The purpose of this essay is to share my critical analysis of a chapter from the book “The Shame of the Governance” by Robert Grantham and Levon Chorbajian. In particular, I will focus on Chapter 5, “Profiting from Prisons” written by Joel Dyer. This article is taken from the author’s book “The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime.” Dyer is a non-fiction writer, editor, publisher and newspaper owner. His passion to uncover the profit driven media, political exploitation and corporate investors who have driven the U.S. to the brink of criminal enterprise is a compelling argument for a revamping of the American Justice System and the American Court System. Dyer believes violence sells and because the media is …show more content…
While the media, politicians and the big business enterprises fuel the need to “jail them all,” Palen offers a bit of a different reasoning for today’s prison problems. According to Palen, there were steady decreases in urban crime in the years 1993 through 2010. Then beginning in the mid 2000’s, murder and robberies increased at alarming rates, particularly within city limits. While Dyer focuses on these for profit corporations as proponents of increased prison populations, another perspective is that people became complacent in fighting crime because the numbers of crimes were going down and a decrease in federal funding resulted in less law enforcement on the streets reacting to criminals. Once society realized complacency and inadequate funding would not address the “safety of the streets,” more laws were put in place and more funding was pumped into the prison and jail system. Dyer also asserts his belief that the prison expansion would not continue for an additional 20 years. He was correct. His article was written in 2000. The life of the federal level privately run prison’s would find itself being phased out by 2016 as these facilities were being unearthed as being less safe and less effective with no real cost savings for the tax payer. It seemed the only ones benefiting from these arrangements …show more content…
While I support a just sentence for criminals illegal or legal, I can definitely see the prison population increasing even more as the country addresses the need to take action against those who break the laws of immigration and even worse, commit crimes against others. It would seem to me Dyer could not have predicted at the time of his article that the tides would change in the U.S., a border wall would begin to be built and foreign travelers would find themselves stranded at airports in an attempt to regain control of our American immigration system. I can certainly see these large prison corporations support such a crackdown and lobbying politicians to support stronger immigration laws. Why, not because it’s the right thing to do. Instead because it will put even more people behind bars increasing their profit while diverting government money for more social programs needed to assist those who seek legitimate change in their lives by immigrating to
In Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing journalist Ted Conover, who has a background in anthropology, goes undercover as correctional officer in order to examine the US prison system. The central problem to this analysis is that is inherently subjective because the author is documenting his experience from the lens of the guard. In such a polarizing and negative power dynamic a singular perspective shows a severely inadequate representation of what occurs at the institution and the circumstances that allow it to perpetuate. This failure is evident in the author’s personal transformation from the beginning of the book to the end. His writing becomes desensitized and begins to see prisoners as increasingly evil. Although this type of first hand journalism is admirable and provides interesting anecdotal evidence it will never be able to fully examine the precise and intricate social, economic, and political conditions that are the root cause of the injustice that is our criminal justice system.
Jacoby uses many claims about how crime in the United States has grown and the how faulty America’s justice system currently is. One claim said that citizens pay around “$30,000 per inmate each year” (Jacoby 197). This grasps the reader’s attention by connecting their life to the problem; it is their money, a lot of their money, being used to imprison these criminals. The rates have increased on inmates since the 1980s by over 250% (Jacoby 197). Jacoby declares that the prison system is terrible; he uses accurate and persuading evidence.
Jacoby can be easily perceived as an upset and alarmed individual who blames the rise of criminal activity in the United States on the failure of the criminal justice system. He cares about people and believes that the safety of individuals is decreasing because criminals are not punished effectively by imprisonment and that some even receive a “sign of manhood” from going to prison (197). Additionally, he is upset that the ineffective system is so expensive. His concern for his audience’s safety and his carefully argued grounds, which he uses to support his claim, create a persona of an intelligent person of
The Justice Gap (2012) [online] “Privatising prisons a step too far”, Available at: http://thejusticegap.com/News/privatising-prisons-a-step-too-far/ [last accessed on 10th November]
Santos, Michael G. Inside: Life Behind Bars in America. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2006. Print.
We live in a society today filled with crime and fear. We are told not to go out after a certain hour, always move in groups, and even at times advised to carry a weapon on ourselves. There is only one thing that gives us piece of mind in this new and frightening world we live in: the American penal system. We are taught when growing up to believe that all of the bad people in the world are locked up, far out of sight and that we are out of reach of their dangerous grasp. Furthermore, the murderers and rapists we watch on television, we believe once are caught are to be forgotten and never worried about again. We wish on them the most horrible fates and to rot in the caged institution they are forced to call their new home. But, where do we draw the line of cruelty to those who are some of the cruelest people in our country? And what happens when one of this most strict and strongest institution our nation has breaks down? What do we do when this piece of mind, the one thing that lets us sleep at night, suddenly disappears? This is exactly what happened during and in the after effects of the Attica prison riot of 1971. The riot created an incredibly immense shift and change not only in the conditions of prisons, but also in the security we feel as American citizens both in our penal system and American government. The Attica prison riot brought about a much-needed prison reform in terms of safety and conditions for inmates, which was necessary regardless of the social backlash it created and is still felt today.
Shockingly, there seem to be a few people who actually profits from keeping people in jails. The practice of mass incarceration who most see as a major problem in the United States of America is actually beneficial to some. The prison system in the United States who was create to keep dangerous criminals at bay is now a major source of profit for some private corporations. John W. Whitehead, attorney and president of the Rutherford Institute writes that, “ the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.” Some blame the war on drugs as the main reason for the mass incarceration; others blame racism. Although those components do play a major role in the affair, a closer look at at the mastermind behind the prison industrial complex suggest that the privatization of the prison system has become the main reason why mass incarceration exist so forcefully in the United States and is a crime against the people of the people of
Over the past several decades, the number of prison inmates has grown exponentially. In 1980, prison population had numbers around half a million inmates. A graph of statistics gathered from the U.S. Bureau of Justice shows that between 1980 and 2010, the prison population grew almost five times, topping out at nearly 2.5 million. According to an article in The New York Times, the average time spent in jail by prisoners released in 2009 increased by 36% compared to prisoners released in 1990. Many people, such as those at Human Rights Watch, believe that the increase of these numbers has been because of tough-on-crime laws, causing prisons to be filled with non-violent offenders. This rise in crime rates, prison population, and recidivism, has led politicians as well as ordinary citizens to call for prison reform.
Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad
Mauer, Marc. 1999. The Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press National Research Council. 1993.
Smith, Kevin B. The Politics of Punishment: Evaluating Political Explanations of Incarceration... Journal of Politics. Aug2004, Vol. 66 Issue 3, p925-938. 14p. 2 Charts. DOI:
Overcrowding in our state and federal jails today has become a big issue. Back in the 20th century, prison rates in the U.S were fairly low. During the years later due to economic and political factors, that rate began to rise. According to the Bureau of justice statistics, the amount of people in prison went from 139 per 100,000 inmates to 502 per 100,000 inmates from 1980 to 2009. That is nearly 261%. Over 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated and 7.2 million are either incarcerated or under parole. According to these statistics, the U.S has 25% of the world’s prisoners. (Rick Wilson pg.1) Our prison systems simply have too many people. To try and help fix this problem, there needs to be shorter sentences for smaller crimes. Based on the many people in jail at the moment, funding for prison has dropped tremendously.
“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.
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’.
With the substantial increase in prison population and various changes that plague correctional institutions, government agencies are finding that what was once considered a difficult task to provide educational programs, inmate security and rehabilitation programs are now impossible to accomplish. From state to state, each correctional organization is coupled with financial problems that have depleted the resources to assist in providing the quality of care in which the judicial system demands from these state and federal prisons. Judges, victims, and prosecuting attorneys entrust that once an offender is turned over to the correctional system, that the offender will receive the punishment imposed by the court, be given services that aid in the rehabilitation of those offenders that one day will be released back into society, and to act as a deterrent to other criminals contemplating criminal acts that could result in their incarceration. Has our nation’s correctional system finally reached it’s critical collapse, and as a result placed American citizens in harm’s way to what could result in a plethora of early releases of inmates to reduce the large prison populations in which independent facilities are no longer able to manage? Could these problems ultimately result in a drastic increase in person and property crimes in which even our own law enforcement is ineffective in controlling these colossal increases in crime against society?