A person’s socioeconomic status plays a major role in how a crime is investigated. Socioeconomic status is the social standing of an individual or group, which is calculated by the factors of income, education, and occupation. When it comes to the criminal justice system, your status determines whether you go to jail. Angela Davis, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., states that “most of the people in the criminal justice system are poor, regardless of race” in reference to how income and race reflect the outcome of criminal convictions. In the documentary, Making a Murderer, it appears Steven Avery was targeted by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s department. Furthermore, the department only focuses on Avery and never …show more content…
Throughout the entire film, viewers can witness how Steven Avery is being poorly treated because of his socioeconomic status, and the fact that he is different from everyone in the Manitowoc County. Steven was lied on, picked on, and accused of committing a crime he did not commit, all because he was looked down upon and viewed as being less of a person than everyone else in the community. Watching this episode invokes an emotion that is prevalent today with our justice system. Many minorities are falsely accused and falsely imprisoned due to personal vendettas from private citizens or members of the law enforcement. Others are disfranchised due to their socioeconomic status. Ultimately, there are numerous innocent men and women serving life sentences and are on death row for crimes they did not commit. As an illustration, in the year of 2007, Davontae Sanford, who was just 14 years old at the time, was wrongfully convicted of murdering four people and sentenced 90 years in prison. Sandford was an individual a part of the lower social class, coming from a rough part of Detroit, he was a victim of poverty. He stated how he was such a naïve kid and was coerced by detectives and his defense attorney to confess and plead guilty to murders he did not commit. Sanford told how his attorney commented, “you’re a black kid from the ghetto; these white people from the suburbs are gonna come in here and they’re gonna find you guilty.” He was exonerated June of 2016 after the real offender came forward and denied Sanford’s involvement in the murder. What is exposed as this bigger picture is how the criminal justice system is corrupted, being prejudice and stereotyping individuals based on their socioeconomic status is how the system seems to incarcerate people and sad to say,
The killings of unarmed black men have increased tremendously with different races to blame for. In January 2011, the life of Justin Patterson was snatched from him and his family by Mr. Neesmith, who only served in prison for one year. How do you think the community of Toombs County and Justin's family feel about him only serving one year in a detention center? Many people protested that the racial issues behind his travesty caused an upstir in the world, including the murder of Trayvon Martin that just recently happened in Florida during that time. However, Justin Patterson's murder did not make national news or even in the papers because most people thought he was just another dead man.
Racial discrimination has been an immense problem in our society for a very long time. The fact that the race of a victim plays a role in his or her sentencing is appalling. Discrimination within our society needs to come to an end. It’s frightening to think that if you are a minority facing a capital punishment case, which you might be found guilty only because of the color of your skin.
In my free time at work I used to listen to You-Tube documentaries on serial killers. I thought it was interesting and it passed the time. Looking back, I now notice that most of the serial killers were white males, middle class, and heterosexual. Without reading this article I probably would have never thought of the fact that most of the serial killers were in fact of that nature. This article just continues to prove that people can not judge people based on race, social status, or gender. There is more that goes on in a person’s brain then what they look like or how they might seem on the
As said by Governor George Ryan, “Since 1973, over 130 people have been released from death rows throughout the country due to evidence of their wrongful convictions.” With each of these wronged convictions, the victim who should rightfully be convicted was able to walk free and possibly continue to commit crimes. Many of these wronged convictions entail parts of conflict theory with them because the dominant group will view things that they believe are socially deviant as criminal. The example in class of the 1992 Chicago gang ordinance shows how the dominant group, the police force, viewed standing on a street corner as socially deviant and thus, labeled it criminal. In The Central Park Five, the five who were convicted were in Central Park late at night, which was socially deviant. Since there was crime that was committed that night, it was easy to take the socially deviant situation of the kids being in the park late at night, them being in the same place as the crime, and them all being non-white and the victim being white and turn the crime on them. At the start of the night, there were kids who were throwing rocks at cars and assaulting homeless people to the extent of smashing one with a beer bottle. Out of all of the kids who were in the park that night, when they all took off running, it didn’t matter which five were stopped and taken to the police station, as long as there were non-white and in the park that night they could have been one of the “central park five”. “Central park five” turns into a label knowing that regardless of who the kid was and their background, the officers involved were going to manipulate they into confessing to the crime and then end up being convicted. Crime today involves conflict theory and can
The Zimmerman case allowed me to be aware of something that was right in front of me. At a young age, my mother's significant other was arrested and imprisoned for "trafficking drugs". My mother had always maintained that he was initially arrested due to racial profiling, as there was no sufficient evidence to warrant the police to search his car. Despite this information being told to me as a child, I remained blind to the effects that such a system of injustice could have on your economic status, mental health, etc. However, I believe that the outcome of the Zimmerman trial opened my eyes to this effect. I believe that Trayvon Martin's family most likely received the same financial and emotional stresses due to the racial injustice associated with their experience. However, they had lost their son. Following the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I began to understand the effect that systemic racism could have on the lives of Black people, and how it had already been affecting
It can be thought of as the class or social standing of an individual or a group (American Psychological Association). Class inequalities in incarceration are represented by those who have a very low educational background (Western and Pettit 2010). Many studies show a significant increase in educational inequality in incarceration due to the fact that almost all of the growth in the risk of incarceration between 1983 and 1999 was confined to men without a college education (Western, Kleykamp, and Rosenfeld 2004). Prisoners of the state average a tenth grade education and around seventy percent do not have a high school diploma (Western and Pettit 2010). Offenders overwhelmingly come from the least educated margin of society (Western and Pettit 2010). Most of the incarceration rate growth stems from young men with very low levels of education (Western and Pettit 2010). In 2008, the incarceration rate of young African American men without a high school degree had risen to thirty-seven percent (Western and Pettit 2010). This rate is even more alarming when compared to the average rate of the general population being 0.76 of 1 percent (Western and Pettit 2010). The incarceration rate among young white dropouts has grown significantly as well with around one in eight incarcerated in 2008 (Western and Pettit 2010). This notable growth in
Women, Race and Class is the prolific analysis of the women 's rights movement in the
The Life and Activism of Angela Davis. I chose to do this research paper on Angela Davis because of her numerous contributions to the advancement of civil rights as well as to the women’s rights movement. I have passionate beliefs regarding the oppression of women and people of racial minorities. I sought to learn from Davis’ ideology and propose solutions to these conflicts that pervade our society. As well, I hope to gain historical insight into her life and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and 70’s.
Juror #10, a garage owner, segregates and divides the world stereotypically into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ‘Us’ being people living around the rich or middle-class areas, and ‘them’ being people of a different race, or possessing a contrasting skin color, born and raised in the slums (poorer parts of town). It is because of this that he has a bias against the young man on trial, for the young man was born in the slums and was victim to domestic violence since the age of 5. Also, the boy is of a Hispanic descent and is of a different race than this juror, making him fall under the juror’s discriminatory description of a criminal. This is proven on when juror #10 rants: “They don’t need any real big reason to kill someone, either. You know, they get drunk, and bang, someone’s lying in the gutter… most of them, it’s like they have no feelings (59).
To look closely at many of the mechanisms in American society is to observe the contradiction between constitutional equality and equality in practice. Several of these contradictions exist in the realm of racial equality. For example, Black s often get dealt an unfair hand in the criminal justice system. In The Real War on Crime, Steven Donziger explains,
Steele is more sure of himself and his solution in this portion than earlier on in the text. This is perceived through dictions like “we must” and “necessity” (610-611). These imperative words develop a strong opinion. This adds to the argument because an audience will tend to adhere to someone who is confident in themselves and what they are saying. Steele’s solution entails that people must begin to individualize themselves.
The first social issue portrayed through the film is racial inequality. The audience witnesses the inequality in the film when justice is not properly served to the police officer who executed Oscar Grant. As shown through the film, the ind...
Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, grandparents, pimps, prostitutes, straight people, gay people, lesbian people, Europeans, Asians, Indians, and Africans all have once thing in common: they are products of sexuality. Sexuality is the most common activity in the world, yet is considered taboo and “out of the norm” in modern society. Throughout history, people have been harassed, discriminated against, and shunned for their “sexuality”. One person who knows this all too well is activist and author, Angela Davis. From her experiences, Davis has analyzed the weakness of global society in order to propose intellectual theories on how to change the perspective of sexuality. This research paper will explore the discussions of Angela Davis to prove her determination to combat inequality in gender roles, sexuality, and sexual identity through feminism. I will give a brief biography of Davis in order for the readers to better understand her background, but the primary focus of this paper is the prison industry and its effect on female sexuality.
“African-American males are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males and 2.5 times more likely than Hispanic males. In 2013, almost 3 percent of black males were imprisoned compared to 0.5 percent of white males. America’s prisons and jails cost more than $80 billion annually – about equivalent to the budget of the federal Department of Education” (Eisen, 2015). After hearing McCleskey v. Kemp trial, the court is informed about the defendant’s background and criminal history; mitigating factors affecting culpability brought to the attention of the
Crime and criminalization are dependent on social inequality Social inequality there are four major forms of inequality, class gender race and age, all of which influence crime. In looking at social classes and relationship to crime, studies have shown that citizens of the lower class are more likely to commit crimes of property and violence than upper-class citizens: who generally commit political and economic crimes. In 2007 the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that families with an income of $15000 or less had a greater chance of being victimized; recalling that lower classes commit a majority of those crimes. We can conclude that crime generally happens within classes.