Mass Incarceration In America

993 Words4 Pages

Several peculiar institutions have had the ability to effectively control, confine, and define blacks in America’s history. Systems included chattel slavery, which was the turning point of the plantation economy, the Jim Crow era legally upheld segregation and discrimination, and the mechanism of ghettos which are comprised of minorities, parallel to the collective proletarianization and urbanization of blacks. Lastly but not least, the carceral apparatus has helped to perpetuate a social and economic hierarchy, due to the subjugation of minorities, within the US directly affecting life outcomes of those who are directly and indirectly affected. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, they are about 2.3 million people in jail, which …show more content…

The US abides by the motto of “Tough on Crime.” Citizen and political leaders believe that by employing incarceration as a persistent threat it will invite people to conform to social norms and discourage in engaging in illegal behavior. Although data shows that high incarceration in neighborhoods results in a future increase in crime. The perpetuation and reasons of mass incarceration come from prejudice ideologies and attitudes that are ingrained into the fabric of society. People of color are targeted, arrested, and punished for crimes. The criminal system operates on a hierarchy of individual liability over the demand and societal pressure”. By routinization of unequal protection from the legal system, black people are more vulnerable to be victimized by …show more content…

There are no overhead cost because prision are prepaid and all other aspects are paid for by taxpayer dollars. The government spends a total of 20 billion dollars a year In the 21st century prisoners can be view as a modern slave working laborious jobs without humane treatment. Inmates work to make profitable products for large corporations and are compensated by one of two ways. They are either able to make 0.13¢ up to $1.15 per hour, or in states such as Florida inmates can subtract time from their sentence in exchange for work, allowing private federal prisons to took in approximately five billion dollars total in revenue in