the efforts by cops, agents, and prosecutors—joined by the black community—to rescue hard-hit neighborhoods."
James Comey on meeting Barack Obama to talk about mass incarceration.
Thats right. The term "mass incarceration" is mean to police and prosecutors in a country that has 25% of the worlds prisoners and 5% of its population.