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Why Do Prisons Increase Incarceration Rates?

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The literature answers the issues of incarceration rates increasing by giving us the product such as legislative decisions that were the primary reason that led to the increase of charging and imprisoning more offenders as well as increasing sentences, limiting prison release, and expanding the prison capacity. Higher incarceration rates were not the sole reason for the increase in crime. Prisons were continuing to be built even though crime had been declining. Later resulting in the sharpest decrease in crime in American history. Essentially every states incarceration rate was increased by 150 percent from 1970 to 2000, and the median state increasewas 390 percent, which was taken from the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2012. Having analyzed …show more content…

Overtime lawmakers grasped onto the aggressive combative responses to crime, which led to mandatory sentence legislation, sentencing enhancements, severe anti drug laws, and bills that would finance prison expansion sustaining prison growth and higher incarceration. The majority of the data that was gathered was over a time span of forty yearsThe research design that was used in this study was method of data …show more content…

Findings have identified the important changes and continuum in understanding imprisonment in the United States. Race was and still has remained a critical predictor of higher incarceration. Findings have also implied that the relationship between violent crime and incarceration became more important as violent crime had increased in 1980 and 1990 however it declined around1970, and no longer was powerful as crime declined by 2000. Attitudes on African Americans and crime regardless of crime decreasing still remained relatively the same. Even though the drop of offending amongst blacks the size of the black population continued to produce as a proxy for real offending. From historical case studies the disproportionate number of African Americans incarcerated in the U.S certify race’s central role in understanding punishment in America. Regarding the use of Sunbelt states it was suggested that Sunbelt states have in common penal and political history that have made them more likely to have harsher penal regime as well as political bias that have marginalized and oppressed minority

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This article, written by William Spelman, focuses on the controversial relationship between prison populations and crime rates. Spelman demonstrates the controversy by referencing studies that yielded a wide array of results ranging from rising prison populations causing a decrease in crime to having no effect at all, and even a study that showed crime increasing as prison populations did. Spelman states that this controversy has long been present when discussing this issue. He expresses concern with the divergent findings due to the fact that they are largely all based on the same data set. This, Spelman believes, is largely due to the fact that the varying studies used different methods in conducting their research.

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Kamalu, Ngozi Caleb, Margery Coulson-Clark, and Nkechi Margaret Kamalu. " Racial Disparities in Sentencing: Implications for the Criminal Justice System and the African American Community." African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: AJCJS 4.1 (2010): 1-31. ProQuest.

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Minority groups, such as African Americans, have long experienced injustices within the criminal justice system. Although we have indeed seen a substantial reduction in overt racial prejudice over the last half-century, racial inequality within the criminal justice system is far from extinct. Over the course of the criminal justice system in the United States, African Americans have been unjustly profiled, pursued, and unlawfully convicted. While not discounting the progress that has been made in the treatment of African Americans, it is important to keep in mind that discrimination is still present. Further, racial biases are likely to exist outside of the White-Black dynamic, which is a question that should be addressed in future

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Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

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The text indicates that increased reliance on prisons can only account for one third of the decrease in crime in the 1990’s. This indicates that although it is a help, it is not the cure. To say if this is viable, one would have to weigh the actual cost of imprisonment per person per year which the text indicates is $25,000, to a numerical number that would equal what crime takes from society. This is almost impossible to accomplish because not all crimes are equal. The authors feel that there is a greater reason that the crime rates decreased in the 1990’s, they feel that the legalization of abortion had a large impact on decreasing crime rates.

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1728 Words | 7 Pages

The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for several reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. This literature review will discuss the ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system and how mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism has become a problem.

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As demonstrated in Trends in U.S. corrections, the U.S. has had the highest rates of incarceration as of 2011 adding up to more than seventy hundred thousand(The Sentencing Project 3). Race and class play an important role on who is punished for such crimes as well as who gets

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In 2002, around 12 percent of black men in their early twenties were incarcerated (Harrison and Karberg, 2003). In this era of mass incarceration, it’s more common to see blacks or Hispanics behind bars, thus it’s becoming more apparent that there might be a correlation between the race of an individual and its likelihood to be incarcerated (Pettit & Western, 2004). In this study, penal inequality estimated lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men. By using the Survey of Inmates of State and Federal Correctional Facilities, the results demonstrated that racial disparities in imprisonment are evident, black men have a higher risk of incarceration compared to whites. This racial disparity affects young individuals as risks of incarceration are six to eight times higher for a black youth than a white youth (Pettit & Western,

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993 Words | 4 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

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In 2010, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported that African Americans receive 10% longer sentences than whites through the federal system for the same crimes. In the 19th and early 20th century, that percentage was higher. Many people think that the US 's legal system truly provides justice for all people unlike back in the early 1900s, but the fact written above could be very easily compared to what racism was like in the 1930s. Although the United States’ legal system has improved some over the past 60 years through the Great Depression and many other hardships, this country’s legal system is still failing at providing justice for all people.

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935 Words | 4 Pages

Research Paper Draft Over the last past decades, the rate of incarcerations for minority has risen at an unprecedented rate (Warren, Gelb, Horowitz & Riordan, 2008).Criminals of difference races, sexes, or socioeconomic status receive different sentences for same crimes. The United States now incarcerates more than 1 out of 100 American adults. The United States holds the record for both prison population size and percentage of citizens in prison (Warren, Gelb, Horowitz & Riordan, 2008). American prisons do have a disparate number of minority inmates in their populations.

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1199 Words | 5 Pages

Much of the twentieth century, crime and punishment has provided some of the most powerful signs of the racial split in America (Rosich,2007). For example, African Americans accounted for 89 percent of the prison population executed for rape between the years of 1930 and 1972 (U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). The question that has been raised is not who, what, when but is why? Could the answer possibly be that, though criminal activity has no face, no gender, race, or ethnic background that people are always looking for a scapegoat of some sort to make sure someone pays the dues of the crime that has been committed?

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839 Words | 4 Pages

In particular, the prison system has been used to entrench discrimination against African Americans. The prison population is overrepresented by African Americans who are targeted by police officers. The high rates of African American prisoners in the country demonstrate the lack of equality within the American criminal justice system. Imprisoning people denies them the opportunity to achieve social and economic mobility due to their criminal record. Prisons are an inevitable feature of the modern society (Davis 9).

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574 Words | 3 Pages

African Americans are incarcerated approximately seven times as often as whites. The economic deprivation in the United States is linked to the variation in criminal punishment. Consequently, collateral sanctions play an ever-larger role in racial and ethnic stratification, operating as an interconnected system of disadvantage as the number of felons and former felons

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1263 Words | 6 Pages

We have just seen that the massive increase in incarceration since the 1970s has probably produced little in the way of crime reduction. Not only has the incarceration boom failed to produce the positive consequence for which it was initiated, it has also had several negative collateral consequences that have attracted increasing attention from scholars and policy analysts (Clear, 2007; Garland, 2001; Mauer & Chesney – Lind, 2003; Petersilia, 2003; Travis, 2005;). This section examines several of these consequences.

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