With a $3.65-million grant and a trove of Los Angeles Police Department records dating back decades, scholars at UCLA have launched a new archival project aimed at independently preserving and dissecting the history of mass incarceration in L.A. The project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and called “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration,” will seek to reveal in new ways how the Los Angeles region became a global outlier for imprisonment — with the largest jail system in the most heavily incarcerated nation in the world — and what the implications of that legacy are in the city’s most heavily affected communities, organizers said.