More people today are being incarcerated than ever before and is the unfortunate result of prejudice and the prison industrial complex. Racism has existed for centuries and has never been eradicated, but it has taken different forms of expression. Many people today suffer from mental illnesses, homelessness, and other social problems that may not let them experience a fulfilling life. This can be due to their fault, but it is also due to the government system not taking proper action against these issues. Instead, the government chooses to incarcerate many of these people with social problems for felonies. In fact, Angela Davis states in her article that over 70 percent of those who are imprisoned are people of color. This means that government and corporations are taking advantage of people who are of color …show more content…
and live in a low social class. It is a real problem when the elite choose to instead take advantage of their fellow human beings and violate their human rights. The prison industrial complex is when the government and industry uses incarceration and policing as solutions to economic and social problems.
As laws became stricter, especially on drugs, imprisonment began to rise steeply starting in the 1980s according to a graph given by the Sentencing Project. Private companies saw the opportunity to make use of the criminals and chose to use them as cheap manual labor. In fact, one of the points made by Angela Davis is that industry depends on racist structures and ideologies in order to make incarceration profitable. This exploitation of people has led to profit being the sole motivation for incarceration of people rather then to help them reenter society. Davis states in her article that mass incarceration has been the most used form of government social program of our time. I believe that prison may be useful in helping formerly incarcerated people join society again, but instead it is doing nothing to help them learn to live a life free of crime. Due to the limited resources given to a former felon, they tend to follow Robert Merton’s strain theory. The strain theory argues that an individual will become deviant if they are not given the
same opportunities to achieve socially acceptable goals. When a former felon becomes deviant, they usually end up back in prison and society tends to blame it on the felon when the felon was not even given any opportunity to rejoin society and live a life. When a formerly incarcerated person leaves prison, they are not allowed to have public housing, which could mean homelessness for the person. They are also restricted from a majority of careers and are not allowed a Pell grant to pursue education, which could give them a brighter future. Much of prison is punitive justice. It focuses on punishing felons in order to define a boundary of acceptable behavior. It is issues like these that need to be addressed and focused on rather than looking for ways to punish inmates. What government should start to focus on is rehabilitative justice in order to not only positively affect the individual, but to give society another member who is willingly to work hard for their freedom. Because of the prison industrial complex, policing is harsh in poor communities of color. Victor Rios explains in an interview how when he was younger, police would actually stop many of the youth in his neighborhood and search them to see if they had drugs or were involved in gangs. This is just one example of social control in action in an area of low social status and colored people. As communities become higher class and less colored people, there is also less social control involved. This impact on the poor communities causes youth and other people to view the police negatively and not trust them. It only leads to more problems for the community and police. One of Rios’ solutions to this problem is to train police in policing methods that are more about developing positive relationships with young people rather than to harass them. Although this solution would not completely change the justice system, it would be a step closer to preventing many people from being incarcerated.
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander states that we still use our criminal justice system to “label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage i...
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.’
Davis discusses the history of the justice system and how the Penitentiary replaced capitol and corporal punishment. She defines Penitentiary as “Imprisonment was regarded as rehabilitative and the penitentiary prison was devised to provide convicts with the conditions for reflecting on their crimes and, through penitence, for reshaping their habits even their souls.3” though the idea of the penitentiary is arguable a new idea during the American Revolution. The penitentiary process was so that prisoners could learn from what they have done by a process of separation and rehabilitation. After slavery and during the early 20th century the level of crime rates rose during the early 1920’s to 1940’s. In the Article Less crime more punishment Adler4,
For the past two decades, the criminal justice system in the United States has been undergoing a tremendous expansion. There are now more than one million black men in jail and that one out of every four black males will go on prison in there lifetime. Knowing these statistics it put a burden on the black community because many families are left with single family home, the unemployment rate for black male go up, they can not vote and now they make jail seem like it is fun to go to.
Shockingly, there seem to be a few people who actually profits from keeping people in jails. The practice of mass incarceration who most see as a major problem in the United States of America is actually beneficial to some. The prison system in the United States who was create to keep dangerous criminals at bay is now a major source of profit for some private corporations. John W. Whitehead, attorney and president of the Rutherford Institute writes that, “ the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.” Some blame the war on drugs as the main reason for the mass incarceration; others blame racism. Although those components do play a major role in the affair, a closer look at at the mastermind behind the prison industrial complex suggest that the privatization of the prison system has become the main reason why mass incarceration exist so forcefully in the United States and is a crime against the people of the people of
Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad
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 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’.
In the essay "Prison "Reform" in America," Roger T. Pray points out the much attention that has been devoted to research to help prevent crimes. Showing criminals the errors of their ways not by brutal punishment, but by locking them up in the attempt to reform them. Robert Pray, who is a prison psychologist, is currently a researcher with the Utah Dept. of Corrections. He has seen what has become of our prison system and easily shows us that there is really no such thing as "Prison Reform"
Racism within the Justice System. Living in the twenty first century, Americans would like to believe that they are living in the land of the free, where anyone and everyone can live an ordinary life without worrying that they will be arrested on the spot for doing absolutely nothing. The sad truth, with the evidence to prove it, is that this American Dream is not all that it appears to be. It has been corrupted and continues to be, everyday, by the racism that is in the criminal justice system of America. Racism has perpetuated the corruption of the criminal justice system from the initial stop, the sentencing in court, all the way to the life of an inmate in the prison.
Every civilization in history has had rules, and citizens who break them. To this day governments struggle to figure out the best way to deal with their criminals in ways that help both society and those that commit the crimes. Imprisonment has historically been the popular solution. However, there are many instances in which people are sent to prison that would be better served for community service, rehab, or some other form of punishment. Prison affects more than just the prisoner; the families, friends, employers, and communities of the incarcerated also pay a price. Prison as a punishment has its pros and cons; although it may be necessary for some, it can be harmful for those who would be better suited for alternative means of punishment.
“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.
All over America, crime is on the rise. Every day, every minute, and even every second someone will commit a crime. Now, I invite you to consider that a crime is taking place as you read this paper. "The fraction of the population in the State and Federal prison has increased in every single year for the last 34 years and the rate for imprisonment today is now five times higher than in 1972"(Russell, 2009). Considering that rate along crime is a serious act. These crimes range from robbery, rape, kidnapping, identity theft, abuse, trafficking, assault, and murder. Crime is a major social problem in the United States. While the correctional system was designed to protect society from offenders it also serves two specific functions. First it can serve as a tool for punishing the offender. This involves making the offender pay for his/her crime while serving time in a correctional facility. On the other hand it can serve as a place to rehabilitate the offender as preparation to be successful as they renter society. The U.S correctional system is a quite controversial subject that leads to questions such as how does our correctional system punish offenders? How does our correctional system rehabilitate offenders? Which method is more effective in reducing crime punishment or rehabilitation? Our correctional system has several ways to punish and rehabilitate offenders.
Davis claims, “[The] point is that we will not be free to imagine other ways of addressing crime as long as we see the prison as a permanent fixture for dealing with all or most violations of the law” (Davis). Society views imprisonment as the enduring solution to solve all or most social crime. The government should apply alternatives to imprisonment because prison should not be the permanent solution to handling each criminal’s crime because offenders are not learning from their mistake inside the