Mass Incarceration Essay

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Alternatives to mass incarceration
Once upon a time, we could proudly to say that America is the land of freedom and opportunities. As the pledge of Allegiance stated, “[I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands,] one nation under God, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” However, under the current criminal justice system, more and more people lose their liberty more than they deserved because of the crimes they have committed.The incarceration rate in the United States of America has skyrocketing since 1980s, in other words, the prison is overcrowded and we need to reform our current prison system. According to Roy Walmsley, a consultant to the United Nations and Associate
Elliott Currie, a professor in criminology and law, suggests that building more prisons, imposing longer sentences, and harsh punishment will not lower the incarceration rate. In his chapter on “Assessing the Prison Experiment”, he explained that the increase of crime rate is not the sole reason that mass incarceration occurs, it was also because courts and legislature did indeed get ‘tougher” on offenders (Currie 14). Under the circumstance of the war on drugs, which was launched by President Richard Nixon, the incarceration rate and sentence longevity were increased dramatically as Currie discussed in his chapter. Currie also pointed out that the war on drugs had a huge influence on the incarceration rate of African American inmates, “ between 1985 and 1995, the number of black state prison inmates sentenced for drug offences rose by more than 700 percent” (Currie 13). Some of these offenders were sentenced more than ten years without parole, which releases prisoners before the completion of their sentences. The government should reconsider the current sentencing laws and reform the correctional system to solve our current mass incarceration

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