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African Americans In Jail Analysis

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The way African Americans are treated inside of jail and outside is actually disturbing. The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. To think about how big this number is disturbing and numbers keep increasing. The United States prison population in 1970 was just above 327,000, and now the current prison population is just over 2 million. On the one hand I feel American Americans deserve some of the punishment that they get, but on the other I wonder why they are treated the way they are. The standard way of thinking about how African Americans are treated is that they are portrayed as criminals. The reason that African Americans are seen to be this way is because of the way they are shown on television. Television makes them look like they are all bad people, out looking for something bad to do. According to the video that we watched, black men account for an estimated 6.5% of the United States population, however they make up 40.2% of the United States prison population. When …show more content…

Also, they said that when you do something wrong there shouldn’t be a grudge that is kept for the rest of your life. At some point and time you need to pay back what harm you did and get over it. The video also referred to the KKK never really went away. The people kept saying that because blacks are still getting killed and that was the whole part of the KKK, was to target people. A black male in the video was put in jail for doing nothing. When he went on trial he was sentenced to death. But, the worst part about that is he has been in jail for 14 years are be hasn’t seen the outside world since. They think that there should be something for the people in jail to do that is outside of the locked up cell. Something to do that lets them get out and do something so they aren’t just sitting in a dark, dingy cell all the

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African American now are nearly 1 million of 2.3 million incarcerated population. They are being incarcerated six times the rate of whites. Together, with Hispanics, they are covering prisons by 58 percent as of

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Over the existence of the United States, blacks have had to face oppression due to the prejudices views held against this. America views every black person as the same and judges them based on the actions of others. It is for this reason that all blacks are judged based on the book of a cover without being able to show the world who they really are. As Norman Podhoretz stated in his Essay “My Negro Problem - and Ours,” “growing up in terror of black males; they were tougher than we were, more ruthless...”

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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.”

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Michelle Alexander, similarly, points out the same truth that African American men are targeted substantially by the criminal justice system due to the long history leading to racial bias and mass incarceration within her text “The New Jim Crow”. Both Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Michelle Alexander’s text exhibit the brutality and social injustice that the African American community experiences, which ultimately expedites the mass incarceration of African American men, reflecting the current flawed prison system in the U.S. The American prison system is flawed in numerous ways as both King and Alexander points out. A significant flaw that was identified is the injustice of specifically targeting African American men for crimes due to the racial stereotypes formed as a result of racial formation. Racial formation is the accumulation of racial identities and categories that are formed, reconstructed, and abrogated throughout history.

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All African Americans had to endure torture, losing family members, punishment, and much more. They had no freedom whatsoever and if they tried to fight for it, they were punished for it dearly. African Americans had to face so much to gain their freedom, and even when they did some people did not agree with the ruling. Even in today’s culture there are still people who see African Americans as less and judge them harshly based off of the past. It pains me to think that our society used Africans Americans for

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“African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population.” The majority group of this statistic are people who come from african american backgrounds. The fact that black people are to make up nearly half of the prison population alone, really conveys the rate at which they are being arrested. Black men are often victims of racial profiling by police. They are targeted by police officers, and security guards, and are accused of crimes unrelated to them, simply on the basis of their skin color.

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The media depicts African American males, in particular, as dangerous and the ones who commit really serious crimes such as rape or murder. African Americans are shown as criminals on television more than they really are, which has an influence on the public of being scared of African Americans who have been referred to as super predators in the past. Some African Americans cannot help but agree with the notion that they are criminals because it is what they have been told and seen which makes them terrified of themselves. All of this goes back to what was touched on in class on how incarceration is an important social justice issue that impacts the individual, family, and children which usually results in negative outcomes overall. Last but not least, an issue raised in the film was that state institutions have legally produced criminalization, particularly targeting minority communities.

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This unfortunate stereotype is still highly prevalent today. We all read about African-American men committing crimes, we see it in the news and on social media. That goes to say, not all crimes are committed solely by black men, and black men should not be treated like criminals based off of others wrongdoings. Staples recounts the events of a night he went for a walk. On this walk, he encountered a well-dressed white woman (as he so described) who instinctively mistook him for a criminal.

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Women of color are the most targeted, prosecuted, and imprisoned women in the country and rapidly increasing their population within the prison systems. According to Nicholas Freudenberg, 11 out of every 1000 women will end up incarcerated in their lifetime, the average age being 35, while only five of them are white, 15 are Latinas, and 36 are black. These two groups alone make up 70 percent of women in prison, an astonishing rate compared to the low percentage comprise of within the entire female population in the country (1895). Most of their offenses are non-violent, but drug related, and often these women come from oppressive and violent backgrounds, where many of their struggles occurred directly within the home and from their own family.

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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.

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Although communities of organized people have fought to change the view of African Americans individuals, there is still ongoing racism. The current controversy that is surrounding us is the concern of young African American men being targeted by law enforcement. As well as the injustice that these individuals are experiencing when they encounter law enforcement, which has resulted in an increase of police

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According to the article Racism and Police Brutality in America, “Whites believe that Blacks are disproportionately inclined to engage in criminal behavior and are the deserving on harsh treatment by the criminal justice system” (Chaney 484). The justice system has unfortunately followed this idea. The African American race has been a minority in the legal system in the past; however, it has been much worse as of 2015. Some individuals assume it is acceptable to refrain from acknowledging this fact. Racism is an issue in the midst of police brutality, and it should be resolved.

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