There were many reason for mass incarceration during the 1980’s and 1990’s, however, one of the main reasons was the punishment of certain street drugs. In the 1980’s and 1990’s the court system did not having fair sentencing or structured sentencing as does most states and courts today. The sentencing during that time was mainly done by the judge which led to discriminatory sentencing. An example of this type of discriminatory sentencing was the sentencing of cocaine on federal guidelines.
Cocaine was coming in two forms during the 1980’s, crack and powder. Crack cocaine was a street version of the powder but came in a crystal form. It was not as pure as powder cocaine but a lot easier to get. The crack sell and use was mainly done in the poor neighborhoods. Unlike crack, powder cocaine was thought to be the rich man’s drug. Powder was very expensive and only people with money could get cocaine in this form (Ingle, 2015).
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An example of this would be a first time offender who violated a federal drug law of possession of crack cocaine with 5 grams or more with a mandatory sentence of five years in prison (Ingle, 2015). A first time offender would have to possess 500 grams or more of powder cocaine to get a sentence equivalent of crack cocaine. This means a person would have to possess almost a pound of powder cocaine to get sentenced to five years.
This types of sentencing guidelines led to mass incarceration in the prison system, which over 88% were African American selling crack cocaine in poor neighborhoods. This paper is not only why mass incarceration happened but also the effects the mass incarceration had in neighborhood and
Most black Americans are under the control of the criminal justice today whether in parole or probation or whether in jail or prison. Accomplishments of the civil rights association have been challenged by mass incarceration of the African Americans in fighting drugs in the country. Although the Jim Crow laws are not so common, many African Americans are still arrested for very minor crimes. They remain disfranchised and marginalized and trapped by criminal justice that has named them felons and refuted them their rights to be free of lawful employment and discrimination and also education and other public benefits that other citizens enjoy. There is exists discernment in voting rights, employment, education and housing when it comes to privileges. In the, ‘the new Jim crow’ mass incarceration has been described to serve the same function as the post civil war Jim crow laws and pre civil war slavery. (Michelle 16) This essay would defend Michelle Alexander’s argument that mass incarcerations represent the ‘new Jim crow.’
Land of the Unfree: Mass Incarceration and Its Unjust Effects on Those Subjected To It and American Taxpayers
Increased tensions during the 1960s in the context of the Civil Rights Movement started to cause an increase in crime, sparking a newfound belief in incarcerating the masses to prevent more crime from occurring. During the 1970s, the likelihood of being incarcerated increased for nearly every citizen, especially low-level offenders. Clear and Frost thoroughly explain that the Punishment Imperative in the 1980s was caused by changes in government “policies and practices associated with the increasingly ubiquitous War on Drugs” (31). Changes in sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimum sentences, and three strikes legislation were though to be initially helpful in decreasing the rate of incarceration, but they proved to do the exact opposite. Policies also regarding reentry into society, access to education, public housing, and child custody for ex-convicts continued to play a major role in the increase in incarceration because newly released convicts had an extremely difficult time reintegrating into society. Clear and Frost continue to argue their point as they reach incapacitation in the 1990s, where they discuss how the government focused generally on increasing the lengths of stay within prisons instead of increasing the amount of people being incarcerated. Clear and Frost use quantitative data to explain the government policy called
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 recent decades, violent crimes in the United States of America have been on a steady decline, however, the number of people in the United States under some form of correctional control is reaching towering heights and reaching record proportions. In the last thirty years, the incarceration rates in the United States has skyrocketed; the numbers roughly quadrupled from around five hundred thousand to more than 2 million people. (NAACP)In a speech on criminal justice at Columbia University, Hillary Clinton notes that, “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40
Mandatory Sentencing Laws and Drug Offenders in New York State. Retrieved November 15, 2010, from http://www.drugpolicy.org/library/factsheets/mandatory_ny.cfm. Compiled by Anonymous , The Correctional Association of New York. March 1999.
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001.
Bobo and Thompson stated that blacks are almost 34% involved in drug-related arrests, though only 14% of those are among regular illegal drug users. Among drug-related convictions, African Americans make up half of the cases, whereas only 26% of the white population is convicted. As Bobo and Thompson stated, “Illegal drug consumption seems to be a race. Incarceration for drug-related charges, however, is something visited in a heavily biased manner on African Americans.” The war on drugs is greatly concentrated on cocaine and even more so on crack cocaine.
Mass Incarceration: The New Jim Crow is the direct consequence of the War on Drugs. That aims to reduce, prevent and eradicate drug use in America through punitive means. The effect of the war on drug policies returned de jure discrimination, denied African Americans justice and undermined the rule of law by altering the criminal justice system in ways that deprive African Americans civil rights and citizenship. In the “New Jim Crow” Alexandra argues that the effects of the drug war policies are not unattended consequences but coordinated by designed to deny African Americans opportunity to gain wealth, be excluded from gaining employment and exercise civil rights through mass incarceration and felony conviction. The war on drugs not only changes the structure of the criminal justice system, it also changes the ways that police officers, prosecutors and judges do their jobs.
The difference between cocaine and crack cocaine is that crack is more pure than cocaine. When cocaine was sold it was forty-five percent filler such as icing sugar or even other drugs. Crack cocaine however, could be purchased what the same price and be eighty percent pure. This lead to issues with people who had been taking cocaine and switched to crack thinking they could take the equivalent amount. This caused a spike that was nearly double the rate of hospital admissions due to cocaine overdose from the previous in 1983 (rehabs.com,
Drug violators are a major cause of extreme overcrowding in US prisons. In 1992, 59,000 inmates were added to make a record setting 833,600 inmates nationwide (Rosenthal 1996). A high percentage of these prisoners were serving time because of drug related incidents.... ... middle of paper ... ...
This research essay discusses racial disparities in the sentencing policies and process, which is one of the major factors contributing to the current overrepresentation of minorities in the judicial system, further threatening the African American and Latino communities. This is also evident from the fact that Blacks are almost 7 times more likely to be incarcerated than are Whites (Kartz, 2000). The argument presented in the essay is that how the laws that have been established for sentencing tend to target the people of color more and therefore their chances of ending up on prison are higher than the whites. The essay further goes on to talk about the judges and the prosecutors who due to different factors, tend to make their decisions
Cocaine can also be made into small white rocks. “Crack” is more pure and potent then the powder version of the drug. It is generally smoked alone in a glass pipe or with marijuana or tobacco products. https://www.dea.gov/druginfo/drug_data_sheets/Cocaine.pdf Crack cocaine is most often packaged in aluminum foil, plastic or paper packets or in small vials and sold in small quantities enough for two to three use. http://www.narconon.org/drug-information/cocaine-crack.html
Overcrowding of prisons due to mass incarceration is among one of the biggest problems in America, mass incarceration has ruined many families and lives over the years.America has the highest prison population rate , over the past forty years from 1984 until 2014 that number has grown by four hundred percent .America has four percent of the world population ,but twenty-five percent of the world population of incarcerated people Forty one percent of American juveniles have been or going to be arrested before the age of 23. America has been experimenting with incarceration as a way of showing that they are tough on crime but it actually it just show that they are tough on criminals. imprisonment was put in place to punish, criminals, protect society and rehabilitate criminals for their return into the society .
According to the Oxford Index, “whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, or hyper incarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.” It should be noted that there is much ambiguity in the scholarly definition of the newly controversial social welfare issue as well as a specific determination in regards to the causes and consequences to American society. While some pro arguments cry act as a crime prevention technique, especially in the scope of the “war on drugs’.