Essay On Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration produced by America’s Criminal Justice System is indeed an institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Mass incarceration has produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As outcasts, this social group made up of mostly young black males are second class citizens and have little access social mobility. Like the Jim Crow Laws, mass incarceration implements discrimination against blacks by taking away their right to vote, limiting their ability to find employment, and constricting their housing options. These social and economic disadvantages, which are induced by incarceration

Incarceration rates are highest between the ages of twenty and thirty, key years in life when individuals are supposed to establish themselves as adults by leaving school, getting a job, and starting a family. The fact that men make up 90 percent of the prison population deepens the struggle for the black community as incarceration not only effects a man's life trajectory, but also the family and children that he helps support. Although age and sex are good indicators of the effects of mass incarceration, race and class disparities in mass incarceration are the main contributors of social inequality. African Americans have always been incarcerated at higher rates than whites but the extent of racial disparity has varied greatly over the past century, usually having an inverse relationship with African Americans becoming full citizens in American society. For example, at the end of the 19th century African Americans were imprisoned at twice the rate of whites, and in the 1960s with the climax of civil rights movement, African Americans were seven times more likely to be in prison than whites, a figure that resembles cotemporary racial