How Crime Affects Society

Crimes are committed by every race, class, and area no matter what origin or background, and it affects everyone in society whether directly or indirectly. A directly affected person could be one who has been the victim of a crime or is close to someone who was. Indirectly affected people would be the other residents of a city fearing the crime/s, and especially the tax payers. Every society is different. Every society has different views, opinions, criminals, and the criminal justice system varies. However, the way a town or city reacts to crime is fairly similar. No matter the crime or the offender who committed it, criminal acts affect every society in the United States and have indirectly or directly had an impact on every US citizen.

Rhode Island, for example, has no death penalty, it being abolished in 1984. The absence of the death penalty causes there to be a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, increasing the prisons’ population. With an increasing prison population comes a higher tax rate. A study done by Fundamental Finance proves that society pays over twice the average household income for one inmate’s incarceration. The more a city takes from the taxpayers’ pockets, the higher chance there is for criminal deviance, which brings us back to an increasing prison population. While not supporting the death penalty is conserving life, it has an impact on future crime, deterring criminals to commit crimes worth capital

In the United States, there is a dispute on how people from different races and backgrounds are treated differently by the criminal justice and law enforcement systems. For example, in the United States, which holds 25% of the world’s prison population, 1 million out of 2.3 million prisoners are African-Americans. On death row, the majority of offenders are white, and many people believe this is because those states are “making up” for past discrimination against blacks. That idea, however, could be easily dismissed if society did some research of their own on this matter. The majority of offenders on death row are serious offenders, mostly male, who have had a high standing in society and the majority of those men are white. No matter what race or age or background an offender has, they are mostly all treated equally in the court of law and are sentenced based on their criminal acts, nothing