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Pros And Cons Of The Crime Bill Of 1994

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In 1994, the United States Congress passed a controversial crime bill that aimed to address rising crime rates by implementing harsher punishments and increasing funding for law enforcement. This legislation had far-reaching implications for communities across the country, sparking debates about the effectiveness of tough-on-crime policies and their impact on discredited populations. The 1994 crime bill was a landmark piece of legislation that sought to address the growing concerns about crime in the United States by implementing stricter sentencing guidelines and allocating more resources for law enforcement. However, critics argue that the bill disproportionately targeted minority communities and led to a surge in mass incarceration. The debate surrounding the bill continues to this day, with advocates citing its role in reducing crime rates, while opponents point to its negative impact on communities of color. The Crime Bill of 1994 is a flagrant example of an unjust law because it discriminated against African Americans. The Crime Bill discriminated …show more content…

This exemplifies the government's recognition of the importance of targeting organized crime groups for deterrence and prosecution. Expansion of Death Penalty: The Crime Bill expanded the federal death penalty to include a wider range of offenses, such as certain drug-related crimes and homicide. This demonstrates the government's efforts to address violent crime and deter offenders through harsher penalties. In conclusion, the 1994 Crime Bill introduced measures to reduce crime and improve public safety in the US, including the "three-strikes" provision, gang-related penalties, and federal death penalty expansion. It emphasized targeting repeat offenders, and organized crime groups, and deterring violent

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The Three Strikes law is a way to ensure justice and to stop criminals from committing more crimes. According to Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center's Public Safety

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He claims the prejudices of the judicial system handed out mandatory sentencing for those who used their constitutional right to have a trial by jury. The author builds a relationship with the audience by using Pathos in order to compel them to recognize the urgency to change the current law. Girault explains the failing logic of the law on page 225, he states that communities were to be made safer and instead of targeting petty crimes the focus would be to bring down kingpins, however after three decades of the SRA it still was a failure. Girault defines the sentencing reform act as discriminatory and states that minorities are hugely effected by this law and states ”Black people are overwhelming charged, convicted and sentenced at a higher rate to federal crimes since the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act.” (Girault 228).

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The Unites States is by far in a better position since the passage of the Homeland Security Bill of 2003. This bill has strengthened and fortified our borders to ensure we are never attacked again like were on September 11, 2001. “There have been a number of planned attacks that have been prevented on U.S. soil and abroad within the past several years” because of the Homeland Security Bill that was put into place (Keefer, 2017). This act vetted a lot of agencies and brought them together in order to make our country much safer than it ever has been. The combing of 22 federal agencies into one new cabinet level department as well as creating four new divisions was the biggest federal reorganization since the creation of the Department of

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The politicization of crime control dates back decades, and over the years it has escalated. With the introduction of the “get tough era” and the crackdown on crime followed by Reagan’s official announcement of the “War on Drugs,” we have allowed presidential campaigns and the politics of race, poverty and drug-use to lead us into a crack down on crime epidemic. Combined with the presidential campaigns and political attitudes towards crime, the media assists in exploiting the fears of the American public resulting in overwhelming support, especially from those not involved in the system. Once elected based on this, most politicians and law makers make this their focus for secondary elections. For fear of breaking from the normal central

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The second challenge would be mitigating the harm from colorblind policies and reform efforts. Alexander highlights that these colorblind policies are surface level and intentionally ignore systematic issues in the criminal justice system, but they are widely used because they are easier to get legislative support in comparison to policies that call for more radical systematic changes. A solution I propose, as I did in previous discussions based on the analysis of The New Jim Crow and other CRT theorists, is abolition and a new system that’s rid of systematic racism to be instituted. In conclusion, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow provides a deeper understanding of racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

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Synopsis In the introduction, Michelle Alexander (2010) introduces herself and expresses her passion about the topic of how the criminal justice system accomplishes racial hierarchy here in the United States. In chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow, Alexander (2010) suggests that the federal government can no longer be trusted to make any effort to enforce black civil rights legislation, especially when the Drug War is aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In response to revolts formed between black slaves and white indentured servants, rich whites extended special privileges to their indentured servants that drove a wedge between them and the slaves that successfully stopped the revolts.

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It has been over a decade since Michelle Alexander published “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Her book delves into the complex nuances of mass incarceration in the United States, more specifically pertaining to the criminal justice system’s deeply-ingrained racial biases. She argues, as in reference to the title of her work, that mass incarceration effectively serves as a new form of Jim Crow discrimination and calls for large-scale reform. But in the time since the book’s original release, there have been many significant developments in terms of policy, public opinion, and social movements which warrant elaboration on the themes originally discussed by Alexander. In chapter 3 of “The New Jim Crow,” the

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The book was written by Michelle Alexander, who is a civil rights litigator as well as a legal scholar and the book talks about discrimination against other minorities. The principal premise of the book is that the current mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow. The author tries to show that the perception among Americans that discrimination mostly ended with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s is wrong. She points to the criminal justice system as the new Jim Crow, using the War on Drugs as the primary tool to enforce old and new forms of repression and discrimination. The new kind of racism has led the country to have the highest rate of incarceration in the world and most of those imprisoned are Black Americans.

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Recently, the government has developed a tactic called the "three-strike rule. " This law was enacted in 1994 by Congress and the Clinton administration. The purpose of the law was to give longer sentences to those who were previously convicted of a violent or severe felony to prevent them from being released and doing a crime again. Due to this law being passed, many minorities stayed in prison for most of their lives. This caused the government and private companies to build more prisons and profit from them.

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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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It highlights the system's persistent racial biases and systemic inadequacies, suggesting that racial superiority was maintained by discriminatory laws and practices even after slavery was legally abolished. Mass incarceration is shown in the movie as a modern form of racialized social control that promotes poverty, disenfranchisement, and institutional racism. Through interviews, it analyzes the catastrophic impact on individuals and communities, challenging viewers to critically evaluate the relationship between race, politics, and criminal justice, and arguing for serious reform and a reevaluation of cultural

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Even before our nation’s founding, people of color have been discriminated. Decades pass and the criminal justice system is still “racist” labeling people of color as criminal, meaning black equal criminals therefore is fine to discriminate people of color just because they’re criminals. In “The New Jim Crow” the system targets black men because they are associated with crime, meaning crime stands in for race. In the other hand, As Heather Mac Donald writes in her book “The War on Cops”, “The criminal-justice system does treat individual suspects and criminals equally, they concede. But the problem is how society defines crime and criminals” (154).

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Unfortunately, there are racial disparities in the United States in the legal system. Prison sentences imposed on African American males in the federal system are nearly 20 percent longer than white males convicted of similar crimes. The 1994 Crime Bill signed by President Clinton established mandatory minimum sentences. African American and Latino offenders sentenced in state and federal courts face greater odds of incarceration than white offenders who are in similar situations and receive longer sentences than whites in some jurisdictions. Research has shown that race plays a significant role in determination on which homicide cases resulted in death sentences.

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But in 1994 President Clinton passed the Crime bill that “[led to] devastating legacy of a presidency that resulted in the impoverishment and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class black people”(Donna

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In addition to greatly affecting the otherwise unlikely citizens of America, Tough on Crime policies have greatly affected minority groups in America; perhaps more so than of any other group of citizens. To begin, from the 1980 on through the year 1995, the incarceration rates among drug offenders increased by more than 1000 percent. Notably, by the year 1995 one out of every four inmates in any given correctional facility was a drug offender. In addition of that 1000 percent increase, drug offenders accounted for more than 80 percent of the total growth in the federal inmate population and 50 percent of the growth of the state prison population from 1985 to 1995 (Stith, web). In addition, once in the system, the probability of receiving harsher

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