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Argumentative Essay On Incarceration

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Argumentative Essay On Incarceration
The concept of incarceration started to emerge in the United States as a form of control over minorities. This began shortly after the end of slavery and targeted freed slaves to provide free labor during prison. This system of large scale prisons continued to gain popularity after the large spike in drug use around the 1960’s and 1970’s. The problems we have today with mass incarceration is due to our deteriorating criminal justice system which originally provided rehabilitation programs and programs for the mentally ill but has now become life sentences for minor drug charges.
The federal prison system has many flaws to address such as the overflow of prisons and violence within prisons themselves. The number of people being incarcerated …show more content…
In many cases this is not true most cases of violence is due to poor prison management that allow prisoners to obtain contraband items such as phones, drugs,rocks,and even silverware that can be used to create weapons such as shanks to cause harm to other inmates(blanco). With this poor management and regulation it allows prisoners to essentially be those who kill and rape or those who are raped and killed. In regard to forcible rape in prisons there has been a 39 percent increase of allegations of sexual assault from 2005 to 2011 and is still increasing . Within these allegations 48 percent of these allegations were inmates that claim that staff take part in the sexual assault (Beck). Another reason that there is a continuous increase in violence is the the presence of gangs in prisons(gabriel). Along with gang activity in prisons the presence of drugs has caused fights and thefts. Overall the the amount of prison violence has gotten out of hand bordering on cruel and unusual
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