March 10, 2018
Trevor Hintz
CRIM 1020 Intro to Corrections
Hastings
For-Profit Prison Industry
Prisons seem like they are popping up everywhere in the U.S. One of the reason for this is an increase in incarceration. History shows that mass incarceration was a big problem back in the 70’s and 80’s when there was a war on drugs. This led to prisons becoming overcrowded and more prisons had to be built to be able to house all those inmates. For-profit prisons are going to want to see this trend continue. A for-profit prison is where inmates are housed in a correctional institution that is run by government organizations. Private prisons have their benefits such as bringing new ideas to help with the rehabilitation of prisoners. Rehabilitation
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Show MoreMass 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.
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.’
Of course, that would be the logical thought to have, but as it turns out, it 's a little more complex than that. Expectedly, “the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.” (Adam Gopnik) In other the words, more inmates meant more money for the company. Over the last thirty years, the Corrections Corporation of America, a company whose main source of income comes from “having as many [prisoners] as possible, housed as cheaply as possible” saw the incarceration rates increase to “500 percent to more than 2.2 million people.” (grassroots) Well, let’s not get carried away, one could argue that the spike in incarceration rates can’t possibly be the private prison’s fault. They exist only to control and house the prison population, not to create it. Well, one would be right, the private prisons are not directly responsible; they are not directly making more criminals but what one doesn 't realise is that they play a pretty critical role in the
The United States of America has the world’s highest incarceration rates, for several reasons. The United States of America doesn’t necessarily possess any unique strict laws in comparison to other countries of the world, yet we still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. More federal level and state level prisons are built in order to control and hold more prisoners because most are reaching its full capacity. The United States of America’s “crime rates” increased about 40 years ago when there became a new focus in the areas of crime. The President of the United States of America at the time Richard Nixon used the term “a war on drugs” in order to shed light on public health due to substance abuse. Initially, these policies created
Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and societal management. It is the process by which individuals jailed for the criminal structure. Marked culprits and criminals are put in jail for a long time and after that are discharged into a permanent second-class status in which they are stripped of essential civil and human rights. It is a framework that works to control individuals, frequently at early ages, and all parts of their lives after they have been seen as suspects in some wrongdoing. Alexander discusses the three stages in the cycle of mass incarceration. Those three stages include roundup, the period of formal control, and period of invisible.
While Jim Crow dominated the social landscape of the South for much of the 20th century, formal segregation and acts of racism also existed in the North during this time. Blacks who moved to the North in the Great Migration after the First World War might have been able to live without the same degree of oppression experienced in the South, however the elements of racism and discrimination still existed. Despite the work by abolitionist, life for free blacks was still harsh because of northern racism. Most free blacks lived in overpopulated ghettoes in the major Northern cities such New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. In the Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B Dubois’ does a social study on race, and uncovers many social problems that plagued African
Michelle Alexander’s use of “Jim Crow” is a viable and useful analogy to describe the current American criminal justice system and mass incarceration. I believe our criminal justice system does not truly define justice or fairness. Also, I agree on the fact that while old “Jim Crow” laws may be dead; the current justice system serves many of the same purposes of those laws. Today, mass incarceration is the biggest issue in our criminal justice system, for mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow.
his paper will seek to analyze the privatization of prisons in the American Criminal Justice Penal System. “Privatization” refers to both the takeover of existing public facilities by private operators and the building and operation of new and additional prisons by for-profit companies (Cheung, 2004). The developments of private prison were a huge result of mass incarceration in America. Therefore, this paper will first evaluate how private prisons are considered to be a solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons in the United States. Next, it will examine private prisons to investigate rather it was an enormous solution to the mass incarceration problem in the criminal justice system. Furthermore, it will seek to understand the idea that private prisons are less expensive to operate than public facilities operated by the state. Honestly, it will terminate the claim that private prisons cause an enormous economic growth, as development projects, in rural areas throughout the United States. Also, I will explain how the private prison industry has tremendously affected the black male and female rate of incarceration. Therefore, private prisons are not a feasible to the issue of mass incarceration; however, it does obstruct the reformation of mass incarceration by reinforcing the very same principles of the already faulty criminal justice system’s ideologies.
“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skin, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” (Lyndon Johnson). Whether said to be called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment or jail, this appearance attributes to the substantial increase in the number of incarcerated people in the United States. This abnormality concentrates on communities of color, immigrants, the unemployed, the undereducated, and the homeless. Hyper incarceration has led to unreasonable consequences on African American employment results, earnings, and disadvantageous families.
Mass incarceration is the rate of incarcerating individuals at an extremely high rate. This is something that began long ago when the states and federal government begin to build up numbers of prison facilities with no one to fill them, in which this forced them to conduct a mass incarceration to ensure they were not building these prisons for no reason. According to Mears and Cochran (2015), counting both the prisons and the county jails in America the incarceration rate is at 716 per 100,000 residents of the states. Mass incarceration was something that existed centuries ago, but did not really take off until about 1973 with the “War on Drugs,” expanding consequent decades under Regan, Clinton, and both Bushes administration, (Liberty Equality Fraternity and
The exact time and location of the world’s first actual prison is unknown, but obviously at some point in time incarceration within a prison system became a common consequence for criminal activities. Schmalleger writes that punitive imprisonment appeared to have been introduced in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for debtors and certain offenders against canon law (Schmalleger, 2009). In those decades penalties for criminal activities dealt more with shaming the offender in hopes of deterring them from future criminal activity. Examples of shaming include the ducking stool, the pillory, whipping, branding, and the stocks (History of the Prison Systems). In addition to the various forms of shaming and deterring, the death penalty was a common punishment for criminal activity, such as hangings, stoning, or burning. Within these decades, prisons were occasionally used as an alternative to corporal punishment. However, as years went on society’s view of an individual’s liberties and humanity were changing thus changing the views of how criminal acts should be handled changed as well. Schmalleger writes that near the end of the eighteenth century is when the concept of imprisonment as punishment reached its fullest expression. The prisons that had been established and continually altered in the United States eventually become models for European reformers that were in hopes of creating a prison system that would humanize criminal punishment (Schmalleger, 2009). The concept was that restricting a person’s liberty would be retribution enough, and that an exact period of time served in a prison could be assigned depending on the severity of a crime committed (Prison History). Early prisons came in the forms of ...
It’s easier to punish, harder to rehabilitate, but their is long term detriment. In a speech addressed to the NAACP, President Obama stated “the United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Our incarceration rate is four times higher than China’s and our prison population is higher than than the top 35 European countries...combined.” And why is this statistic so skewed? Profit. Because of the boom in the prison population caused by the War on Drugs during the 1980s, prison overcrowding and rising cost became problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private-sector involvement in prisons moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons, aka spoiler alert: Orange is the New Black Season 3. The privatization of Prisons creates new prisons for profit, prisons that need to be filled. In 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation 's largest operator of for-profit prisons, sent letters to 48 states offering to buy their prisons as a remedy for "challenging corrections budgets." Meaning, the CCA offered to run the prison in exchange for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance the prison would remain at
The goal of private prisons is to be more efficient and runs cheaper than the average public operated prisons. In a public prison, it cost a lot of money for the inmates to be taken cared of, so the plan was to have a prion that is not own by the government, but instead was owned by a owner who would guarantee to run their prison facility for less money, and still provide the same qualities and care as a public prison. However, that isn’t the case now. Private prisons are falling short on actually fulfilling those aspect and requirements. In fact it is relatively hard to determine if there is any difference in the qualities between a private facility and a public facility. The only difference so far is that a private prison is not own by the government and therefore it is more of a business own by an owner who most likely runs...
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’.