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The effects of poverty on an individual
The effects of poverty on an individual
How poverty affects people
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According to Stephen B. Bright, many of the men, women, and children sent to prison in the United States everyday, are processed through courts without legal representation that is indispensable to a fair trial, a reliable verdict and a just sentence. We see many examples of this everyday. “A poor person arrested by police may languish in jail for days, weeks or months before seeing a lawyer for the first time” (Bright 6). Once convicted a poor person can face years in prison, or even be executed without ever having a lawyer present. The concepts of crime can be defined differently in different societies and can be classified according to race ethnic, gender, sexuality class, and religious identifications (Bright 6). Common targets of this “poverty-to-prison” cycle can be seen in When a Heart Turns Solid Rock by Timothy Black. The book shows how schools, jobs, the streets, and prisons have shaped the lives and choices of poor Puerto Rican boys at the turn of the twenty- first century. Rather than using a model of urban poverty that blame the poor for their poverty, Black instead focuses, through ethnography, on the social forces that affect the individual lives of three urban Puerto Rican brothers: Julio, Fausto, and Sammy. As viewed in the book, many targets for the prison system are poor African American and Latino men. People that come from poor neighborhoods are at a higher risks of being incarcerated. There have been different outcomes for different racial and gender groups in sentencing and convicting criminals in the United States criminal justice system. Experts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to many of these inequalities. Minority defendants are charged with ... ... middle of paper ... ... black males. Latino men are also targets of this perception of being criminals. Most societies are built to see minorities fail. For example, “to make laws like the three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws, right, these are made for habitual criminals, but what’s a habitual criminal? …a guy that keeps on committing the same crime over and over again, why does he keep on committing the same crime over?...You never bothered teachin’ him when the first time he went into the prison system”(Black 905). Most of the lives of minorities reflected around that type of scenario when it came to the prison system. Instead of having a system to help them, they had a system that failed them and were considered “criminals”. In some cases, most of the men being arrested were arrested for drug possession or minor crimes however, they were treated like second-degree murderers.
To understand this approach, he maps the ways that the justice system stigmatized and killed these Latino and African American youth future dreams. Children, these young kids that could be future doctors, scientists, and engineers are forced by this punishment that could lead them to prison or even killed in the streets with no hope or opportunity to prosper. The author described a Fifteen-year –old Latino kid born and raised in Oakland by name of Slick.
In his novel Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Dr. Victor M. Rios aims to demonstrate the catastrophe of criminalization, the flops of using cruel and humiliating punishments that attempt to “‘correct’ and ‘manage’ marginalized youths” (p. 23), and to display the consequences that these practices will have on the paths that teenagers take. He does this by documenting parts of his experience in observing forty boys of Black and/or Latino who are “heavily affected by criminal justice policies and practice” (p. 8). Then, he clarifies how these flaws impacted the boys in these situations. The aim of this essay is to summarize Dr. Rios’ observations and analyze and critique the primary arguments made in the book.
The book Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino boys by Victor Rios is about the Latinos and African Americans in poor parts of the city joining gangs, do violence, and ending up in prison. It is also add how the police are handling the situation differently in these areas. The researcher is Victor Rios and the goal is to change how the police should handle in these poor communities and to have trust to prevent a crime that is unrelated with African Americans and Latinos. Additionally to develop new programs to help these young people out of prison to be productive, to be part of society, and to create a brighter future for these young people and their community. This is
The book "Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys" is written by Victor M. Rios, who was a former gang member in his hometown and later turned his life around. He went to Berkeley and earned a doctorate in sociology. This book explores how youth of color are punished and criminalized by authorities even under the situation where there is no crimes committed and how it can cause a harmful consequence for the young man and their community in Oakland, California. The goal is to show the consequences of social control on the lives of young people of color and try to remind the authorities. This is important Since society plays a crucial part in shaping the lives of people. And the authorities have biases towards them and mistreat
Stereotypes within our society have shaped the way we perceive each other. Throughout the book Punished by Victor Rios, a lot of stereotypes were not only reinforced but also used against a lot of the boys. A lot of the boys presented throughout the book had never actually committed a crime but they were treated as if they had. These boys were constantly labeled and categorized, like folders into a filling cabinet or a bin. Sure Oakland, California had a lot of gang-infested areas but that does not mean everyone in that area is part of a gang or is committing a crime. Thus, this book really demonstrates how one can be perceived or labeled as a criminal due to his or her surroundings and how these stereotypes can destroy one’s chance of freedom.
“A report by the United States General Accounting Office in 1990 concluded that 82 percent of the empirically valid studies on the subject show that the race of the victim has an impact on capital charging decisions or sentencing verdicts or both” (86).
The work by Victor M. Rios entitled Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness depict ways in which policing and incarceration affect inequalities that exist in society. In this body of work I will draw on specific examples from the works of Victor M. Rios and Michelle Alexander to fulfill the tasks of this project. Over the course of the semester and by means of supplemental readings, a few key points are highlighted: how race and gender inequalities correlate to policing and incarceration, how laws marginalize specific groups, and lastly how policing and incarceration perpetuate the very inequalities that exist within American society.
The majority of our prison population is made up of African Americans of low social and economic classes, who come from low income houses and have low levels of education. The chapter also discusses the amount of money the United States loses yearly due to white collar crime as compared to the cost of violent crime. Another main point was the factors that make it more likely for a poor person to be incarcerated, such as the difficulty they would have in accessing adequate legal counsel and their inability to pay bail. This chapter addresses the inequality of sentencing in regards to race, it supplies us with NCVS data that shows less than one-fourth of assailants are perceived as black even though they are arrested at a much higher rate. In addition to African Americans being more likely to be charged with a crime, they are also more likely to receive harsher punishments for the same crimes- which can be seen in the crack/cocaine disparities. These harsher punishments are also shown in the higher rates of African Americans sentenced to
Most black Americans are under the control of the criminal justice today whether in parole or probation or whether in jail or prison. Accomplishments of the civil rights association have been challenged by mass incarceration of the African Americans in fighting drugs in the country. Although the Jim Crow laws are not so common, many African Americans are still arrested for very minor crimes. They remain disfranchised and marginalized and trapped by criminal justice that has named them felons and refuted them their rights to be free of lawful employment and discrimination and also education and other public benefits that other citizens enjoy. There is exists discernment in voting rights, employment, education and housing when it comes to privileges. In the, ‘the new Jim crow’ mass incarceration has been described to serve the same function as the post civil war Jim crow laws and pre civil war slavery. (Michelle 16) This essay would defend Michelle Alexander’s argument that mass incarcerations represent the ‘new Jim crow.’
This research essay discusses racial disparities in the sentencing policies and process, which is one of the major factors contributing to the current overrepresentation of minorities in the judicial system, further threatening the African American and Latino communities. This is also evident from the fact that Blacks are almost 7 times more likely to be incarcerated than are Whites (Kartz, 2000). The argument presented in the essay is that how the laws that have been established for sentencing tend to target the people of color more and therefore their chances of ending up on prison are higher than the whites. The essay further goes on to talk about the judges and the prosecutors who due to different factors, tend to make their decisions
In modern-day America the issue of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is controversial because there is substantial evidence confirming both individual and systemic biases. While there is reason to believe that there are discriminatory elements at every step of the judicial process, this treatment will investigate and attempt to elucidate such elements in two of the most critical judicial junctures, criminal apprehension and prosecution.
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001. In theory if this trend continues it is estimated that about 1 in 3 black males being born can be expected to spend time in prison and some point in his life. One in nine African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 are currently incarcerated. Although the rate of imprisonment for women is considerably lower than males African American women are incarc...
In the United States, the rate of incarceration has increased shockingly over the past few years. In 2008, it was said that one in 100 U.S. adults were behind bars, meaning more than 2.3 million people. Even more surprising than this high rate is the fact that African Americans have been disproportionately incarcerated, especially low-income and lowly educated blacks. This is racialized mass incarceration. There are a few reasons why racialized mass incarceration occurs and how it negatively affects poor black communities.
According to the Oxford Index, “whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, or hyper incarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.” It should be noted that there is much ambiguity in the scholarly definition of the newly controversial social welfare issue as well as a specific determination in regards to the causes and consequences to American society. While some pro arguments cry act as a crime prevention technique, especially in the scope of the “war on drugs’.
Openly meaningful reforms to the criminal justice system cannot be accomplished without acknowledgement of racial and ethnic disparities in the system. Focused attention on reduction of disparities is needed. The unequal treatment of minorities in the criminal justice system is one of the most critical issues in America. Diversity and multiculturalism issues in the judicial, policing, and correctional system has been an ongoing problem. We are often witnesses of the tensions between minority groups and law enforcement, unequal treatment in prisons, courts, and representations. Cultural competence is important in the criminal justice field, because it can decrease these tensions and unequal treatment we often witness.