Disproportionate Incarceration of African Americans

1675 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Ethical Treatment of Prisoners

Disproportionate Incarceration of African Americans

The disproportionate numbers of African Americans in the prison system is a very serious issue, which is not usually discussed in its totality. However, it is quite important to address the matter because it ultimately will have an effect on African Americans as a whole.

Of the many tribulations that plague Americans today, the increase in the amount of African American men and women in prisons is unbelievable. It would be naïve to say that the increase is due to the fact that more African Americans are committing crimes now than before. When in actuality it has very prevalent connections to a systematic plan to incarcerate a race of people by creating harsh drug laws to imprison mostly African American, non-violent drug offenders. Since these drug laws were enforced strictly, African Americans have filled our prison systems in outstanding numbers. Consequently causing an overcrowded prison. Private companies, which contain private contracts with the prison, use the inmates as a source of free or cheap labor. One may ask themselves, "Is this ethical?" Absolutely not. They allow the public to believe that it is beneficial because has no expense to tax payers, however the only real benefit is to the company itself. The company has managed to attain free or cheap labor while simultaneously increasing their net profits.

When the values of a people and the ethics of a country are systematically broken down, one begins to ponder about why the preposterous numbers are what they are. African Americans constitute about half of the prison inmates when they only make up about 13% of the United States population. There are many speculations as to why this is so. Some...

... middle of paper ...

...liography:

**Parenti, Christian, Lockdown America (London; New York: Verso, 1999) 17-19

**Lynch, Michael J. and Patterson, Britt, Race and Criminal Justice (New York: Harrow and Heinstien, 1991)

*Ranese, Celia "Todays Prison system vs. Yesterdays Slave System" USA TALK 13 March 1999

*Palmer, Louise "Numbers of Blacks in Prison nears 1 million" The Boston Globe Seattle Post Intelligencer

*United States Department of Justice Bureau of Statistics: Prison Inmate Statistics, Washington 1998

*Polowsky, Robert, "Liberal Legacy" Prison Activist Resource Center (weekly). 25 September 1998

*Smith, Phil, "Private Prisons Benefit" The Berne Collection. 1 December 1998

*Shakur, Assata, "Letter from Assata Shakur on the prison industrial complex" 25 October 1999

*Schlosser, Eric, "The Prison Industrial Complex" The Atlantic Monthly. December 1998 Vol. 282 No.6

Show More
Related

  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

    1198 Words  | 3 Pages

    The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that works together –almost invisible– to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined by race, African American (p. 178 -190).

    Read More

  • Unmasking America: A Deeper Look at Social and Economic Injustices

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    Just Mercy’s Bryan Stevenson exposes some of these disparities woven around his presentation of the Walter McMillian case, and the overrepresentation of African-American men in our criminal justice system. His accounts of actors in the criminal justice system such as Judge Robert E. Lee and the D.A. Tom Chapman who refused to open up the case or provide support regardless of the overwhelmingly amount of inconsistencies found in the case. The fact that there were instances where policemen paid people off to testify falsely against McMillian others on death row significantly supports this perpetuation of racism. For many of the people of color featured in Stevenson’s book, the justice system was unfair to them wrongfully or excessively punishing them for crimes both violent and nonviolent compared to their white counterparts. Racism towards those of color has caused a “lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers” and ultimately leads to the mass incarceration of this population (Stevenson, 2014, p. 141). Moreover the lack of diversity within the jury system and those in power plays into the already existing racism. African-American men are quickly becoming disenfranchised in our country through such racist biases leading to over 1/3 of this population “missing” from the overall American population because they are within the criminal justice

    Read More

  • Power Matters By Brenda Allen

    1173 Words  | 3 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Prison

    1347 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Is Parole Ineffective of Effective in Curbing Recidivism?

    2253 Words  | 5 Pages

    Mauer, Marc. 1999. The Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press National Research Council. 1993.

    Read More

  • Film Analysis of Boyz in the Hood

    2158 Words  | 5 Pages

    "‘Race Wars’ Part 1: The Shocking Data on Black-on-Black Crime." The Blaze. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.

    Read More

  • The Flaws of Incarceration in America

    1359 Words  | 3 Pages

    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 a number of 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. The ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system is caused by mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism.

    Read More

  • Criminal Justice

    751 Words  | 2 Pages

    Although our present day society still questions whether the rights of the Individual should outweigh the public order or the social order of our country should outweigh the individual rights has enlightened me to a distorted vision and a compromised system and questionable Leadership. “African- American men comprise less than 6% of the U.S. population and almost one-half of its criminal prisons.” Quoted by the Bureau of justice statistics. When research is conducted by another other than oneself yield such great crippling results, it does hold truths to be true to that which began before our awakening

    Read More

  • Incarcerated Black Males

    744 Words  | 2 Pages

    Black Incarcerated Males For the past two decades, the criminal justice system in the United States has been undergoing tremendous expansion. There are now more than one million black men in jail and one out of every four black males will go to prison in their lifetime. Knowing these statistics puts a burden on the black community because many families are left with single family homes, the unemployment rate for black males goes up, they can not vote and now they make jail seem like it is fun to go to. Black men in jail are having drastic effects upon the black community.

    Read More

  • Surging Incarceration Rates in the United States

    1766 Words  | 4 Pages

    Of course, that would be the logical thought to have, but as it turns out, it 's a little more complex than that. Expectedly, “the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.” (Adam Gopnik) In other the words, more inmates meant more money for the company. Over the last thirty years, the Corrections Corporation of America, a company whose main source of income comes from “having as many [prisoners] as possible, housed as cheaply as possible” saw the incarceration rates increase to “500 percent to more than 2.2 million people.” (grassroots) Well, let’s not get carried away, one could argue that the spike in incarceration rates can’t possibly be the private prison’s fault. They exist only to control and house the prison population, not to create it. Well, one would be right, the private prisons are not directly responsible; they are not directly making more criminals but what one doesn 't realise is that they play a pretty critical role in the

    Read More

  • Mass Incarceration of African Americans

    2058 Words  | 5 Pages

    Goldberg, Eve, and Linda Evens. "The Prison-Industrial Complex and the Global Economy." Global Research. 18 Oct. 2001. Web. www.globalresearch.ca/articles.

    Read More

  • Racial Disparities In The Criminal Justice System Essay

    802 Words  | 2 Pages

    Even though racism has always been a problem since the beginning of time, recently in the United States, there has been a rise in discrimination and violence has been directed towards the African American minority primarily from those in the white majority who believe they are more superior, especially in our criminal justice system. There are many different reasons for the ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system between the majority and the minority, but some key reasons are differential involvement, individual racism, and institutional racism to why racial disparities exist in

    Read More

  • Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Justice System

    4767 Words  | 10 Pages

    These authors’ arguments are both well-articulated and comprehensive, addressing virtually every pertinent concept in the issue of explaining racially disparate arrest rates. In The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, Wilbanks insists that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is a fabrication, explaining the over-representation of African Americans in arrest numbers simply through higher incidence of crime. Walker, Spohn and DeLone’s The Color of Justice dissents that not only are African Americans not anywhere near the disproportionate level of crime that police statistics would indicate, they are also arrested more because they are policed discriminately. Walker, Spohn and DeLone addi...

    Read More

  • Racial Inequalities in the Justice System

    1738 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Racialized Mass Incarceration in America

    622 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

More about Disproportionate Incarceration of African Americans

Open Document