In the more than one hundred years between the mid-1850s and 1980s, the State of California constructed a total of nine prisons and two prison camps. But in the five years between 1984 and 1989, nine more prisons were constructed. It had taken more than a century to build the first nine prisons in California, and less than a decade for that number to double. Today, there are 34 state prisons in California, and this is not counting federal prisons or county jails—the equivalent of Kenya’s police cells. The State of California also has 43 prison “conservation” camps, whose inmates are procured to fight wildfires and respond to other public emergencies.

That the US is running a prison industrial complex has been well documented. America accounts for just 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Ava DuVernay’s gripping 2016 documentary, 13^th, expertly tracks the policies, systems and forces that have pressed more than 2.3 million Americans—overwhelmingly black and Latino—into the prison system, so much so that in some neighborhoods, going to prison is almost a normal rite of passage.

What the above figures from California reveal is that the processes that produce mass incarceration of an entire demographic can be astonishingly rapid and diabolically efficient.