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Mass incarceration
Social effects of mass incarceration
The importance of incarceration
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Mass incarceration
Social effects of mass incarceration
The importance of incarceration
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Mass incarceration is the greatest civil rights injustice of our time. People behind bars are disproportionately black and Hispanic. The criminal justice system drives and reinforces deep-seated racial
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.
Seeing as how the U.S. leads the world in prison populations—with an exaggeratedly high amount being black and Latino men, it is crucial that we take a step in ending this corrupt cycle. Societal progress is dependant on an improved incarceration system which focuses on preventing confinement, rather than the allocation of prisons for people who are doing their best to survive.
Mass incarceration of minorities has been considered one of the numerous pressing issues of civil rights. Public policies, criminal justice officials, lawmakers, and the media has contributed to this issue. Issues underlying this injustice include other injustices such as racism, class inequalities and inequalities in education. In turn, the injustice of mass incarceration of minorities also play minor and major roles in disproportionate effects on employment, housing, and standard of living. Rawls believed that society cannot be organized in a way which disadvantages the worst off.
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.
Literature Review It’s hypothesized that Blacks and Hispanics residing in the United States are more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Vogel and Porter (2016) conducted a study to examine the relationship between race and incarceration in the US. This study draws on data from the Prisoners in 2010 report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the 2010 decennial census, the BJS provides estimates of the total number of sentenced prisoners on December 31, 2010, by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin (Guerino et al. 2012). The results demonstrated that race is not necessarily directly linked to high incarceration rates.
Over the decades, mass incarceration has become an important topic that people want to discuss due to the increasing number of mass incarceration. However, most of the people who are incarceration are people of color. This eventually leads to scholars concluding that there is a relationship between mass incarceration and the legacy of slavery. The reason is that people of color are the individuals who are overrepresented in prison compared to whites. If you think about it, slavery is over and African Americans are no longer mistreated; however, that is not the case as African Americans continue to face oppression from the government and police force.
Mass Incarceration Mass Incarceration of the black male in the United States have become a rising situation. Most people would say due to high population is why there are more blacks than whites in our prison system. Well some whites have experiences high population, so why aren’t there more whites in jail? In the 2000s it shows more blacks than whites are being put in prison.
The first steps to the incarceration process are intake and booking. When rules and standards are unclear confusion sets in. Some staff members and inmates take advantage of lack of clarity by dominance in an oppressive manner and some will cower from responsibility’s and become victimized by the stronger. Intake and booking process is to have a safe and smooth operation of the jail. Mo matter how many times an inmate has been in custody the inmate has rights.
I think there needs to be more attention to this issue. I think if more people are aware about this issue maybe there would be a better opportunity to fixing the problem. A lot of people are aware that children of color and adults of color are treated differently than a white children and adults when interacting with police officers. However, people overlook it.
The United States entered into World War II after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt issued the Executive Order 9066, forcing the removal of 110,000 Japanese to detention centers. The incarceration caused a deep trauma for many Japanese Americans, exposing them to harassment, danger, and violence. They were taken away from their freedom of speech, choice, and association. Japanese Americans were discriminated, an American racial/ethnic subject to be negotiated, and often looked down to because they were neither black or white.
People of all different races and ethnicities are locked behind bars because they have been convicted of committing a crime and they are paying for the consequences. When looking at the racial composition of a prison in the United States, it does not mimic the population. This is because some races and ethnicities are over represented in the correctional system in the U.S. (Walker, Spohn, & DeLone, 2018). According Walker et al. (2018), African-Americans/Blacks make up less than fifteen percent of the U.S. population, while this race has around thirty-seven percent of the population in the correctional system today.
Numerous studies have provided different perspectives and evidence on the impact of racial inequality in the criminal justice systems, specifically how these racial inequalities affect black Americans. Lisa Miller found in The Invisible Black: Victim, “mistreatment by law enforcement, law-makers, and federalism” in the racial bias toward black Americans (2010). Pettit and Skyes in Civil Rights Legislation and Legalized Exclusion, point out that black males are more likely to end up in jail (2015). A sociologist named David Garland contrived the term “mass incarceration” to explain high incarceration rates in the United States (U.S) (Pettit and Skyes 2015). Currently, the highest incarceration is among black men of 1 in 15 (Miller 2010).
Incarceration has long been part of our corrections facilities in maintaining and holding criminals confined to themselves and harmless to the outside world. That’s not the exactly the way it is anymore, now they are creating treatment programs to rehabilitate people into better normal class citizens in prison because of the effects it has on prisoners in and outside the walls along with people they are associated with. For instance one article stated how in Germany they created state of the art treatment programs to help treat the criminals with their addictions. It was said to have great results in the treatments, but the program was very costly, so it was shut down. While another program in New York is trying to help the incarcerated fathers, by letting them portray the father