Summary Of The Caging Of America By Adam Gopnik

-One of the most talked about subjects in America, is the subject of incarceration. The rates of incarceration are high, the length of time people are being sentenced for certain crimes seems sometimes disproportionate, and it is costing the US more than most like to think about in money, but other areas of life as well. The article “The Caging Of America,” written by Adam Gopnik, brings attention to some of these problems. The article begins by discussing how the time each prisoner spends in prison is a punishment in itself. It explains that having to watch the clock and do the same things most days, is a painful agony for most prisoners. Gopnik then asks the question “How did we get here?” and goes into describing how we in America consider

There is plenty in this article to analyze, but for the purpose of my analysis, I will focus on what the primary and secondary aims of it are, and what the tone is that the author, Gopnik, takes.

-While reading the article, I found that there was a primary and secondary aim throughout it. I believe the primary aim to be to bring attention to some of the problems there are with the extremely high rates of incarceration we have, where as the secondary aim is to get people to think about how taking all these people out of society and putting them in these cages may not be the best way to handle crime. Some evidence to support the primary aim comes immediately in the second paragraph. Gopnik mentions that large portions of those serving time

Evidence of the secondary aim comes when Gopnik writes “If a pill causes a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.” From this you can see that the article was also written to get people to understand that we cannot know what other ways there might be than just putting mass numbers into prisons, that could contribute to a lower crime rate, if we only ever focus on using the prison system.-The tone Gopnik took in writing this article was a strong one as well. It is seen first when he mentions how more people who are poor in America are affected by the prison system throughout their lives than “privileged, professional people.” From this I see that the author feels as though there is an unfair aspect of our system today. Gopnik also compares the mass incarceration to slavery basically saying that the way we dealt with our massive population back in the day was unfair and was by putting those who were underprivileged into the control of those who were privileged. In a way this is what we are doing now, except there are more people in prisons than there were slaves. Out of this comparison, it is easily seen that