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Crime, Law, Administration of Justice Professor: Kelly McGeever 04/25/18 Topic- Reflection on lock-in by John Pfaff Provide your reflection on the book and argument The justice system in America caused mass incarceration to become overpopulated from the 1970s to 2000. The reason being people were sentenced for more minor crimes which resulted in prisons to become overcrowded. Based on the book Lock In by John Pfaff, the three main reasons causing mass incarceration in America were; long sentences, war and drugs, and prosecutors.
I found an opinion article from CNN written in 2015 by Evan Feinberg. His article is titled, “Why are so many Americans criminals?” In the article, he explains how America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, creating a huge problem for its citizens. Feinberg cited a statistic that incarceration leads to an 11% drop in wages, 9 weeks lost of employments each year, and a 40% annual reduction in wages (Pew).
Mass incarceration has become a legal institutionalized system that methodically oppresseses both the criminal and their community. It has become so normalized within those communities and unspoken by the privileged that few dare to speak of it or challenge it. Despite the fact that
Mass Incarceration is a term used to describe the increase in the number of people put in jail over a certain period. In recent years, America has had more than two million people put in jail. Most, for minor crimes that were not worth the sentence they received. Privately owned prisons actually make more money based on how many prisoners are in the jail. Organizations like the ACLU are working to cut the number of citizens in prisons by half by the year 2020.
Those who find themselves sentenced to time in a penitentiary, jail, or prison are at risk of either being broken or strengthened by the time they spend behind bars. There is a great debate of whether or not the prison system in the United States is positive or negative. The following will briefly highlight the positives, negatives, and possible alternatives for our nation's prison system. First, there is a long list of negatives that the prison system in America brings. The prison system is filled with crime, hate, and negativity almost as much as the free world is.
Mass incarceration is an expensive, for-profit system that abuses and disenfranchises economically disadvantaged Americans through the war on drugs. The war on drugs introduced policies like COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) and the Byrne Grant program, which Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, believes reduced the crime rate by fifteen percent. Alexander refutes this claim, referencing a 2005 Government Accountability Office report that concluded, "the program may have contributed to a 1 percent reduction in crime—at a cost of $8 billion" (Alexander, pg.240). These programs that contributed to mass incarceration had little impact on crime rates, and cost billions of tax dollars. The ineffectiveness of these
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.
I am interested in mass incarceration due to the fact the USA is a leading county of mass imprisonment. In my opinion, the most important social fact of mass imprisonment is the inequality in penal confinement. This inequality produces tremendous social problem in the USA with extraordinary mass imprisonment rates among racial minorities with no more than a high school education.
Taking a further look into the incarceration system we know today in America reveals layers of propaganda enforced by our government and drilled into our minds since birth. Contrary to popular belief, prisons—as we know them today—are unsuccessful in reducing crime rates. Liz Benecchi from the Harvard Political Review details the ineffectiveness of prisons for preventing crime rates, stating, “...76.6% of prisoners are rearrested within five years.” Prisons don’t keep criminals from committing crimes as they claim to: they’re just a penalization system. The way to keep the public more safe is not by locking away these threats for however many years until it’s time to release them, just to lock them back up again when they are inevitably rearrested; we should be pursuing a more humanitarian and efficient method of reentry to daily life that decreases the risk of recidivism.
Mass incarceration is the way that the United States has locked up millions of people over the last forty years using unnecessary and disproportionate policies. Contrary to popular belief, this is racially fueled as most of these policies saw to it that blacks and latinos be locked up for longer than their white peers and for smaller crimes. These racist roots within the system can be traced back to when the first slave ship arrived in the US. But our first major prison boom was seen after the American Civil war. I know that the Civil War was far more than forty years ago.
However, we are far from that being a viable solution. Mass incarceration in the United States has ruined lives. It has ruined the lives of the people who are put into prison and the lives of those around them. There is also a racial component to this. African American men are disproportionately incarcerated above any other racial group.
Since the 80’s you are able to see a rise in Mass Incarceration system in America. The accelerating rate of which people are being put in to prison is starting” in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. ”(Gopnik, 2015) with this rise
Another reason why we’re in this era of mass incarceration is because people started making money off of it. Private prisons emerged, and now people were making millions of dollars off of locking people up. This is like how we’re dealing with Big Pharma today, how medications and treatments cost a fortune, just because these businesses are making millions off people’s suffering. Robert Martinson’s “Nothing Works” article completely changed the trajectory of our correctional policies and the overall purpose of
With the topic that I have chosen to do my paper it somewhat difficult getting information on the different causes of mass incarceration and thus reentry, and also to find ways to prevent this from happening over and over again. It seems as if today’s society would like to just see individuals that mess up and commit a crime, but rather lock them away instead of just finding ways to help rehabilitate them. Yes, it is very important to hold every person accountable for their actions and stupid “mistakes” that they make. However, at times trying to control or prevent mass incarceration and mass reentry may be something that is very difficult saying that it start decades ago and was something very popular to the people.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with approximately 2.3 million people currently behind bars. This number is staggering and raises questions about why so many people are being imprisoned in the United States. There are several factors that have contributed to this situation, including mandatory minimum sentences, the war on drugs, and the privatization of prisons. One of the key drivers of the high incarceration rate in the United States is mandatory minimum sentences.
