Angela Davis Incarceration Analysis

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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…

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

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