Mass Incarceration Research Paper

Most recently, on October 30th, I called my father at work to ask if I could give him an in-person interview on this current issue. As soon as he arrived at home, the questions have begun. I asked him the three main questions that I addressed in the introduction. The interview took place in my kitchen since I was already doing school work in there. We spoke for about twenty minutes minimum about the issues since he was so thrilled to discuss about his daily occupation. Christopher Trujillo, my father, worked at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Men’s Central Jail for six years, patrolled in the city of Norwalk for six years, and in the Compton Courthouse for the past four years.

Me: What could be done to avoid the problem of mass incarceration?

Deputy: Well actually, the system could enforce parents to join a mentoring program for troubled youth.
Me: What does the mentoring program do?
Deputy: The program is basically focused on helping parents with child-rearing to “socialize” their child properly by enforcing controls and this could be done by observing and tracking their delinquent child’s behavior.
Deputy: Also, another solution would be for the departments to train officers to enforce community-oriented policing, which involves officer’s bond with the citizens, building a stronger relationship through trust.

This will help prevent low offense criminals and influence citizens to contact the police immediately to catch violent offenders.

Me: Compared to other countries, why does the United States have the highest incarceration rates?

Deputy: The government doesn’t have capital punishment, so criminals who are given the death sentence are never killed, while other countries kill the inmates without questions.

Deputy: There’s really no point in early release because there’s no benefit. About seventy-five percent of criminals in jails and prisons are non-violent and drug offenders, so this means that those who get released, only get put back in jail not much later and a large portion of early release criminals end up murdering a victim and then the department gets blamed for releasing the murderer.

Me: That’s crazy, I never thought of it like that. Alright, last question before I let you go. I know you might not know the exact rate, but what do you think the recidivism rate is for criminals who were released

early?
Deputy: Right, I don’t know the precise recidivism rate, like you said before, but I do know that those who didn’t receive an education or rehabilitation while in incarcerated have a higher chance of returning to prison.
Conclusion
From the start, I would’ve never thought I would achieve such a large quantity of knowledge on a topic that I knew almost nothing about. Since I accomplished this amount of research in this topic, hopefully I could change the communities perspective on law enforcement and remove policing’s bad name. Before this research project, I was an average researcher who used wikipedia for every source and who would’ve ever thought that having an interview could carry out such a large amount of information on my issue. Overall, this “i-search” was a thrilling and adventurous journey, learning new methods of finding answers to unsolved issues of mine and I could use these techniques when I’m in the field at work in the future and this process will make my job easier than it should be.