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Racial discrimination and disparity in the united states justice system
Mass incarceration the essay
Mass incarceration the essay
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From the beginning of the Criminal Justice System, the obsession was with prison and punishment. In the last few years, this focus forced the jail and prison populations to skyrocket higher than any other place in the world. There is never a class we are not reminded there are currently 2.3 million people in United States prisons and jails. The criminal justice system or the correctional system has not changed yet remained its focus on deterrence and isolation not on the proactive ways of dealing with crime. Focusing on Race to incarcerate: a graphic telling, Marc Maucer uses mass incarceration and the many reasons behind it into perspective. Along with the text of Maucer, Sabrina Jones includes comical artwork to connect with the story being told. Starting from the very start of the race in the 1960s, with the baby boomers, heroin, and urbanization. The influence of politics lead to legislation aiming solely on the incarceration on evening the smallest crime. In the aim of influencing good behavior, America lost touch in fixing the reasons why crime happens to …show more content…
Their race resulted in mass incarceration of people serving longer sentences for minor charges and long rap sheets just because the system believes more in incarceration rather than focusing on the root of crime. Yet the race is imprisoning the ones who identify as African American because they have always been seen as the ones too commit the crime. It may be hard for some people to come to terms with but the black race is sentenced more to jail or prison time than any others. It is not because they are the most likely to commit crime, but they have always fallen victim to the causes of it. This book helped me to take that all into perspective, like this system has been built of so much it would take the same amount of time to
We imprison seven-hundred-fifty prisoners per one hundred-thousand citizens, almost five times the earth average. Around one in every thirty-one grown-ups in the United States is in the penitentiary, in prison or on supervised release. District, state, and national disbursements on corrections expenses total to around seventy billion dollars per year and has raised to forty percent more over the past twenty years. http://www.newsweek.com/ The current corrections specialists have started to support that notion. Even though we comprehend that criminals must take accountability for their actions, we also realize that we can no longer just turn out heads at their disappointments. The individuals that derive out of our penitentiaries, prisons, municipal programs and out from beneath our direction are our creation, and we have to take some responsibility. Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) Hankoff, Leon D. "Current trends in correctional education: theory and practice." International Journal of Offender Therapy & Comparative Criminology Apr. 1985: 91-93. Criminal Justice Collection. Web. 12 June 2016.
From the study, Michelle Alexander’s argument is true and correct that the mass incarcerations are just a representation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow has just been redesigned as the blacks have continued to be mistreated and denied some of the rights and privileges that their counterparts enjoy. There is discernment against the African Americans towards different privileges which are essential to their lives. This discrimination is political as leaders steer operations that are aimed at racially discriminating people from particular groups of race.
The majority of our prison population is made up of African Americans of low social and economic classes, who come from low income houses and have low levels of education. The chapter also discusses the amount of money the United States loses yearly due to white collar crime as compared to the cost of violent crime. Another main point was the factors that make it more likely for a poor person to be incarcerated, such as the difficulty they would have in accessing adequate legal counsel and their inability to pay bail. This chapter addresses the inequality of sentencing in regards to race, it supplies us with NCVS data that shows less than one-fourth of assailants are perceived as black even though they are arrested at a much higher rate. In addition to African Americans being more likely to be charged with a crime, they are also more likely to receive harsher punishments for the same crimes- which can be seen in the crack/cocaine disparities. These harsher punishments are also shown in the higher rates of African Americans sentenced to
In the wake of President Obama’s election, the United States seems to be progressing towards a post-racial society. However, the rates of mass incarceration of black males in America deem this to be otherwise. Understanding mass incarceration as a modern racial caste system will reveal the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy America. The history of social control in the United States dates back to the first racial caste systems: slavery and the Jim Crow Laws. Although these caste systems were outlawed by the 13th amendment and Civil Rights Act respectively, they are given new life and tailored to the needs of the time.In other words, racial caste in America has not ended but has merely been redesigned in the shape of mass incarceration. Once again, the fact that more than half of the young black men in many large American cities are under the control of the criminal justice system show evidence of a new racial caste system at work. The structure of the criminal justice system brings a disproportionate number of young black males into prisons, relegating them to a permanent second-class status, and ensuring there chances of freedom are slim. Even when minorities are released from prisons, they are discriminated against and most usually end up back in prisons . The role of race in criminal justice system is set up to discriminate, arrest, and imprison a mass number of minority men. From stopping, searching, and arresting, to plea bargaining and sentencing it is apparent that in every phases of the criminal justice system race plays a huge factor. Race and structure of Criminal Justice System, also, inhibit the integration of ex offenders into society and instead of freedom, relea...
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
These statistics demonstrate that racialized mass incarceration exists in the U.S. There are a few reasons why African Americans are discriminated against by the legal system. The primary cause is inequitable protection by the law and unequal enforcement of it. Unequal protection is when the legal system offers less protection to African Americans that are victimized by whites. It is unequal enforcement because discriminatory treatment of African Americans that are labeled as criminal suspects is more accepted.
7) Symbolic production of race. Perhaps this is the most important category of her analyses. She stresses that mass incarceration as Jim Crow and slavery define and reinforce what being a black person means. During slavery being black meant to be a slave. During Jim Crow meant to be a second class citizen. And mass incarceration defines black people, especially men, as criminals.
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.
The United States has an enormous prison problem. The impact of incarceration on crime is inconsistent. The increase in incarceration does not help reduce the crime rate. Incarceration may account for a third of the decrease in crime rates but is not significant to be a contributing factor. Modern incarceration levels do little to deter crime while they do much to rip up families, increase racial disparities and destroy lives. District attorneys
Over 2 million people incarcerated in the United States of America, it does sounds like a lot of people, however, with nearly 350,000,000 million people in the United States of America, it makes that number sound a little smaller. Fact, society is violent, and has always been violent, furthermore, will always be violent, the question we should ask is, do we pay now, or ten fold later? Many factors come into play when dealing with the criminal justice system, in regards to, the incarceration of the people who cannot live amongst us. With so many people incarcerated, society is faced with two complex issues, “Mandatory Sentencing” and “Building more Prisons”. However, these issues are much broader than just locking up the “Bad Guys”
“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.
The number of incarcerated citizens has risen from around 330,000 in 1980 to nearly 2,000,000 today (Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Prisoners of 1990s). The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet the U.S. has around 25% of the population of incarcerated persons (NAACP 1). This has led to an unnecessary overcrowding of our nation’s state and federal prisons. The Vera Institute of Justice has released a study that found the aggregate cost of prisons in 2010 in the 40 states that had participated in the study was around $39 billion dollars; each incarcerated citizen costs each taxpayers nearly $31,286 per inmate (Vera Institute of Justice
The Prison System’s in the U.S. is a drastically important part of society. It allows the criminals and delinquents in the U.S to help them discipline themselves. Although, the system was designed to help prisoners go back into society.The prison system has several goals. One is to punish people for criminal activity. “Another is to prevent future crimes by keeping criminals locked up. A third is that prison serves as a deterrent to other would-be criminals. Finally, the prison system aims to rehabilitate, or reform, criminals”(Gale). The U.S prison system is doing the exact opposite turning them into very aggressive people that don't know the difference between wrong and right. People fail to see the importance of these prisons. “It is astonishing
All over America, crime is on the rise. Every day, every minute, and even every second someone will commit a crime. Now, I invite you to consider that a crime is taking place as you read this paper. "The fraction of the population in the State and Federal prison has increased in every single year for the last 34 years and the rate for imprisonment today is now five times higher than in 1972"(Russell, 2009). Considering that rate along crime is a serious act. These crimes range from robbery, rape, kidnapping, identity theft, abuse, trafficking, assault, and murder. Crime is a major social problem in the United States. While the correctional system was designed to protect society from offenders it also serves two specific functions. First it can serve as a tool for punishing the offender. This involves making the offender pay for his/her crime while serving time in a correctional facility. On the other hand it can serve as a place to rehabilitate the offender as preparation to be successful as they renter society. The U.S correctional system is a quite controversial subject that leads to questions such as how does our correctional system punish offenders? How does our correctional system rehabilitate offenders? Which method is more effective in reducing crime punishment or rehabilitation? Our correctional system has several ways to punish and rehabilitate offenders.
For years now, incarceration has been known to be the center of the nation’s Criminal Justice Center. It’s no secret that over time, the criminal justice center began experiencing problems with facilities being overcrowded, worldwide, which ended up with them having to make alternative decisions to incarceration that prevent violence and strengthen communities. These new options went in to plan to be help better develop sentencing criminal offenders.