The higher classes have passed laws only to benefit themselves. These same laws are unfavorable to the working class. Both crowds commit acts of deviance, but the system the higher class created defines deviance inversely for each group. The justice system judges and punishes each group differently. The elite can afford expensive lawyers and sometimes friendly with the people in control of creating and enforcing laws. The working class does not have these advantages. The working class is likely to commit street crime, such as robbery and assault. A homeless individual is more probable to be categorized deviant than an executive who misuses finances from the corporation. The elite are less likely to commit acts of violence but more expected …show more content…
It began in the 1980s, when high crime led counsels to send people to prison for longer sentences. The country’s war on drugs lead strict sentencing procedures, which reduced the preference of judges. In a 2013 study "Why are so many Americans in prison?", Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll, professors of public policy at Berkeley and UCLA, found that changes in sentences for drug offences were important, accounting for about twenty percent of the increase in the incarceration rate. Yet, stricter sentences for violent offenders accounted for nearly half. Many convicts serving long sentences were never dangerous, or have matured with age and no longer posed a danger to the community. To put someone in a cell is to strip the individual of all freedom. Most of us think this sort of dispossession of freedom can be justified when a crime is serious enough. A regulation of proportionality has to apply so that way punishment can always fit the crime. Keeping people in jail too long adds an injustice to the original crime. If someone commits a crime that is six years, but is kept in for twelve, then six years of life have been unreasonably taken in much the same way that the life of a kidnapping victim went through. It may be that many Americans have taken the idea that a serious crime justifies the loss of certain rights. This may explain the America’s indifference to the fair of punishment. Fairness is kept for those who haven’t disgraced their mortality and citizenship by committing crimes. Thus, putting away the criminals lets us great citizens sleep at night knowing there would be less crime in the streets