HIS 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... ... middle of paper ... ...hment's Place: The Local Concentration of Mass Incarceration. Daedalus 139.3 (2010): 20+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 May 2014. Thompson, Heather Anne. Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History. The Journal of American History (2010) 97 (3): 703-734 doi:10.1093/jahist/97.3.703 Pettit, Becky, and Bruce Western. "Incarceration & Social Inequality." Daedalus 139.3 (2010): 8+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 May 2014. WESTERN, and CHRISTOPHER MULLER. “ RECONSIDERING THE URBAN DISADVANTAGED: THE ROLE OF SYSTEMS, INSTITUTIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS; SPECIAL EDITORS: MARIO L. SMALL AND SCOTT W. ALLARD: SYSTEM: Mass Incarceration, Macrosociology, and the Poor.” The American Academy of Political and Social Science The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science,(2013)
Click here to unlock this and over one million essays
Show MoreAlexander (2010) suggests mass incarceration as a system of racialized social control that functions in the same way Jim Crow did. She describes how people that have been incarcer...
Mauer, Marc. 1999. The Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press National Research Council. 1993.
In the 21 first Century, the United States still has an extremely large number of individuals in the penal system. To this day, the American country still contains the highest prison population rate in the world. Although mass incarceration rates are extremely high, decreases in this number have been made. Since the first time since the 1970s, the imprisoned population has declined about 3 percent. This small step seemingly exemplifies how a vast majority of individuals who becoming aware of these issues and performing actions to decrease these numbers. In the Chapter 13 of James Kilgore’s Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time, he asserts how individuals who oppose mass incarceration
Shapiro, David. Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration. Rep. New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2011. Print.
Incarceration has been the center of the United States justice system ever since the opening of the nation’s first prison. In order to understand how the aspects of the first corrections institutions correlate to later correctional practices seen today. Whether it was temporary or permanent, there has always been some form of detainment for offenders, and they were always held against their will. Imprisonment of offenders in earlier times was done primarily to hold the accused until the authorities determined the offender’s actual punishment. Jails and prisons create a vicious and expensive cycle of crime that usually just end up overcrowding correctional facilities.
“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.
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. In theory if this trend continues it is estimated that about 1 in 3 black males being born can be expected to spend time in prison and some point in his life. One in nine African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 are currently incarcerated. Although the rate of imprisonment for women is considerably lower than males African American women are incarc...
Western, Bruce , and Becky Pettit. "Disadvantages of America’s prison boom: Scholar’s research brief." Journalists Resource RSS. N.p., 20 Feb. 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2014. .
In the United States, the rate of incarceration has increased shockingly over the past few years. In 2008, it was said that one in 100 U.S. adults were behind bars, meaning more than 2.3 million people. Even more surprising than this high rate is the fact that African Americans have been disproportionately incarcerated, especially low-income and lowly educated blacks. This is racialized mass incarceration. There are a few reasons why racialized mass incarceration occurs and how it negatively affects poor black communities.
There is a plethora of data within the last 10-15 years that repeatedly show family, friends, and entire communities or neighborhoods being drastically affected by the consequences of mass incarceration as well. The data focus primarily on the effects on the partners, children, families, friends, and caregivers of those incarcerated; particularly the economic, emotional, and personal relationships between incarcerated individuals and those the data also
Herman, Peter G., Ed. The American Prison System. n.p.: The H. W. Wilson Company, 2001. Print.
Opponents to mass incarceration like Michelle Alexander have called it the “New Jim Crow”, a social institution aimed at limiting the rights of African Americans. Upon their release criminals are legally denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and placed in a position of subordination. Others would suggest that, “cultural shifts, political realignments, changes in job prospects for low-skilled men, and perhaps most importantly, legal changes” have led to the severe increase and absolute disparity in the rates of black imprisonment over the late 20th and early 21st centuries. One thing is certain, mass incarceration would be justifiable if crime decreased but that is just not the case. Evidence has shown that the benefits of mass imprisonment in reducing crime have diminished over time and incarceration is now a much less effective method for crime control than it was before the 1990s. Due to factual evidence of high rates racial disparity in imprisonment, mass incarceration can be seen as a significant generator of social inequality. The history and the study of mass incarceration is important because it defines us as a society just like slavery and Jim Crow once
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 topic that I have chosen to discuss is “Mass incarceration in the world past and present.” This topic is pretty relatable for most individuals, because of the amount of incarcerations over the past few decades taking individuals away from their families. This is one topic that I have never really looked into to find out the reasons behind mass incarceration. To most people this topic is not one that many may find interesting, however after researching the topic it is one that is interesting and very important. Throughout this paper we will hit what exactly mass incarceration and some of the official data that shows the numbers of incarceration over the few decades and how it increase or decrease over the years. Next, we will discuss the
The organization often works on dozens of projects at once. The specific Vera project from which the data for this paper were obtained is the Incarceration Trends Project. Vera conducted this project as part of an initiative to reduce incarceration by “changing the way America thinks about and uses its jails” by providing easily accessible information on jail and prison populations in the United States at national, state, and county levels (Subramian et al. 3). The project provides information on jail and prison incarceration rates by gender and race and ethnicity. For the purposes of this paper, data on jail incarceration by race and ethnicity in the state of Tennessee were selected.