After reading" Life Sentence" by Christopher Shea, I totally agree with what he is trying to reveal. In the beginning of the reading, Shea mentioned all these “What if” questions to get you thinking before he starts explaining his claim. His claim in this article was that prisons have a greater impact than most people think it does. Prisons don’t just punish criminals during their time, they still punish them even after they’ve paid their time.
In the next paragraphs, Shea explains how not only do we spend $60 billion just to maintain the prison, but we bash these ex-prisoners, making it almost impossible for them to get a job once their out of prison. We should be trying to help them by doing more counseling, and more jobs. In order to keep
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If a ex-prisoner paid his time in jail, why should they still be punished? Most of these ex-prisoners want to live a better live and prove to others that they have learned from their mistakes. So why aren’t we letting them prove it to us? An idea that seems pretty meaningful to me is that black ex-convicts are the ones who struggle the most. Why is it that in the year 2016, we still struggle with discrimination? Shouldn’t that have been over years ago? I just don't get how someone of color can have a greater impact than someone who isn’t of color. We are all human and should be treated the same if we all paid the same price. My position on this issue is that ex-convicts should all be treated equally. There should not be any special treatment for anyone based on color, income or sexuallity. If you did the same crime as someone else, you should get the same treatment. For example, let’s say a white man and a black man killed someone else. So because they both committed a homicide, they should face the same charges. Sadly, this doesn’t always happen, what tends to happen is that the police can assume the black person was involved in a gang and sentence him to 5 more years.. My point here is that just because someone is colored doesn’t necessarily mean they were involved in a gang. You can’t just judge a book by it’s cover. There should be evidence to prove their reasonings, not just because he “looks
Every human being on earth deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and we should all be treated equally. Unfortunately, Black people do not have the privilege of white people. Throughout the years many innocent people were killed and arrested for being people of color. For example, an unarmed black person can get killed by a white cop who is armed. The white-armed cop can get away with it easily for having a white police privilege.
Oftentimes, the media publicizes when a black person is shot and killed by an officer and even then many cases tend to go unnoticed. The officers are hardly ever reprimanded for having shot an innocent child who was mistaken for holding a gun when it was really a toy truck. It is also known that far too often, rich white men are able to avoid being sent to jail, keeping their record clean. Whereas poor people of color are usually sentenced to harsher punishments for committing the same crime. It is evident that there is a much larger picture to the incarceration of black people and other minorities.
In every country, criminals are punished differently such that some are sentenced to prison, others the public becomes the judge and the jury while for the case of the United States we usually have a trial to prove that they are not guilty and if they are indeed guilty then they will be just sentenced them to jail. In the article “How to Dismantle the “New Jim Crow”? it states how the number of inmates have increased since the late 1960’s. In some cases, the prisons are filled with minority race within the community for example; the African American, Latinos, and many more that’s why they call it the new Jim Crow. With this kind of treatment of the minority, some people have different reasons as to why the minority race is the one that is mostly
The justice system in the United States of America is not fair. Michelle Alexander writes a great article “Locked Up In America” describing how people gets into the justice system and how their life is when coming out of jail. People that are convicted of any crime they are labeled as criminals and felons. Criminals does not get properly punished for their crimes if they did they wouldn’t be so many people going in and out of jail. The justice system should have different ways of punishing a person according to the crime they commit, just by putting them in jail and assuming that is going to change them is not a good way of going about that.
You are most definitely correct Mark. The Three-strike laws are a good way to deter crimes. As stated on the Golden Gate University Law review, the Three-strike law has had a deterrent effect because it reduces felony arrests rates among the class of criminals with 1 strike by 29 to 48 percent (Goodno, 2010, p. 469). Statistically, it seems to somewhat stop repeat offenders. Bill Veeck is known for famously saying, “If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off” (Demakis, 2012, p. 354).
Is it fair that an African American man is sentenced up to life in prison for possession of drugs when Brock Turner is sentenced to only 14 years, later to be reduced to six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious women. The judiciary system are believed to have a high african american incarceration rate as a result of discrimination. At a presidential debate on Martin Luther King Day, President Barack Obama said that “Blacks and whites are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, and receive very different sentences… for the same crime.” Hillary Clinton said the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more african americans proportionately than whites.”
Thesis: It is very important for the sake of Americans tax dollars that we change the way that prisons are run and increase the productivity of inmates so when they are released from jail they are ready to be a productive member in society and have the confidence to achieve new goals. Introduction: Day after day, millions of inmates sit in jail doing nothing productive with their lives. We are paying to house inmates that may not even have a good reason to be there. For example, drug offenders are being kept with murderers and other violent offenders.
The government treats prisoners as if they are nothing in this world. The U.S prison system needs to be reformed by building new and better prisons and making it more humane and fair. Looking back to the prison history. Incarceration has not always been a common form of punishment. Back then people wanted to reform and change the way
A finding from a study done by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that 67.8 percent of ex-convicts were rearrested. Two-thirds of them spent their time in prison waiting for the release, only to go back into that dirty old cell again. Why don’t they try to get a real job, earn their own living and cherish the second chance we grant them. Let’s step down from the moral high ground for a second. Often released prisoners lack the skills and knowledge to keep up with the pace of society.
Why the prison system is flawed The american prison system is flawed and should be changed because it is very expensive to keep it running the way it is, the prison system is helping gangs grow and it can be fixed it is possible. I believe that it needs to change so that cities will have more tax money to fix other things and the people who don't deserve to get released won't be. The prison system is very expensive for taxpayers because they have to pay to employ the officers, they have to pay for the building, the tools, the food for them to eat, there clothing and bedding.
People of all different races and ethnicities are locked behind bars because they have been convicted of committing a crime and they are paying for the consequences. When looking at the racial composition of a prison in the United States, it does not mimic the population. This is because some races and ethnicities are over represented in the correctional system in the U.S. (Walker, Spohn, & DeLone, 2018). According Walker et al. (2018), African-Americans/Blacks make up less than fifteen percent of the U.S. population, while this race has around thirty-seven percent of the population in the correctional system today.
One possible alternative route to the prison system could be a boarding school type system where convicts are required to participate in an educational program that gives them the knowledge and ability to be released and given the needs to go make something better of the life they have been given. This system where they are required to participate in educational training would come along side a strict rule system that would encourage them to make the decision to choose something better. The debate is whether or not prison is beneficial or not for those who will be convicted, sentenced, and released. Whether we change the system or not there will always be crime and
Jacoby’s point makes sense. Why should we waste money on the living expenses of convicts, especially if the outdated policy could prove more effective? Jacoby uses an excellent approach to drawing his audience
In our criminal justice system today, this same type of discrimination persists, especially for individuals from the lower-class. In the case of Tom Robinson, he was not the one who raped Mayella it was so Bob Ewell who raped her, yet they accused Tom and he was even charged with the crime just because of his skin color. This is a pure injustice in the criminal justice
Implications for this book include Santos’s desire to help fix the prison system and the mass incarceration issue the U.S is facing. Santos is also helping other that are being prosecuted by the failing system. Upon being released and piecing his life back together, Santos started his own foundation called the Michael G Santos foundation. Through this foundation, Santos is helping bring awareness to the socials issues that result from mass incarceration while also helping former prisoner transition and integrate successfully back into the work force. Through Santos’s hard work and commitment, Santos successfully helped Maine’s department of corrections enhance their prison system by the virtue of his own programs that he has developed post