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Influence on the development of children due to poverty and deprivation
Debate on racial imbalance within the justice system
Influence on the development of children due to poverty and deprivation
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A stone of Hope by Jim St Germain is a memoir about the life of a young African-American immigrating to the United States and opting to the streets of Brooklyn Crown Heights. When my more expresses the poverty and troubles in the criminal justice system. As a young boy living in poverty and recently moving to America Jim used the streets as his Learning Center. The author and protagonist of the memoir, Jim, struggled in education system trying to learn a new language and adapting to his new surroundings. With the stigma of being an ESL student and the lack of support in school and at home Jim begin to invest more time into streets then into his education, he began stealing and dealing drugs and growing up increasingly violent. At the age of 15 Jim had been arrested more than a dozen times but instead of prison St Germain was placed in Boys Town. Boys Town being a rehabilitation center for troubled youth, to help change the lives of children who have severe Behavioral or mental health problems, academically and socially. Even from a young age in the Criminal Justice System St Germain knew that there was a problem lack of compassion and human capital. …show more content…
The groups of people the book focused on were children in the criminal justice system and poverty.
The social problems face by these groups is poverty, discrimination, and criminal justices system. I was interested in learning more about the children in the criminal justices system because in social services we often encounter minorities who have been marginalized, face oppression and systemic racism that has a negative effect on individuals, including wage gaps, redlining, social inequality, and often times results in incarceration. According to The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons “African Americans are incarcerated in state prisons across the country at more than five times the rate of whites, and at least ten times the rate in five
states.” The connection between the book and class that helped me further understand social welfare polices was the human capital theory. Human capital is a form of getting people the education, skills and training needed to obtain a well-paying job. According to The Uncertain Hour ‘The Magical Bureaucrat’ “Comparing the welfare recipient that had gone through the work first program and other programs that focused on education and training, work first worked better in the early years but in year 7 the effects reverse, the people who had gotten more educated and more skills training were doing better. They were more likely to still be in work and making more money”. The author did confirm what I believed the book would be about, underline the inequality for minorities, the focus on African Americans, poverty, and the juvenile system. What I learned from this book how to understand how policies are created to work with or against minorities and the criminal justice system.
Research from Hanser and Gomila (2015) revealed that most minority groups “live in lower-class neighborhoods in large urban centers where the greatest concentration of law enforcement officers exists” (p. 340). Racial disparity and discrimination are common among juveniles who are born in the United States from immigrant parents, particularly those residing in lower-class neighborhoods where crime is prevalent. Minority juveniles will also find themselves facing various difficulties and challenges
Your fate is not based upon anyone’s actions other than your own. Both Wes Moore’s experienced a circumstance in which they required a second chance. The decision of how to use that second chance is the vital part to succeeding, for the difficult part learning how to “distinguish between second chances and last chances” (Moore 67). Wes— The author— was given a second chance after joining military school. Although it was originally an unfortunate turn of events, Wes quickly learned the opportunities that surrounded him were to fade rapidly if he did not improve his way of life. This experience is an example of how a single person can set themselves up for success or failure based upon their individual
criminal justice system. If the current trends persist, one out of every three African American men can expect to go to prison over the course of his life, as can one out of every six Latino males, compared to only one in seventeen white males (Bonczar 2003). For females, the figures are significantly lower, but racial and ethnic disparities are very similar. For instance, one out of every eighteen African American females can expect to go to prison, as can one out of every 45 Latino females, and one out of every one-hundred and eleven white females (Bonczar 2003). The racial disparities in imprisonment have been felt the most by young African American males (Western and Pettit 2010). Males are a significant majority of the prison and jail populations, accounting for around ninety percent of the population (Western and Pettit 2010). Racial disparities in incarceration are astounding when one counts the men who have been incarcerated in their lifetime rather than those serving time on any given day (Western and Pettit 2002). For instance, in 1989, approximately two percent of white men in their early thirties had been in prison compared to thirteen percent of African American men in their early thirties (Western and Pettit 2002). These extreme racial disparities disproportionately affect communities of color and have significant collateral effects such as family stress and dissolution,
There are various reasons why many juveniles are ending up in the juvenile justice system unjustly. The pipeline commences with inadequate resources in public schools. Many children are locked into second rate educational environments in which they are placed in overcrowded classrooms, insufficient funding, lack of special education services and even textbooks. This failure to meet the educational needs of children leads to more dropout rates which could also increase the risk of later court involvement. Surprisingly enough, some school may even encourage children to drop out in response to pressures from test-based accountability regimes which create incentives to push out low-performing students to increase overall test scores.
Vito, Gennaro F., and Clifford E. Simonsen. Juvenile justice today. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004. Print.
Black men in Jail are having drastic effects upon the black community. The first and arguably most important effect is that it intensifies the problem of single parent households within the black community. When these men are sentenced to prison, they, many times, leave behind a wife/girlfriend and/or children. If they have already have had children, that child must spend multiple years of his/her early life without a primary father figure. In addition, that male's absence is even more prominently felt when the woman has to handle all of the financial responsibilities on her own. This poses even more problems since women are underpaid relative to men in the workforce, childcare costs must be considered, and many of these women do not have the necessary skills to obtain a job, which would pay a living wage, which could support her and the children. Black male incarceration has done much to ensure that black female-headed households are now equal with poverty.
This paper will analyze the different theoretical issues pertaining to the modern juvenile court, determine their origin, and suggest a course of action for resolving these issues to the best extent possible. It is important to note, however, that the juvenile justice system alone cannot ever prevent all juvenile crime, respond perfectly to every situation or treat every suspect fairly. Furthermore, an effective antidote to modern juvenile crime would necessitate far broader action, addressing underlying social structure inequalities that breed poverty and social disorganization.
Many inequalities exist within the justice system that need to be brought to light and addressed. Statistics show that African American men are arrested more often than females and people of other races. There are some measures that can and need to be taken to reduce the racial disparity in the justice system. Racial disparity in the criminal justice system exists when the proportion of a racial or ethnic group within the control system is higher than the proportion of the group in the general population. The cause of this disparity varies and can include differences in the levels of criminal activity, law enforcements emphasis on particular communities, legislative policies, and/or decision making by one or more persons at some level in the criminal justice system.
The challenges of children who grow up with parents whom were incarcerated at some point in their childhood can have a major effect on their life. The incarceration of parents can at times begin to affect the child even at birth. Now with prison nurseries the impregnated mother can keep her baby during her time in jail. With the loss of their parent the child can begin to develop behavioral problems with being obedient, temper tantrums, and the loss of simple social skills. Never learning to live in a society they are deprived of a normal social life. “The enormous increase incarceration led to a parallel, but far less documented, increase in the proportion of children who grew up with a parent incarcerated during their childhood” (Johnson 2007). This means the consequences of the children of the incarcerated parents receive no attention from the media, or academic research. The academic research done in this paper is to strengthen the research already worked by many other people. The impact of the parent’s incarceration on these children can at times be both positive and negative. The incarceration of a parent can be the upshot to the change of child’s everyday life, behavioral problems, and depriving them a normal social life.
Fortunately, this is not the prevailing view. While it is a force in the field, many more "experts" think the juvenile justice system simply needs renovations. Different states treat offenders differently, and some states are role models in the way their juvenile justice systems are managed and executed. Generally, state juvenile delinquency prevention systems were overhauled as a result of the high crime rates in the early 1990s. For my political science Senior Seminar research project, I wanted to look at what factors affected state delinquency rates. I was looking for what effects the reforming (or lack thereof) of these systems has had on the crime committed by juveniles in the states.
Between 1990 and 2007, the number of children under 18 years old with an incarcerated parent in the United States increased from 945,600 to 1,706,600, reaching 2.3% of the nation’s children (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008). These children can suffer from traumatic separation, loneliness, stigma, confused explanations to children, unstable childcare arrangements, strained parenting, reduced income, and home, school, and neighborhood moves. (Murray, Farrington, and Sekol 2012). Additionally, these children are put into high stress life events while their parents go through the process of being incarcerated and likely had other stressors before their incarceration. The behavioral effects of these children and their families have urgent social concerns, as incarceration effects go far outside of prison walls.
Everyone is affected in one way or another. Prisons are overcrowded and the government has to spend billions on the prison system. Taxpayer’s money fund the cost of prisons facilities, programs, services and security staff. The children of the inmates are affected because they are been raise without a father role model to teach them how to properly function in society and this increase the chances for them to end up in jail. Prisoners lose freedom to be with their love ones. Police interaction with minorities are getting more violent and deathly. Low and middle class communities are affected by the racial injustice because it built resentment and distrust in our law enforcement and criminal justice system. The bottom line is if do not have racial equality in America things are only going to get
Hundreds of youth under the age of 16 are incarcerated at the Department of Juvenile Justice in New York City. The majority of these young people locked up do not pose a threat to society because they are convicted of non-violent, low-level offenses. If these are low-level offenses, why are these young individuals being sent to juvenile centers? Well, rather than employing traditional disciplinary measures for minor discretions such as detention or counseling, faculty members are instead using drastic methods such as suspension, expulsion and law enforcement to punish the youth. This funneling of students out of school and into the streets and the juvenile correction system is known as the “School-to-Prison-Pipeline.” This cycle deprives the youth who are in poverty, of meaningful opportunities such as an education and a future.
Reed, Diane F., and Edward L. Reed. "Children of Incarcerated Parents." Social Justice. 24.3 (1997): 152-169. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.
However, in 2012, Geoff K. Ward rectified this omission in his meticulously researched book, “The Black Child Savers.” What Ward so compellingly documents is the decades-long efforts of African-American child savers to bring about a restructuring of the social politics of American juvenile justice.