Recidivism In The Justice System

The justice system in America is a failure and should be immediately reformed to a more standardized system that encourages reform over punishment. This is clearly evidenced by the 76.6% of prisoners that are rearrested within five years of release, the inequality of sentencing based on race or socioeconomic class, and the widely varying prison terms, which in many cases do not fit the crimes committed. Evolved from English common law, the United States judiciary system is an intricate series of complex judgments, decisions, and procedures. A corner-stone of this systematic practice, is the belief that a crime against an individual is a crime against society at large, therefore must be punished by that same society. The intent of incarceration is to rehabilitate the offender, so that they might return to society and become productive members of it. Recidivism is a major problem in the United States, as nearly two-thirds of those released from prison, reoffend. In fact, in many cases those who were initially incarcerated for non-violent crimes, often escalate to violence, after release from prison. A U.S. Department of Justice special report released in 2014, entitled: Recidivism of

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