First is how mass incarceration affects the communities. One of the first issues that is talked about in the article is this issue of Invisible Inequality. “Inequality worsens both crimes of poverty motivated by need for goods for use and crime of wealth motivated by greed”, (Barak, et. al., 2015). This issue has many aspects but the main aspect of this issue is that when data is being collected for different types of community well-being studies such as unemployment the people that are incarcerated are not accounted for in the data that is collected. By doing this the effect on the communities is that the data that is being reported is not entirely accurate. When this data is not reported it makes the numbers look better than the situation…
Homelessness, Poverty, and Incarceration: The Criminalization of Despair by Larry Covin is the first article that will be reviewed. This article reflects on the impact that homelessness and poverty, among other factors, can have on incarceration and likelihood of committing crime, the conditions that the poor face in prison, and how those in poverty are treated during the criminal justice process.…
Life, as we know it today, isn't the way it was before because of the increase in incarceration rates within our nation; especially among our minority groups. When minority groups are mentioned, it's aimed towards people that are different from the social majority. Incarceration is the state of being confined in prison; imprisoned. There are various factors that have led to this dreadful increase. The cause of this climb in numbers of people being incarcerated are prisons profiting from the number of people being imprisoned, policies and practices, and most importantly, a wide range of criminal offenders. This dilemma…
Criminal justice stakeholders affected by various social, political, economic, and institutional forces throughout the last five decades have implemented policies that have increased reliance on incarceration and its punitive purpose. In contemporary criminal justice reform efforts to scale back mass incarceration, some of the most active stakeholders have been this year’s presidential candidates, the for-profit prison industry, and community-based organizations.…
When offenders seek employment and housing, they are often denied a position or home when employers and landlords retrieve their criminal history. Such practices create a significant struggle for ex-offenders to become productive citizens while avoiding recidivism. As we know, recidivism is harmful to both the offender, the community, and in some ways the economy/tax payer revenue. Approximately “sixty-billion dollars” is disbursed annually to house offenders’ country-wide and when ex-convicts reoffend and are sent back to prison, costs increase resulting in spiked taxes for citizens and overcrowding for…
The United States accounts for 5% of the world population but has nearly 22% of world prison population. This means that nearly 2 million people are incarcerated, and 1 in 3 black men will go to prison or jail if this trend continues (Amnesty International). Mass Incarceration has been one of the major debate recently in Politics. The politician has been debating on a method to reduce the prison population, and to do that they need to find the cause of it and the different contribution. In recent year, there has been a cut in funding for many states rehabilitation, education and other programs because the costs to accommodate an inmate is escalating upward. At the same time, laws are put in place that put disadvantaged people within the criminal…
“Since the 1970s the rate of incarceration in the United States has quadrupled, after having been relatively flat over the prior half-century.”-Anthony Zurcher. The rate of prison incarcerations has increased so much over the years; the government can’t afford to incarcerate that many people. Karen Thomas’s article “Time to Invest in Schools, Note Prisons” shows that United States incarcerates too many criminals violent and non-violent. Joan Petersilia said in her article “Beyond the Prison Bubble” that, the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation. This also supports the idea that The United States incarcerates too many people.…
Over the years the United States incarceration rate has gradually increased. The money spent on an individual incarcerated each year surpassed an average person living off minimum wage. Can these rates decreases? Yes, creating programs which help individuals develop skills in the working field. Allow those individuals to voice their opinions and not feel the wrath of not being able to do much with one’s life after being incarcerated.…
The U.S has roughly 5 percent of the world’s population, but about 25 percent of its prison population. Further, over two million Americans are in prison or jail. Crime statistics and incarceration rates reveal that young African American men are prosecuted and imprisoned at higher rates than their Non-Hispanic White counterparts. Appallingly, of those incarcerated just under half (40 percent), are African American (Lawrence, 2011, p. 4). To put this statistic into perspective, as of 2010, African Americans…
There are over six million ex-convicts in the United States. Research proposes that the best way for ex-cons to avoid prison again is to reintroduce them into the working world and find them jobs. However, most employers are hesitant to give them a chance. With the unemployment rate approaching its highest it makes keeping a job is challenging. When a person has been to prison, their chances of getting hired decrease drastically. Chapter five of David K. Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America, Shipler emphasizes attaining a job, maintaining a job, and living while employed to construct his arguments on the barriers and biases that the working poor have to overcome.…
Even words from the Bible come to the same conclusion on the statement that the rich always get richer, the poor will always get poorer, and poverty has been continued throughout generations to many poor families. "For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away" (Matthew 13:12). Is the cycle of poverty able to be broken? Although some people argue that people can get out of poverty if they work hard enough, those who live in poverty tend to remain and continue the cycle of poverty because they are less likely to receive the same opportunity in education with wealthy people. Secondly, poverty makes an effect on child development in the society and…
According to Michelle Alexander, mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America today. That is to say, being black connotes being a criminal and being a criminal is a contemporary “code word” for being black. The new Jim Crow evolved as a rebranded way to deal with race in America or as Alexander put it, an adaptation to the demands of the current political climate. It is perfectly legitimate in this day and age to discriminate against criminals just as it was to explicitly discriminate against people of color. However, the increase in incarceration has mainly targeted this same group (people of color) which is why it is just a relabeled system; African Americans are still facing the brunt of discrimination under new terms.…
In, “Beyond the Prison Bubble,” published in the Wilson Quarterly in the winter 2011, Joan Petersilia shows different choices about the imprisonment systems. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation (para.1). The crime rate over a thirty year span had grown by five times since 1960 to 1990. There are more people of color or Hispanics in federal and state institutions then there are of any other nationality. The prison system is growing more than ever; the growth in twenty years has been about 21 new prisons. Mass imprisonment has reduced crime but, has not helped the inmate to gradually return back to society with skills or education. But the offenders leaving prison now are more likely to have fairly long criminal records, lengthy histories of alcohol and drug abuse, significant periods of unemployment and homelessness, and physical or mental disability (par.12).…
Overcrowding in prisons is one of the biggest challenges facing the American criminal justice system today. The total population of prisons and jails in the United States neared the 2.1 million mark in June 2003, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported incarceration rates of state and federal prisoners continued to rise. At midyear 2003, the number of sentenced inmates was 480 per 100,000 U.S. residents, up from 476 per 100,000 on December 31, 2002. There were 238 jail inmates for every 100,000 on June 30, 2003. Overall, one out of every 140 U.S residents was incarcerated in prison or in jail. During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s state and local governments got tougher on crime by passing legislation calling for mandatory sentences for repeat offenders, such as California’s “three strikes you’re out” law and New York and other cities adopted the “Broken Windows” strategy that called for the arrest and prosecution of all crimes large and small. Because of these polices the number of violent crimes has dropped. Unfortunately, one unintended consequence of America’s new tough stance on crime is that our prison system has become dangerously overcrowded, forcing prison officials to release violent criminals after serving only a fraction of their sentences. The current system used to relieve overcrowding has created a “revolving door” criminal justice system. The recidivism rate among those released early from state and county prisons is extremely high. In fact, a Department of Justice study found that 67.5 percent of criminals released from prison were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years (USDOJ, 2013). A Large portion of the overcrowded conditions in the prison system is a result of the” war on drugs”. This war alone costs taxpayers a large amount of money each year because new prisons are needed to be constructed to house the ever-growing…
Incarceration rates have dramatically increased in the United States than in anywhere else in the world. In fact, according to “Incarceration nation,” America has about 707,000 incarcerated people compared to Russia, who has about 474,000 people. Not only has this caused a problem inside the prison walls, it has also increased economic situations for stakeholders.The recent increase in incarceration rates has had negative effects on the United States economy by causing an increase in expenditure on prisons that could be better used for education. This increase in incarceration rates has also led to overcrowding in prisons, leading to unsuitable conditions for prisoners and prison workers.…