The United State’s Prison Industrial Complex is a term that defines the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to what are, in actuality, economic, social, and political “problems” (Herzing 2005). Cheerlessly, the Prison Industrial Complex is a relevant and powerful conflict unsympathetic to minority groups particularly in the United States. A major influence on the Prison Industrial Complex includes the War on Drugs, which leads to the mass incarceration of certain groups of individuals, specifically impoverished communities of minorities. As research suggests, it is acceptable to conclude that the War on Drugs has been merely the stem of the Prison Industrial Complex. …show more content…
The privatization has been compared numerous times to modern day slavery (Florio 2016). In other words, minorities are being held in prisons, owned by the government, working for extremely low wages. Lastly, another prime consequence that has been produced from the Prison Industrial Complex is the major ramifications that act as results against minorities—mental health issues. By contemplating on the weight that has been composed by the Prison Industrial Complex, one can argue that this underground business is principally a cycle for minorities, which does not have an end to, ultimately causing them major negative concomitants. Although other multiple individuals might object to it, the Prison Industrial Complex should be a major concern for minorities in the United States, if it already is not. In order to gain insight with respect to the complex issue of the Prison Industrial Complex, one has to consider its formulation, the privatization of prisons, and the consequences that it has …show more content…
The War on Drugs, as previously stated, was first introduced by Nixon and reinforced by its preceding presidents. It is a campaign that was launched in 1971, by President Richard Nixon during his time in office, but was not enacted into full force until the 80s when Ronald Reagan was in office. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI anti-drug funding went from eight million to 95 million dollars. During the same time, funding for treatment and prevention was reduced (Florio 2016). As a result, convictions for drug offenses, after the announcement of the War on Drugs, are the single most important cause of the explosion of incarceration rates in the United States (Alexander 2012:60). That is to say that if the War on Drugs was not introduced and reinforced following Nixon, the United State’s prison system could have avoided mass incarceration, exceptionally for people of color. To illustrate, nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs (Alexander 2012:60). Sadly, it is more than obvious that it appears that the War on Drugs was a certain phenomenon that was distinctly formulated to target individuals of color. Although the War on Drugs was in reality created to diminish the drugs and punish those that were located with them, it did absolutely the opposite. Few would guess that the
While the War on Drugs may have been portrayed as a colorblind movement, Nixon’s presidency and reasoning for its implementation solidifies that it was not. Nixon coined the term “War on Drugs” in his 1971 anti-drug campaign speech, starting the beginning of an era. He voiced, “If there is one area where the word ‘war’ is appropriate, it is in the fights against crime” (DuVernay, 13th). This terminology solidified to the public that drug abusers were an enemy, and if the greatest publicized abusers were black, then black people were then enemy. This “war” started by Nixon claimed it would rid the nation of dealers, but in fact, 4/5 of arrests were for possession only (Alexander, 60). Nixon employed many tactics in order to advance the progress
Bibliography:.. **Parenti, Christian, Lockdown America (London; New York: Verso, 1999) 17-19. Lynch, Michael J. and Patterson, Britt, Race and Criminal Justice (New York: Harrow and Heinstien, 1991). *Ranese, Celia "Todays Prison system vs. Yesterdays Slave System" USA TALK 13 March 1999. *Palmer, Louise "Numbers of Blacks in Prison Nears 1 Million" The Boston Globe Seattle Post Intelligencer *United States Department of Justice Bureau of Statistics: Prison Inmate Statistics, Washington 1998 *Polowsky, Robert, "Liberal Legacy" Prison Activist Resource Center (weekly).
When people think of reform movements, they often look for one key sign, and ask one key question of whether that the reform was a success. Did the reform create a lasting change in the way people view the institution that was reformed? All the great reformation movements, from Horace Mann and his education reforms, to Martin Luther, and the Protestant Reformation, to the civil rights movement, all created lasting change in the minds of the average person. One other reform, often overlooked historically is the Prison Reform movement. As the world shifted from 18th to 19th century ways of life, many key aspects of life underwent tremendous change. As the United States gained their independence from Britain and began to shape their own identity, the reforms and revolutions that occurred in this infantile stage of its history played an immeasurable impact on the future of the entire country, with the most notable and impact reform being the reformation of prisons from the 1820s until 1860.
The past quarter century of American history has been profoundly impacted by the “war on drugs.” Ever since the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 was passed by President Richard Nixon, the number of yearly incarcerations for drug violations has grown exponentially. America’s drug policies have cost billions of dollars and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Americans, yet rates of drug, property, and violent crime have failed to decrease. Yassaman Saadatmand summates the consequences of Nixon’s policies: “Not only has the drug war failed to reduce violent and property crime, but it has also shifted criminal justice resources (the police, courts, prisons, probation officers, etc.) away from directly fighting violent and property crime.” The issue is further complicated by racial inequalities in the rates of drug use and crime. Whereas Whites consist the majority of the population of any state, they are outnumbered by African-Americans in both state and federal prisons (E. Ann Carson 2013). This incongruity is paralleled with many other races, such as an overrepresentation of Native Americans and an underrepresentation of Asians in rates of drug use. What causes this imbalance? What purpose do the higher rates of incarceration for certain minorities serve? As this topic is explored, it becomes evident that the racial disparity in drug crime is perpetuated by America’s legacy of bigotry and racism, capitalism, and a cycle of poverty.
The number of Americans that are in prison has elevated to levels that have never been seen before. Prisons in the US have always been crowded ever since the first prison was invented (Jacobs and Angelos 101). The first prison in the US was the Walnut Street Jail that was built in Philadelphia in 1773, and later closed in the 1830’s due to overcrowding and dirty conditions (Jacobs and Angelos 101). The prison system in modern US history has faced many downfalls due to prison overcrowding. Many private prison owners argue that the more inmates in a prison the more money they could make. In my opinion the argument of making more money from inmates in prisons is completely unconstitutional. If the private prisons are only interested in making
Mass incarceration has put a large eye-sore of a target on the United States’ back. It is hurting our economy and putting us into more debt. It has considerable social consequences on children and ex-felons. Many of these incarcerations can be due to the “War on Drugs”. We should contract the use of incarceration.
Elliott Currie, a professor in criminology and law, suggests that building more prisons, imposing longer sentences, and harsh punishment will not lower the incarceration rate. In his chapter on “Assessing the Prison Experiment”, he explained that the increase of crime rate is not the sole reason that mass incarceration occurs, it was also because courts and legislature did indeed get ‘tougher” on offenders (Currie 14). Under the circumstance of the war on drugs, which was launched by President Richard Nixon, the incarceration rate and sentence longevity were increased dramatically as Currie discussed in his chapter. Currie also pointed out that the war on drugs had a huge influence on the incarceration rate of African American inmates, “ between 1985 and 1995, the number of black state prison inmates sentenced for drug offences rose by more than 700 percent” (Currie 13). Some of these offenders were sentenced more than ten years without parole, which releases prisoners before the completion of their sentences. The government should reconsider the current sentencing laws and reform the correctional system to solve our current mass incarceration
The definition of mass incarceration is a term used by social activists to describe the significant increase in the number of incarcerated people in United States ' prisons over the past forty years, from 1970 to 2005 the number of inmates has risen 700%. Lawrence (2011) has stated that more than 2.3 million people in America are in jail or prison and sixty percent are African American and Latino. In this paper, I will present information on mass incarceration of black males, the development of a racial injustice due to rising of incarceration rates, and the financial standing that the prison system has, due to its massive expansion.
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 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
The War on Drugs is believed to help with many problems in today’s society such as realizing the rise of crime rates and the uprooting of violent offenders and drug kingpin. Michelle Alexander explains that the War on Drugs is a new way to control society much like how Jim Crow did after the Civil War. There are many misconceptions about the War on Drugs; commonly people believe that it’s helping society with getting rid of those who are dangerous to the general public. The War on Drugs is similar to Jim Crow by hiding the real intention behind Mass Incarceration of people of color. The War on Drugs is used to take away rights of those who get incarcerated. When they plead guilty, they will lose their right to vote and have to check application
“The modern system of nation-states were fundamental to European colonialism and economic expansion: the territorial boundaries of the nation delimited the center of power from which rule was exerted over external foreign territories through a system of channels and barriers that alternately facilitated and obstructed the flows of production and circulation. (Empire- ) Such flows of power described by Denis Childs reflects the need for expansion in ways used to control greater volumes of the other. He presented the statistical fact that 70% of the population incarcerated are black and 99.9% are poor. As I listened to the notes I heard myself not struck by the population distribution and before Childs could say 99.9% were poor I quickly got it out. One would only know those facts if they grew up in a poor community where they should one of those statistics. The level of oppression historically used to maintain communities of poor backgrounds and black and brown people, through mediatazation of vilifying and making a person automatically a criminal based on skin color is common practice as with the passing of vagrancy laws after the Civil War. In a modern era the US is repeating the racial practice in order to maintain a labor force. Through the functionality of Justice System as described by Childs the country has a guaranteed cheap labor force in prison inmates. In some cases the reinstitution of chain gangs has come back into play as prisoners are hauled out to do some work previously done by state
When it comes to the topic of war on drugs,most of us will readily agree that the war on drugs is not about the drugs But about the people. Many Politicians and law enforcement will argue that the war on drugs is about our nation's wealth and safety.however they don't see the destruction the war on drugs has caused; The war on drugs has recreated this new system of discrimination among the minority community, individuals and communities are being profiled,their rights as citizen are being seized ,individuals being stripped away from their families. They’re being locked up with no hope to live the American dream in their our country.
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’.
Shelden, R. G. (1999). The Prison Industrial Complex. Retrieved November 16, 2013, from www.populist.com: http://www.populist.com/99.11.prison.html