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Racial inequality in the justice system
Essay on the problems in the american justice system
Racial inequality in the justice system
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Lady Justice has long been an icon of the American criminal justice system. Her blindfold shows that justice should apply equally to everyone regardless of appearance, race, age, or gender. Her sword encourages the execution of justice while the scales she holds represent the idea that both sides (plaintiff and defendant) are clearly heard before a decision is made. However, Lady Justice often fails to get her job done. To better achieve the goals of Lady Justice, people should begin to focus more on the ideas of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who envisioned that all Americans must be offered the prospect of justice. However, fifty years after his speeches and letters, King’s vision has yet to become a reality. Too many people continue to find themselves failed and cheated by the American criminal justice system. Criminal offenders find that their punishments do not fit their crime, while law abiding citizens find their taxpayer dollars being drained on an ineffective prison system. The segregation and injustice occurring in American prisons needs to come to a halt. In order to pursue the goals of Lady Justice and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., less criminal offenders need to be imprisoned while more need to be placed in programs that will help them get on the right track.
Many prisoners are in jail for minor and harmless offenses which are often performed in times of struggle and desperation. As opposed to a few decades ago, data from table 1 shows how the criminal justice system has begun to deal more and more with incarcerating suspects who have committed petty, small offenses as opposed to major, more serious crimes. Over 85 percent of state and federal prisoners were incarcerated for violent and property offenses in ...
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James, D. J., & Glaze, L. E. (2006, September). Mental health problems of prison (Rep.). Retrieved November 26, 2013, from Bureau of Justice Statistics website: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mhppji.pdf
King, M. L., Jr. (n.d.). Letter from a Birmingham jail [Letter written April 16, 1963 to My dear fellow clergymen]. Retrieved November 26, 2013, from http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
ProCon. (2013, February 21). Incarcerated felon population by type of crime committed, 1974-2010. Felon Voting. Retrieved November 26, 2013, from felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339&print=true
Torrey, E., M.D., Kennard, A. D., M.P.A., Eslinger, D., Lamb, R., M.D., & Pavle, J. (2010, May). More mentally ill persons are in jails and prisons than hospitals: A survey of the states. Retrieved November 26, 2013.
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.
illnesses. It is estimated that about 50 percent of prison population suffers from some sort of mental illness. The most common mental illnesses that mostly make up this population are anxiety, antisocial personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder.
Furthermore, there are around 10 million individuals booked through the jail systems in a year. Of these 10 million individuals, around 700,000 of these individuals have symptoms of serious mental illness. However, though already high numbers, these numbers are expected to be lower than the actual due to individuals not wanting to report or not knowing to report thei...
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
Arrests by Race, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004896.html US Census Bureau. (2011). The 2012 Statistical Abstract. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/law_enforcement_courts_prisons.html
Thousands of people statewide are in prisons, all for different reasons. However, the amount of mental illness within prisons seems to go unaddressed and ignored throughout the country. This is a serious problem, and the therapy/rehabilitation that prison systems have do not always help those who are mentally ill. Prison involvement itself can contribute to increased suicide (Hills, Holly). One ‘therapy’ that has increased throughout the years has been the use of solitary confinement, which has many negative effects on the inmates.
Although prisons have a few positive aspects such as keeping felons off the streets and being less final than the death penalty, they have many negative aspects as well such as tearing families apart, causing severe psychological harm to the children of inmates, costing 47,102 dollars a year in California alone (California Judicial website), and causing many problems for the inmates in the long run. Fundamentally the use of incarceration is intended to reform and rehabilitate offenders of society’s laws; however, America’s prison system usually makes matters much worse for the offender, his or her family, and society as a whole. The illustrations below show that there is a severe need for reform in the penal system.
King, Martin L. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]." Letter to Fellow Clergymen. 16
HRW: Ill Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness: VII. DIFFICULTIES MENTALLY ILL PRISONERS FACE COPING IN PRISON. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1003/7.htm
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and of that over sixty percent of jail inmates reported having a mental health issue and 316,000 of them are severely mentally ill (Raphael & Stoll, 2013). Correctional facilities in the United States have become the primary mental health institutions today (Adams & Ferrandino, 2008). This imprisonment of the mentally ill in the United States has increased the incarceration rate and has left those individuals medically untreated and emotionally unstable while in jail and after being released. Better housing facilities, medical treatment and psychiatric counseling can be helpful in alleviating their illness as well as upon their release. This paper will explore the increasing incarceration rate of the mentally ill in the jails and prisons of the United States, the lack of medical services available to the mentally ill, the roles of the police, the correctional officers and the community and the revolving door phenomenon (Soderstrom, 2007). It will also review some of the existing and present policies that have been ineffective and present new policies that can be effective with the proper resources and training. The main objective of this paper is to illustrate that the criminalization of the mentally ill has become a public health problem and that our policy should focus more on rehabilitation rather than punishment.
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.
King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter From A Birmingham Jail." Letter to The Clergymen. 16 Apr. 1963. American Identities. N.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. N. pag. Print
In prisons and jails there are individuals that have mental illnesses, some of the individuals know they have a mental illness before ending up in the criminal justice system but some do not and end up getting diagnosed while incarcerated. This paper has three major parts about individuals that have mental illnesses that are incarcerated; how improving the mental health scanning individuals that are going into corrections more accuracy will be beneficial in providing the necessary care, how individuals with mental illness are treated in the correctional facilities and treatments they receive in correctional facilities, and should mentally ill individuals be in prison and jails or health facilities, how metal health facilities have closed down, so when an individual has a mental illness and disobeys the law ends up in the criminal justice system.
Many people idealized the relevancy of living in a civilized world, where those who break the law are reprimanded in a less traditional sense of punishment in today’s standard. Instead of just doing hard time, programs and services could and should be provided to reform and rehabilitate prisoner. Despite standard beliefs, many individuals in prison are not harden criminals and violent offenders, many of these people suffer mental illness and substance abuse Hoke
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.