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
2010, “Racial Disparities in Sentencing: Implications for the Criminal Justice System and the African American Community”, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 4(1): 1-31, in this Albonetti’s study is discussed in which it was found that minority status alone accounted for an additional sentence length of “one to seven months.” African American defendants were “likely to receive pretrial release but were more likely to be convicted, and be given harsher sentences after conviction than white defendants charged with the same crimes.” One of the reasons behind this are the sentencing laws, it is seen that these laws are designed in a way that they tend to be harsher towards a certain group of people, generally towards the people of color than others thus leading to inequality with the sentencing
“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”(Lyndon Johnson). For generations in the United Stated, ethnic minorities have been discriminated against and denied fair opportunity and equal rights. In the beginning there was slavery, and thereafter came an era of racism which directly impacted millions of minorities lives. This period called Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system up in till mid 1960s. Jim Crow was more than just a series of severe anti-Black laws, it became a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were positioned to the status of second class citizens. What Jim Crow did is represented the anti-Black racism. Further on, In 1970’s the term “War on Drugs” was coined by President Richard Nixon . Later President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war. In reality the war had little to do with drug crime and a lot to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a strategy of used by the government. The President identified drug abuse as national threat. Therefore, they called for a national anti-drug policy, the policy began pushing for the involvement of the police force and military in drug prohibition efforts. The government did believe that blacks or minorities were a cause of the drug problem. They concentrated on inner city poor neighborhoods, drug related violence, they wanted to publicize the drug war which lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it. The war on drugs targeted and criminalized disproportionably urban minorities. There for, “War on Drugs” results in the incarceration of one million Americans ...
The United States, a powerhouse in the race for evolution, a country that is an expertise in all known subjects and more. Though, America has participated in heinous behaviors that have been unknown to the general public, one including, mass incarceration. People in the U.S. confined in prisons or jails at a startling rate. [9]With America owning 5% of the world’s population, we also house 25% of the world’s prison population. That is approximately 1.8 billion people that we have imprisoned with us each and everyday. Using the most recent data available, 753 per 100,000 people in the U.S. are in prison or jail. More than 3x higher than the next country with second highest. This billion-dollar industry has problems of its own and financial tolls on our economy. The state of life of prisoners, their well-being after their sentence, and the degrading economic standpoint on costs of maintenance contributes to the fact that we are living within a multi-faceted failing project. Measures will need to be taken if growth and expansion of worldwide influence is encouraged.
Race has always been a controversial topic of discussion dating back centuries ago. One area of controversy comes in the area of the connection between minorities and prison. Racial discrimination has been very much existing in the Criminal Justice System in this day and age. As a result, the justice system is looked at as being more of a system for keeping minorities, especially African-Americans, in check. African-Americans are often seen as being unfairly targeted and prosecuted. Because of this, through the eyes of minorities, the Justice in America is seen as being a racially biased system that holds different standers between whites and minorities. As for evidence of this claim, there are clear cut and dry statistics that have been recorded to support this claim.
Inequality and discrimination are some of the most outrageous and detrimental problems in society today, and have been for quite some time now. Racism has grown tremendously and is frequently seen in the justice system. The movement “Black Lives Matter” has recently taken over the internet as videos of police authorities treating African American citizens terribly have caught the attention of many. But, not everyone in the world means no harm. African Americans are normally stereotyped to be horrible people in low income neighborhoods who are up to no good, when in reality they 're just people going about their day. The slim economic opportunities and turbulent living conditions of young disadvantaged and black men may lead them to crime, thus
The prison system is another form of slavery that would function to keep the black race in a subordinate position. It is similar to slavery because it is in which cash is made by the misuse and mistreatment of individuals that are of middle and lower class groups, particularly African Americans. Incorporated into the prison industry are private correctional facilities, state imprisons, the way imprisons profit, outside organizations that profit off prisons. There was excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons that were seen by many whites - liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners - as indisputable proof of blacks ' inferiority (Muhammad).
This, however, is not the case in today’s judicial system. Justice is not blind, as our forefathers had intended it to be. According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, on the racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, African Americans are incarcerated in state prison at 6 times the rate of Caucasian Americans, and were sentenced to death at 5 times the rate. Furthermore, African Americans have an average sentence length of 40 months, compared to Caucasians average sentence length of 37 months. Those figures begin to widen exponentially as socioeconomic class is brought into the
Whether called mass detainment, mass incarceration, the jail blast, the carceral state, or hyper detainment, this marvel alludes to the present American trial in incarceration, which is characterized by nearly and verifiably extraordinary rates of imprisonment and by the grouping of imprisonment among youthful, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated detriment. The high rate of imprisonment among African American men is a piece of a pattern in discipline characterized by an emotional increment in the carceral framework – a term used to portray the legitimization and standardization of imprisonment as a variable of social life. However the security outcomes of expanded imprisonment are most critical for African American men. More African Americans are under remedial control today in jail or correctional facility, on post trial supervision or on parole, than were subjugated in 1850, preceding the Civil War started. The term mass incarceration refers to the unique way the U.S. has locked up a vast population in federal and state prisons, as well as local jails (What is Mass Incarceration? – Daniel Nott – Medium, n.d.). Despite the fact that there is insightful agreement about how to characterize mass imprisonment, there is some level of contradiction over its causes and outcomes.
Both media outlets source data from the Department of Justice showing how African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated in these area. The difference with the topic of mass incarceration when compared to food access is that there are no pragmatic options or solutions discussed by either media source. There are references to grants received bye ACLU, $50 million to reduce overall incarceration but there were no specific solutions mentioned, and how crime is handled but, due to systematic discrimination within our judicial system, and governments as a whole, simply changing our jail systems to meet the perspective outcome we will need to take a huge step forward in Social Justice reform rather than just looking at how we treat inmates (Badger
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.
Michelle Alexander calls the contemporary moment of mass incarceration “the new racial equilibrium.” According to Alexander, “More African American adults are under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.” Making up only 5 percent of the global population, the United States imprisons 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Modern histories of state violence, including police brutality and the mass incarceration of Black people, have not only significantly impacted the lives of African Americans, but also have informed the contemporary Movement for Black Lives.
Even though racism has always been a problem since the beginning of time, recently in the United States, there has been a rise in discrimination and violence has been directed towards the African American minority primarily from those in the white majority who believe they are more superior, especially in our criminal justice system. There are many different reasons for the ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system between the majority and the minority, but some key reasons are differential involvement, individual racism, and institutional racism to why racial disparities exist in
There are so many more African-Americans than whites in our prisons that the difference cannot be explained by higher crime among African- Americans - racial discrimination is also at work, and it penalizes African- Americans at almost every juncture in the criminal justice system.1
The article “What It’s like to Be Black in the Criminal Justice System “ say that blacks are more likely to be jailed while awaiting trial. Many would say that the defendants and their families could not afford to pay their bail, which may have been true, but he may have not even been allowed a bond at all. Not being able to be bailed out of jail causes a lot of hurt to a family physically, emotionally and economically. According to the article “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist” racism is not why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. They say blacks are more likely to be imprisoned for crimes, but who really knows the truth. All we know is that blacks are not treated fairly when it comes to bonds and