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Criminal justice system role in society
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The media and the criminal justice system
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America by many is known or considered for justice, equality, and a land of freedom but it 's the contrary . In the U.S it promised equality, justice, freedom, safety, etc. The criminal justice system however shows any of those characteristics due to their strict policies which are unethical. The criminal justice system has a negative effect on society because it focuses on putting people in jail for petty crimes, it targets people of color, and destroys families and communities.
What people are presented on T.V manipulates people into thinking someone is dangerous because you constantly see images of them presented in a negative way. With the the Stop and Frisk policy, many minorities such as hispanics but mainly blacks have been stopped by police to be searched just to find anything against them to have a reason to arrest them. A New York Times video on stop & frisk talks about Tyquan experience with
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Discussing criminal justice in America is very important because we live in it but we don 't know the secrets behind it because we have been brainwashed. People tend to think that there are so many bad people because constantly they see someone getting arrested. So many families getting torn due to incarceration and crimes that don 't deserve a huge amount of years in jail. It affects the individual as well when he/she comes out they have spent so many years spent in jail that they don’t recognize their surroundings anymore, their families, their kids grown, and their community have new faces. Incarcerating people doesn’t decrease in crime while they were gone. People should be aware and come to their sense and know that they have been told and confused to think putting people in jail will not solve the problem and not actually arresting those who are doing deplorable
The criminal justice system has been evolving since the first colonists came to America. At first, the colonists used a criminal justice system that mirrored those in England, France, and Holland. Slowly the French and Dutch influences faded away leaving what was considered the English common law system. The common law system was nothing more than a set of rules used to solve problems within the communities. This system was not based on laws or codes, but simply that of previous decisions handed down by judges. Although rudimentary, this common law system did make the distinction between misdemeanors and the more serious crimes known as felonies.
With matted hair and a battered body, the creature looked at the heartless man outside the cage. Through the dark shadows you could only see a pair of eyes, but those eyes said it all. The stream of tears being fought off, the glazed look of sheer suffering and despair screamed from the center of her soul, but no one cared. In this day in age I am ashamed to think that this is someone's reality, that this is an accurate description of a human being inside a Canadian women's prison . Exposing the truth behind these walls reveals a chauvinistic, corrupt process that serves no greater purpose. The most detrimental aspect of all is society's refusal to admit the seriousness of the situation and take responsibility for what has happened.
If given this prompt at the beginning of this semester I would have answered with a resounding yes, the criminal justice system is racist. The classes I have previously taken at LSU forced me to view the criminal justice system as a failed institution and Eric Holder’s interview in VICE - Fixing The System solidified that ideology. The system is man-made, created by people in power, and imposed on society, so of course there will be implicit biases. The issue is that these internally held implicit biases shaped the system, leading the racial and class disparities. VICE – Fixing The System addressed heavily the outcomes that we see in today’s society based on these implicit biases. Additionally, this documentary focuses on the ways that mainly
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” (Nelson Mandela, 1994). The United States of America has more people behind bars than any other country on the planet. The prisons are at over double capacity. It cost a lot of money to house prisoners each year. A large number of the prisoners are there because of drug related offenses. There are prisoners who have been sent to prison for life for marijuana related drug offenses. Many prisoners have been exonerated after spending many years behind bars due to the corruption in our legal system. 32 States in United States of America still execute prisoners even though there is no evidence to suggest that capital punishment is a deterrent. Prison reform is needed in America starting at the legal system and then ending the death penalty.
So, in a time of social, political and economic change it makes sense that how we enforce the law and systems of punishment would begin to shift into the public eye. Gunther claims that we have a criminal processing system, rather than a criminal justice system; But what makes a criminal justice system an impartial justice oriented system rather than the harsh, biased and unfair processing mechanism that Gunther saw? For this, we look to Packer’s four assumptions of a justice system.
Saint Augustine once said, “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?” The criminal justice system in America has been documented time and time again as being a legal system that borders on the surreal. We as Americans live in a country where the Justice Department has failed to collect on $7 billion in fines and restitutions from thirty-seven thousand corporations and individuals convicted of white collar crime. That same Justice Department while instead spending more than 350% since 1980 on total incarceration expenditures totaling $80 billion dollars. America has become a place where a 71-year-old man will get 150 years in prison for stealing $68 billion dollars from nearly everyone in the country and a five-time petty offender in Dallas was sentenced to one thousand years in prison for stealing $73.
Mass incarceration has caused the prison’s populations to increase dramatically. The reason for this increase in population is because of the sentencing policies that put a lot of men and women in prison for an unjust amount of time. The prison population has be caused by periods of high crime rates, by the medias assembly line approach to the production of news stories that bend the truth of the crimes, and by political figures preying on citizens fear. For example, this fear can be seen in “Richard Nixon’s famous campaign call for “law and order” spoke to those fears, hostilities, and racist underpinnings” (Mauer pg. 52). This causes law enforcement to focus on crimes that involve violent crimes/offenders. Such as, gang members, drive by shootings, drug dealers, and serial killers. Instead of our law agencies focusing their attention on the fundamental causes of crime. Such as, why these crimes are committed, the family, and preventive services. These agencies choose to fight crime by establishing a “War On Drugs” and with “Get Tough” sentencing policies. These policies include “three strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and juvenile waives laws which allows kids to be trialed as adults.
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
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.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the year 1980 we had approximately 501,900 persons incarcerated across the United States. By the year 2000, that figure has jumped to over 2,014,000 prisoners. The current level of incarceration represents the continuation of a 25-year escalation of the nation's prison and jail population beginning in 1973. Currently the U.S. rate of 672 per 100,000 is second only to Russia, and represents a level of incarceration that is 6-10 times that of most industrialized nations. The rise in prison population in recent years is particularly remarkable given that crime rates have been falling nationally since 1992. With less crime, one might assume that fewer people would be sentenced to prison. This trend has been overridden by the increasing impact of lengthy mandatory sentencing policies.
In today's society, we are facing many changes. Our own family, neighbors, and countrymen are afraid of many dangers which influence their lives. Although many people have fear which resonates in their consciousness and unconsciousness, the United States has a comparatively low crime rate. Despite this low crime rate, America incarcerates it's citizens five times the rate of Canada and seven times that of most European democracies.(Slambrouck, Paul. 24) Our society needs to be changed. We cannot blame the individuals involved in wrongdoing but we can blame our society who raised these criminals. Of course someone who kills another human being needs to be put away in some form; but we need to make changes. We need to help as many maladjusted people as we can. There are some steps which really seem to work. There are many prison inmates who come from broken homes and have low self-esteem. What needs to be done to help these insecure people, who are at war with themselves and society, is to rehabilitate them. The problem is the prison officials do not try to teach the prisoners how to learn from their mistakes.(McGovern, Celeste. 42) What actually happens is that criminals tend to be better thefts, and have the ability to out smart the police. Our politicians need to stress how important vocational, educational, drug-treatment, and religious programs are, in order to improve the attitude and demeanor of these convicted felons. This is the only way to keep ex-con's from jail.(DeLuca, H.R. 38) Another problem with America's prison system is overcrowding. There is a huge amount of young conscienceless offenders who are entering today's prisons. Imagine trying to compact eight gallons of water in a five gallon con...
Overcrowding of prisons due to mass incarceration is among one of the biggest problems in America, mass incarceration has ruined many families and lives over the years.America has the highest prison population rate , over the past forty years from 1984 until 2014 that number has grown by four hundred percent .America has four percent of the world population ,but twenty-five percent of the world population of incarcerated people Forty one percent of American juveniles have been or going to be arrested before the age of 23. America has been experimenting with incarceration as a way of showing that they are tough on crime but it actually it just show that they are tough on criminals. imprisonment was put in place to punish, criminals, protect society and rehabilitate criminals for their return into the society .
The criminal justice system is composed of three parts – Police, Courts and Corrections – and all three work together to protect an individual’s rights and the rights of society to live without fear of being a victim of crime. According to merriam-webster.com, crime is defined as “an act that is forbidden or omission of a duty that is commanded by public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law.” When all the three parts work together, it makes the criminal justice system function like a well tuned machine.
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...
The present system of justice in this country is too slow and far too lenient. Too often the punishment given to criminal offenders does not fit the crime committed. It is time to stop dragging out justice and sentencing and dragging our feet in dispensing quick and just due. All punishment should be administered in public. It is time to revert back to the "court square hanging" style of justice. This justice would lessen crime because it would prove to criminals that harsh justice would be administered.