executed by lethal injection. Prior to being executed, Carlos had spent some time in prison,…
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.…
Mass incarceration started in the 1980s, when the war on drugs arose. The U.S. prison system is a failure on every level. There are a total of 2,418,352 federal and state prisons in the United States and 2.3 million people occupy them. According to California prison focus “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens”. The U.S. has more prisons than colleges. America also has private prisons owned by greedy corporate millionaires and billionaires.The more people in prison, the more money private prisons make. Tom Beasley, co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America(CCA) stated that “you just sell prisons like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers”. According to CCA they have nearly 5,500 acres of land, and 2,500 acres are undeveloped for future growth projects. That means they want to keep putting people in jail. There are 4,575 private prisons in the United States. According to NYU School of Law “ since 2000, the effect on the crime rate of increasing incarceration has been zero. Even though the crime rate has not gone down, the government continues to put people in jail. Private prisons have continued because they make millions of dollars off of owning private prisons, and putting people in jail. War on drugs was the beginning of mass incarceration. In the 1990’s state and federal prisons started exploding at the seams because of the increase in drug use and possession of it. The drug that made the huge impact on society was Cocaine, known as “crack”. Cocaine was a powder, which was known to be more sophisticated than crack. Crack was used in poor black communities. The biggest surge in the use of crack was between 1980s and 1990s. Black and latino communities were hit the hardest in the drug epidemic. There was a high…
What factors have led to increasing incarceration rates? How has this affected the United States economically and socially?…
Politics and government is the focus point in America that shapes the lives of every citizen in America. Jails and Prison in the United States should be equally as important to the American people as the government. “Race and American Incarcerate machine” is the topic I chose among the list of topics that was suggested. When research my question I thought about different American race percent that were getting locked up and the different kind times they were getting with the same crime. After going over and over looking for answers I came up with a question is: Is it true that the United States have the highest incarceration and are the different races given the same amount of consequence. America is only 5% of the worldś population, but locks up 25% of the worldś prisoners. An estimate of about 3 to 7 million people a year pass through jails in the United States. A trip to jail can drastically affect the lives of an American and this is the most disturbing experience one can endure with the criminal justice system. In the…
Our biggest problem in the United States is mass incarceration. We send more people to prison than any other nation in the world, and people of color make up more than 50% of incarcerated population. When the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, abolishing slavery it still gave leeway to some loopholes. The significant loophole in the Amendment was that, though: It stated that slavery and involuntary servitude are illegal, "except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." So this loophole means I think that people who are imprisoned are technically considered the property of the state or federal government so they do not have rights, which is similar to the slavery time period.…
Mass incarceration has many costs associated with it besides for the punishment of the offender. For many people, they have no idea how badly an incarceration can destroy someones entire life, and family. Mass incarceration affects everyone, the offender, their family, and the entire community as a whole. I believe that there are three major consequences and costs that are encored by mass incarceration, and they each effect either the offender, their family, or the seemingly unrelated community.…
During the mass mobilization of consciousness raising in the late 1960’s, the fight for democracy roared the elites to manifest into power through a global project which not only implemented policies to sustain global capitalism, but advocated for various systems that work to control society, as well as the future reality of certain communities. According to research done by the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Throughout American history, politicians and public officials have exploited public anxieties about crime and disorder for political gain” (Gottschalk). This includes the war on drugs and war on terrorism, which has sustained a movement of mass criminalization, in the name of public safety. However this safety has been a way to suppress those trying to challenge the status quo and reveal the true underlying which sparked the rise of mass incarceration.…
The high rates of imprisonment among poor men reflect the effects of mass incarceration on the microlevel as well as the outcome of when law enforcement focuses on socioeconomic disadvantages in urban communities. Could it be that the criminal Justice system is deeply embedded in maintain poverty racially condense areas? Evidence shows mixed views of the social consequences of mass incarceration. This is due to the problem of invisible equality where those who are incarcerated are unavailable for social research, thus affecting statistics on severe economic disadvantage regarding mass incarceration. For one employment rates have decreased with the increase of incarceration rates. There is limited proof that mass incarceration undermines family…
Drug courts seek to halt the revolving door of addiction and crime by linking addicted offenders to drug treatment and rigorous judicial monitoring. They bring together judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, treatment providers, and court staff in a collaborative effort to address the offender’s underlying substance use disorder and enforce compliance with court orders. Drug courts also use a system of graduated incentives and sanctions to help substance abusers achieve and maintain a drug-free life. Today, thanks to well-established evidence that drug courts reduce substance abuse and recidivism—including a groundbreaking study by researchers from the Center for Court Innovation—there are approximately 3,000 drug courts in the United States.…
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.…
The prison system in the united states has some very serious problems, some of these being the sheer number of people that we incarcerate in this country the highest percentage in the world. The incarceration rate impacts racial minorities much more that the percent of the population that these minorities make up in the population. Also the sheer cost of the mass incarceration costs taxpayers in the United states is huge. But looking at these problems for a sociological perspective can help you understand them better.…
Li, H. (2011, May 4). California Prison Overcrowding: How’s That ‘War on Drugs’ Working Out? Retrieved from http://www.ibtimes.com/california-prison-overcrowding-hows-war-drugs-working-out-285805…
Drug consumption in the U.S has fluctuated considerably for the last years and most Americans seem split about the legalization of marijuana. While proponent of the legalization advance how legalization will the cost of drugs for users and therefore will reduce the rate of crimes related to drug. Also, they believe that the legalization can be new sources of revenues for government because of the taxes that will be withdraw on its sale. Opponents of marijuana legalization claim that marijuana legalization will affect our criminal system because an increase of drug related crime in the U.S. According to them, the legalization will feed drug user addiction and increase marijuana user population…