Inarceration In Prison

Garland stated that “at the beginning of the twenty first century, The United states and United Kingdom experienced an unprecedented economic boom, with low unemployment levels, rising standards of living with federal surplus and healthy state budgets. Crime rates fell in both countries in the 90s and U. S recorded declines in every year since 1992 same as England for five years decrease until 1999. Garland reported that despite the positive trends in decrease, there is every sign that the shift towards punitive justice and security build ups continued to be unabated. The market in private security grew and the delivery of penal legislation speed up, the crime complex reproduces itself, thereby facing being locked into the new ‘iron cage.”

In Garland’s definition, mass imprisonment has two characteristic. First, he writes, that mass imprisonment implies a rate of imprisonment that is markedly above the historical and comparative norm of the societies’ of this type. The rate of incarceration in America by the 1990s was far higher than Western Europe and without precedent in U.S history. Secondly, Garland argues, the demographic concentration of imprisonment produces not the incarceration of an individual’s offenders, but the “systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population.”

The cost of mass imprisonment, he stated are beginning to be apparent. Mass incarceration does not solve the social problems it purports to it neither reduces crime and drug abuse, nor makes our communities safer. But pointing out the ineffectiveness of current policies in achieving their stated aims is not enough if those policies have now become crucial for maintaining our current economic and political status quo. Political strategies against the prison crisis and efforts to build alternatives to mass incarceration must take into account the real economic and political causes and functions of the prison crisis.”