Mass Incarceration In America Essay

Many people know that the United States Judicial System is, to put it nicely, flawed. Right now, the U.S holds five percent of the world’s population, and 2.3 million are in prison, making twenty five percent of the world’s prisoners. (13th). Forty percent of that 2.3 million are African American males as well. So how did it get to this point? Why have people let it get to this point? Is there any hope in fixing it? Some of these questions are harder to solve than another, but with the proper sources and information, all will be answered. Let’s start with “How?”. How did the problem of mass incarceration in the U.S get so bad that it now holds twenty five percent of the worlds prison population? It’s supposed to be the land of the free is it not? The cause mass incarceration in the U.S can be traced back to long

During the 70’s, drugs such as marijuana and crack cocaine where seen as the greatest threat to the American people by the government. Marijuana was associated with “hippies” and crack with African Americans for some reason or another. This lead to more police searches, and people being tossed in jail for suspicion of possession. The “Super Predator” meanwhile came into play in the 80’s, and was the name given to children who committed crimes, and where supposed to be the signs of the end of America as the countries violence rating where supposed to only keep increasing as people became more and more violent. As one can see, it never got that bad. But that didn’t stop even more people, many of which were innocent, from being tossed into jail for the smallest of infractions for ridiculous sentences, most never getting a trial. And so here we are, continuously at war against crime only tossing more and more people into jail as the courts fill and trials are set for another time because there are too many