This week I read a really interesting article that really made me think about some things. This article was called “Prison and the Poverty Trap” from The New York Times, published on February 18, 2013. This article is about a young man named Carl Harris who was a father. But was also a crack dealer and ended up in prison and also homeless for a while. what caused his to start selling drugs was when he watched a high-level dealer pull up draped down in jewelry and a nice outfit. What caused him to get arrested was when he went to a crack den. The police extended his sentence to 15 to 45 years. While he was in jail it affected his wife a lot.She went on welfare. She wasn't so successful and she had to move relative to relative. When he came out of jail he said that he felt …show more content…
It was hard for him to get a job because he had just come out of prison. When I read this article Mr.Harris story was stating that lives of prisoners before and after jail is not easy. It changes your whole life. You are a whole different person when you come out of jail. It also affects your family and kids. For example his wife was already struggling with welfare. Also when you come out of jail you come out not knowing what is really going on in the world. You forget how things used to really be. You forget how to use a phone, pay for the bus, you struggle with coming back to that normal life. I think that long prison terms affects families and communities because it changes everything. It affects families because they have to suffer a lot, it's sad to not have someone who you were used to seeing most of the time. And it can also affect them physically and emotionally. I think that it is kind of fair because the prisoner deserves to pay for what they did although it affects most families. If they committed a crime then they have to pay for it, receive the consequences. In the article Mr. Harris made some really poor
According to Stephen B. Bright, many of the men, women, and children sent to prison in the United States everyday, are processed through courts without legal representation that is indispensable to a fair trial, a reliable verdict and a just sentence. We see many examples of this everyday. “A poor person arrested by police may languish in jail for days, weeks or months before seeing a lawyer for the first time” (Bright 6). Once convicted a poor person can face years in prison, or even be executed without ever having a lawyer present. The concepts of crime can be defined differently in different societies and can be classified according to race ethnic, gender, sexuality class, and religious identifications (Bright 6). Common targets of this “poverty-to-prison” cycle can be seen in When a Heart Turns Solid Rock by Timothy Black. The book shows how schools, jobs, the streets, and prisons have shaped the lives and choices of poor Puerto Rican boys at the turn of the twenty- first century. Rather than using a model of urban poverty that blame the poor for their poverty, Black instead focuses, through ethnography, on the social forces that affect the individual lives of three urban Puerto Rican brothers: Julio, Fausto, and Sammy. As viewed in the book, many targets for the prison system are poor African American and Latino men. People that come from poor neighborhoods are at a higher risks of being incarcerated.
The Convicts, by Iain Lawrence, is a story of a young boy who faces great odds to complete his quest to help his father. This novel takes many twists and turns through the landscape of London, more specifically in nineteenth century London. However, London is not described in the picturesque view many people have come to know London as. Lawrence shows the uglier more rugged lifestyle of many poor people in London during this time period. Within a society like this in London, swindling, gangs, and prison become common subjects among the lower classes, especially in this novel. Although life was hard for many, the characters in this novel find adventure along the way while aboard ships and through underground sewers.
To begin, Alexander points out how felons are depicted as life-long prisoners in her article ”The New Jim Crow”. However, Alexander states that The War on Drugs caused many blacks to be put in prison and scrutinized by the government thereafter. Similarly, according to Arnold, welfare/workfare recipients are under constant supervision and are required to work menial jobs. In addition, Arnold mentio...
In the novel, The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society, Irwin claims that the jails are inhabited by individuals based on their offensive behaviors, and most importantly, based on their social status, notably being poor. “The public impression is that the jail holds a collection of dangerous criminals. But familiarity and close inspection reveal that the jail holds only a few persons who fit the popular conception of a crime…some students of the jail have politely referred to them as the poor” (Irwin 1). In Chapter one, Irwin describes what a jail entails. He explains that a jail is the foremost start into the criminal justice system. Those individuals placed in jails, normally do less than a year 's time in a jail. A jail is created for individuals who cannot make their bail, and most likely have committed a
The article explains that the majority of women involved in the prison system are poor single mothers. The same majority of poor single mothers are all serving sentences for nonviolent drug-offenses. This article as well as many others, place a significant amount of blame for the increasing prison population on the War on Drugs. The authors explain the correlation between poverty and the implication of mandatory drug sentencing laws.
Todd Clear and Dina Rise state in their study that the high incarceration and return rates of specific communities negatively impact the community social network like worsening ties amidst neighbors, reducing income of families, and affecting family formation. Moreover, African- Americans are four times more likely than other Americans to live in poverty (DAvis 1) The Class of Poverty, states that” individuals in high poverty, highly black neighborhoods are the least likely to have access to food pantries, child care, transportation, job training, substance abuse treatment or other, similar social services.” This means that the majority of individuals effected by this are African Americans. People living in high poverty communities are offered less help than low poverty areas that are predominantly white, meaning that the intersection and combined oppression of being both a racial minority and of lower class, leads to a higher probability of falling victim to the industrial prison
The debate over prison labor has existed as long as the concept it’s self. Opponents claim that it exploits prisoners, takes away jobs from the general population, and puts people in danger by allowing convicts access to their personal information. While supporters of prison labor argue that it helps the economy as well as benefits prisoners. On this issue I stand on the side of the supporters. By having prisoners work we are accomplishing several beneficial things. First, work keeps them occupied and out of trouble, instead of getting into confrontations with other inmates, they are actually doing something productive. Second, by working they are alleviating some of the high costs of keeping them incarcerated, thus reducing the amount the government has to spend for this purpose. And third, the opponent’s argument that prison labor puts the general population in danger is not a valid one since most perpetrators of identity fraud are not convicts, but regular people with no past criminal record. Even with these positive factors, still there is room for improvement in the institution of prison labor.
For instance, the Puerto Rican boy (Santana) who is already a man without wife, without a permanent job without anything. “It is important to address employment issues of returning inmates since being able to obtain and hold jobs is a crucial factor in achieving successful reentry, and helping former prisoners improve their literacy and job search skills is crucial to helping them get work” (Lilienthal, 2013). The documentary present that he applied for a job and in the part of the application where it asks “have you been convicted of a crime?” Santana marked “Yes” and for that reason they did not offer the job to him. Once a person is released of a crime the city does not provide the sufficient services. All they give them is money to survive. The city should pay them back with all opportunities they lose while in prison such as a house, a permanent job, help them to integrate in society again and provide them free education. I think these little things would help to recover more from their trauma. When they get released and they are going back to society is like a new chapter, they have to start from zero again. Their lives were apart from society unjustly for a crime they never commit. That is why I think the city should pay them everything
It is undeniable that mass incarceration devastates families, and disproportionately affects those which are poor. When examining the crimes that bring individuals into the prison system, it is clear that there is often a pre-existing pattern of hardship, addiction, or mental illness in offenders’ lives. The children of the incarcerated are then victimized by the removal of those who care for them and a system which plants more obstacles than imaginable on the path to responsible rehabilitation. Sometimes, those returned to the community are “worse off” after a period of confinement than when they entered. For county jails, the problem of cost and recidivism are exacerbated by budgetary constraints and various state mandates. Due to the inability of incarceration to satisfy long-term criminal justice objectives and the very high expenditures associated with the sanction, policy makers at various levels of government have sought to identify appropriate alternatives(Luna-Firebaugh, 2003, p.51-66).
There is a plethora of data within the last 10-15 years that repeatedly show family, friends, and entire communities or neighborhoods being drastically affected by the consequences of mass incarceration as well. The data focus primarily on the effects on the partners, children, families, friends, and caregivers of those incarcerated; particularly the economic, emotional, and personal relationships between incarcerated individuals and those the data also
Families are often forced to choose between supporting an incarcerated loved one and meeting basic needs for their families and themselves. For many families the loss of income from the relative who goes to jail or prison results in deep poverty and can last for generations to come. Alongside physical separation, the
The report from CPS ASEC which was conducted by the Census Bureau did not include the homeless, those in nursing homes, long-term hospitals, or in prisons. Those in hospitals need to be included in the report since the families’ foot for the hospital bills. The students living in school dormitories also need to be included in the report since they are still dependent on their families. Since there is the increase of those working full-time all year round, most of the families reported as living within the poverty line would decrease since they would move a quintile up. The best recommended time to carry out the survey would be after 2 to 3 years since most of the people would either move a quintile up or down or even maintain their current
There prison population is overpopulated with people just like these. The people in these cases needed help, whether it be employment opportunities, rehabilitation, an alternative to prison, or even a lesser sentence. We have learned that throwing everyone who has a problem in prison and letting them rot behind bars is not the answer. We have only created another problem that our prisons have become overcrowded, and when these offenders finally come out of prison they have a high risk to go right back in. We have to put funding back into communities, society needs to stop spending so much money on sending people to prison, and spend more money trying to keep them out. Society has to put funding back into creating employment opportunities, affordable rehab, and focus on low income communities who need the most help. We need to leave the violent offenders that we are afraid of for prison, and for the people that really need help we can 't put them in jail. Mandatory Minimum sentences are not the answer, this bill needs to be reformed. We have learned that our prisons are filled with people just like Angelos, Echols, and Lockwood who didn’t deserve such harsh sentences and would have benefitted from a judge 's discretion. These people lives would not have been ruined by these sentences if they had better
The correctional system is based on helping offenders become part of society and not commit any crimes. Many prisons begin the correcting criminals since they are inside the jails, but many prisons do not. Prisons provide prisoners with jobs inside the prison where they get very little pay close to nothing and many have programs that will help them advance their education or get their high school diploma. There are various programs prisons provide to prisoners to help them get a job or have a skill when they are released from prison. In contrast, prisons that do not provide programs or help to prisoners rehabilitate and enter society again will be more likely to commit another crime and go back to jail. The Shawshank Redemption prison did not
Crime has been around for continuous years and is affecting our world every second of the day. Consequences of committing crime can range from a small fine, jail time, community service or even imprisonment. A prisons purpose is to penalize the criminal for committing crime and to hopefully stop them from committing crime in the future. In the book “The Richer Get Rich and the Poor Get Prison,” criminologist Franklin Zimring stated that growth of imprisonment is responsible for the decline in crime. I do agree with Zimring, but I also have a few thoughts that don’t agree with Zimring. A decline in crime does correlate with imprisonment, but depending on the way the prison system runs. For example; the way imprisonment prepares the criminals for the world, how the families of the inmates are affected and reasons why Norway’s prison system is more successful than the U.S system all give evidence to the negative side of prisons.