The New Jim Crow Summary

Over the second half of this State and Local Government course we have been reading and discussing The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Her overarching theme for this book has been incarceration, and its purpose is to change the way we think about the world and its systems. All of our class discussions on incarceration and all it entails, led me to wonder what the connection between incarceration and crime is. In this paper I will be using multiple sources that have to do with crime and incarceration in order to find out how incarceration relates to crime rates and if incarceration is the reason for crime decline. I will go over all the information I found on this topic including my findings on incarceration, including statistics and rates,

That is a 500% increase from forty years ago.2 The U.S. also has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Here we host 25% of the world’s incarcerated population, even though the U.S. only accounts for 5% of the world’s population.2 Because of that, the U.S. spends $262 billion a year to run this system.2 This does not just have a monetary affect; prisoners suffer wage losses which make it hard to adjust back into the community when they are released. Because of their criminal record, they also miss out on job opportunities and the ability to benefit from public housing. Due to the struggles prisoners face after being released from the prison system, it is not surprising that about 45% of prisoners go back to prison, raising the incarceration rate.2 While researching, I found some interesting information on incarceration in Louisiana. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Nearly 1 in 75 adults in Louisiana is in jail or prison, which is double the national average.4 Even though this state has the highest incarnation rate in the world, there has not been evidence of a substantially lower crime rate. By 2013, there were 40,000 prisoners in Louisiana, yet the increase in incarceration over the years had almost no effect on reducing crime.4 Throughout the years America has noticed crime drops and has since took note of the factors that had an effect on the

The deterrence theory suggests that “the severity of criminal sanctions dissuades other potential offenders from committing crimes out of fear of punishment.”4 That is applicable to the individuals that are punished and to people in the community. Nevertheless, prison’s effectiveness is often questioned as an effective deterrent to crime. Studies have shown that longer sentences have a small effect on whether offenders commit crimes or not, and the National Academy of Sciences determined that “insufficient evidence exists to justify predicating policy choices on the general assumption that harsher punishments yield measurable deterrent effects.”4 The NAS also pointed out that their deterrence research came to the conclusion that “potential offenders may not accurately perceive, and may vastly underestimate, those risks and punishments associated with committing a crime.”4 Incarceration has an even less effect on violent crimes, since they are often crimes of passion and are not premeditated. Because of that, severe terms of incarceration will not have an effect on an offender’s choice to commit a criminal offense. There are two different ways of measuring the effect of prison expansion, bottom-up and top-down. For bottom-up, researchers combine survey information about criminal offenders, reports on