In “Caging of America,” written by Adam Gopnik is an outline of everything that is wrong with the mass incarceration problem in America. We have come so reliant on methods that do not work that we have become blind to the effects it has on prisoners. We believe have set up a successful model to handle mass incarceration, in addition to our miss guided belief that we have fixed a problem.…
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…
Upon reading Adam Gopnik’s “Caging of America”, I have understood his main point to be the over incarceration rate in the United States compared to any other place on earth along with explaining some causes and some solutions to this problem.…
By directing more money into the prison industry, the state is teaching and funding the notion that in our society it is acceptable to value the reduction of “crime” by enslaving inmates than it is to support a child’s education, creativity, and future.…
Over the last two decades (1980-2000), the US prison population has increased 450%. California has led the nation in prison growth since the early 1980s, and it incarcerated a higher percentage of its population than any nation on earth by 1994. The same year California enacted a controversial sentencing law that will drive prison growth for decades to come. This is the story of that law.…
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.…
Have you ever wondered where and how our tax money being spent? We pay taxes for services that we all benefit from as a community. Things like roads, law enforcement, libraries, transportation systems, to live comfortable and safe. However; a very big chunk of that money goes towards prisons and jails. California’s current prison budget is almost $10 billion dollars (Jerrod). Even this sum is not enough to incarcerate all of the offenders. California will need an additional two to four billion dollars to address the overcrowded problem (Hayes). This does not necessarily mean that the crime rate has increased, this just means that politicians need to change the way our prison system works. In the end we are the ones paying for everything. Statistics have shown that the crime rate has decreased over the years but prison population continued to grow (Mayeux). This has started since 1980s when California released a series of strictest mandatory sentencing laws and stringiest parole policies in the nation (Young). These actions have increased prison population by 700 percent since the 1980s (Young). All at the expense of taxpayers which costs us $32 billion dollars yearly nationwide and keeps growing (Kieso). Government cut budgets for education but they keep adding money to correction and rehabilitation sector (Mayeux). Prisons are overcrowded to the point that Supreme Court ordered our state to release 46,000 prisoners because there is just no room for them (Jerrod). Purpose of this proposal is to provide more information on this issue and propose a solution to reduce prison population by reducing the numbers of secondary offenders and going for the root of the problem.…
Teichner, M. (2012, April 22). The cost of a nation of incarceration. In CBS News. Retrieved October 7,…
America’s prisons have a major importance in modern society. They are a huge contributing factor to the safety of our country and allow for proper and humane punishment for those who commit crimes. While America’s streets continue to be plagued by crime and dangerous people, prisons help significantly in decreasing the crime rate and removing those people from society in order to create a safer place for people to live. Although there are many pros that come with prisons, a handful of cons come with them as well, which allow for arguments to rise about whether prisons should be allowed in America or not. Prisons are a necessity in modern society that punishes and rehabilitates those who commit crimes with the purpose of protecting…
This means then that a direct statement on the mandatory minimum sentencing cannot adequately explain the decline in criminal activity; causation does not equal correlation in this instance. Furthermore, “most optimistic research...on the crime decline of the 1990s finds that 25% of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to rising imprisonment” (Spelman 2000). However, in Bruce Western’s research, published in his novel, Punishment and Inequality in America, he derives that the rise in incarceration effects merely but, 10% of the decline in crime. Furthermore, these studies exclude other factors for the rise of incarceration, such as…
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).…
The author includes two states to show that there is a change happening in America, the change is slowly but surely. By using the word substantially the author gives a sense that the two states are changing in a dramatically fast way. The author included the statement of a non-increase in prison violence reveals that prisoners are capable of behaving themselves with out harsh punishments. The Editorial Board uses the word reduce letting readers know that the states have not completely eliminated the use of solitary confinement, but they are willing to eliminate it in the future. They want readers to infer for themselves that the more reduced solitary confinement is the more possibility prison violence will decrease. They express the evidence of decrease in prison violence does not affect prisoners behavior in a negative way. The Editorial Board says, “Solitary confinement will be presumptively prohibited for pregnant women, and inmates with developmental disabilities will be held there for no more than 30 days.” The Editorial Board predicts the prohibition of certain inmates by using the word presumptively. They state that the only inmates prohibited will be pregnant women, and inmates with…
The United States of America promotes itself as the land of the free but, is it truly free? People believe what they see or are told without actually giving it thought, as the saying goes, “See no evil, hear no evil.” The people of today have been brainwashed to believe that what the media portrays is fact and that’s all there is to it. We are aware of what life can be like in other countries, and compare it to the United States to give ourselves the illusion that we are free. Although it may be true that we have more freedom than other nations, it is not true that the United States is an absolutely free nation. The incarceration rates of this country are devastatingly high that the prison system operates more like a business than as a correction…
However, due to the continued growth of the prison industry the social cost, children without parents, the decrease in educational opportunities, employment and home ownership has effected the poor but more specifically African-American males and their families. What is even more astounding is that other lucrative countries such as Canada and Italy are also experiencing a decline in crime rates without increasing their rates of incarceration. In California, 2011 that state started to reform their judicial system these reforms resulted in a decreased use of prisons for parole violations and more of the use of local sanctions. The result of this reformations was a decline of nearly 13% of the prison population in one year. The conclusion of this…