Crime in the United States from 2014 to 2013 has decreased. According the FBI’s page, the definition of “violent crime” is, composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are those offenses that involve force or threat of force. These crimes have decreased from a little over 1.250,000 to an estimated 1,165,383 nationwide. Aggravated assaults accounted for 63.8%, robbery offenses were 28%, rape was 7.2%, and murder was 1.2%. Not only is violent crime rate reducing, but so is property crime. Property crime includes larceny-theft, burglary, motor-vehicle theft, and arson. From 2010 to 2014 property crime has reduced from an estimated 9,100,000 to 8,277,829. It declined 4.3% from a 2013 estimate. Loses from 2014 estimate $14.3 billion. …show more content…
N.p., 4 Mar. 2015. Web. 9 Nov. 2015. .
Eisen, L. (2015, May 16). America 's Faulty Perception of Crime Rate. In Huffington Post. Retrieved November 7, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurenbrooke-eisen/americas-faulty-perceptio_b_6878520.html
Howard, John. "Fear of Crime." John Howard Society of Alberta. Ed. Stephanie L. Lowe. N.p., 1999. Web. 9 Nov. 2015. .
McCarthy, J. (2014, November 21). Most Americans Believe Crime in U.S. is increasing. In Gallup. Retrieved November 8, 2015, from http://www.gallup.com/poll/179546/americans-crime-last-year.aspx
Picchi, Aimee. "The high price of incarceration in America." CBS Money Watch . N.p., 8 May 2014. Web. 9 Nov. 2015. .
"Prison Crisis." ACLU. ACLU and ACLU Foundation, 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. ."Prison Crisis." ACLU. ACLU and ACLU Foundation, 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. .
"Prison overcrowding is a growing concern in the U.S." A Degree in Demand that Makes a Difference . Portland State University, n.d. Web. 9 Nov. 2015.
...Prison Overcrowding: California." ALEC: American Legislative Exchange Council. American Legislative Exchange Council. Retrieved October 13, 2013 from Organization of CDCR
The Tragedy of America's Jails. " Newsweek - National News, World News, Business, Health, Technology, Entertainment, and More - Newsweek. Web. The Web. The Web. 05 Mar. 2011.
Over the past several decades, the number of prison inmates has grown exponentially. In 1980, prison population had numbers around half a million inmates. A graph of statistics gathered from the U.S. Bureau of Justice shows that between 1980 and 2010, the prison population grew almost five times, topping out at nearly 2.5 million. According to an article in The New York Times, the average time spent in jail by prisoners released in 2009 increased by 36% compared to prisoners released in 1990. Many people, such as those at Human Rights Watch, believe that the increase of these numbers has been because of tough-on-crime laws, causing prisons to be filled with non-violent offenders. This rise in crime rates, prison population, and recidivism, has led politicians as well as ordinary citizens to call for prison reform.
Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad
The media plays a huge role in forming people's perceptions of crime. Without the media we would remain ignorant to occurrences outside our direct social groups. The media and especially news coverage therefore provides us with an important point of contact with the rest of society. In evaluating its effect on popular perceptions of crime it becomes important to consider where most of the information comes from and how representative it is on actual criminality. If it takes "facts" (the truth, the actual event, a real thing) or if it is heightened to a crime myth. With a myth being based upon "exaggeration" or heightening of "ordinary" events in life. Crime myths become a convenient mortar to fill gaps in knowledge and to provide answers to question social science either cannot answer or has failed to address. Myths tend to provide the necessary information for the construction of a "social reality of crime (Quinney, 1970)." As crime related issues are debated and re debated, shaped and reshaped in public forms, they become distorted into myth, as largely seen in the mass media.
society. In the last few years, a slight dip in violent crime has been noted,
"Anybody living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin... The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly - a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile... Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace, So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery, and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome and constant companion...
Overcrowding in our state and federal jails today has become a big issue. Back in the 20th century, prison rates in the U.S were fairly low. During the years later due to economic and political factors, that rate began to rise. According to the Bureau of justice statistics, the amount of people in prison went from 139 per 100,000 inmates to 502 per 100,000 inmates from 1980 to 2009. That is nearly 261%. Over 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated and 7.2 million are either incarcerated or under parole. According to these statistics, the U.S has 25% of the world’s prisoners. (Rick Wilson pg.1) Our prison systems simply have too many people. To try and help fix this problem, there needs to be shorter sentences for smaller crimes. Based on the many people in jail at the moment, funding for prison has dropped tremendously.
Crime in this country is an everyday thing. Some people believe that crime is unnecessary. That people do it out of ignorance and that it really can be prevented. Honestly, since we live in a country where there is poverty, people living in the streets, or with people barely getting by, there will always be crime. Whether the crime is robbing food, money, or even hurting the people you love, your family. You will soon read about how being a criminal starts or even stops, where it begins, with whom it begins with and why crime seems to be the only way out sometimes for the poor.
Travis, J., & Waul, M. (2002). Reflections on the crime decline: Lessons for the future. Proceedings from the Urban Institute Crime Decline Forum (pp. 1-38). Washington, D. C.: Urban Institute Justice Policy Center.
Firstly, in order to gain a better understanding of the problems that plague or correctional system we must fully understand the enormous overcrowding problem that exist in the majority of or state and federal prisons. Since 1980 the prison population has quadrupled and only the numb...
Property Crime can be defined as the unauthorized taking or damaging of an individual’s personal belongings. This is not limited to robbery of any kind, fraud, or even arson, but all of these crimes have several coinciding traits that group them under this term. While property crimes are meant to take something that is not ours and use it for our own advantage, violent crimes are used to harm or even kill another rather than using for ones self. This includes hate crimes, murder, rape, and abuse. Hate Crimes are unique because they usually target someone who’s different than the race or sex of that individual committing the offense whereas murder and assault are not always gender or race defined. Therefore, property and violent crimes are influenced by social inequalities that are caused by gender, race, income and age; thus why the legal definition of crime cannot cover all possible scenarios without taking each individual case and studying social behaviors in these of why or what was the cause of the crime committed.
In today’s society there is a high fear of crime by society. Society actions show that there is anxiety and fear about crime. Therefore, anxiety and fear about crime has placid our cities and communities. Society express fear of being victimized by crimes, criminal activities, and behaviors. Therefore, according to, (Crime, 1999) states that “ the level of fear that a person holds depends on many factors, including but, not limited to: “ gender, age, any past experiences with crime that a person may have, where one lives, and one’s ethnicity.” All of those factors have a huge impact on one’s fear level.
The first issue that I would like to address is the overcrowding issues in prisons. In my opinion, overcrowding issues are the biggest issues in our correctional system that concerns every citizen. Running a prison required money, resources and manpower, with overcrowding issues, the government would have no choice but to increase the number of correctional facilities, privatized prisons and increasing manpower. According to (Levitt, 1996), “The incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled in the last two decades. At year-end 1994 the United States prison population exceeded one million. Annual government outlays on prisons are roughly $40 billion per year. The rate of imprisonment in the United States is three to four times greater than most European countries.” (p.1). Overcrowding issues are not only affect prisons but the society as a whole as well. The reason is simply because prison population directly refl...
MacDonald, H. (2010, January 4). A crime theory demolished. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870359090504574638024055735590.ht