In the article, “The Rich Get Richer and Poor Get Prison” Jefferey H. Reiman clearly depicts that poor citizens have a greater chance for imprisonment over middle and upper- class citizens. The author makes it predominately obvious that he believes, at least as far as criminal justice is concerned, racism is simply one powerful form of economic bias (Reiman 1). Through studies, statics in the article overall show that black Americans with low income rates or no income at all living in “disorganized inner-cities” have an increasingly higher rate to commit crimes resulting in being arrested leading conviction. The criminal justice system functions to ‘weed out’ and thus grants advantages to the middle and upper- class. First, there is economic…
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…
In Prison Writings in 20th Century, Franklin illuminates a positive correlation between poverty and incarceration after the 1929 stock market crash. Over a roughly ten-year period, the Great Depression elucidates an intersection of poverty and “criminality,” where impoverished conditions created behavioral responses that American society has criminalized. In addition, the crash created a profusion of cheap labor and therefore decreased the demand for prison labor. In 2008, the Great Recession destroyed countless people’s wealth, employment, and hope. The increase in poverty created by the recession should, according to the 1929 crash, also have a corresponding increase in incarceration and decrease in the use of prison labor. Yet incarceration…
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.…
“A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Stigmatization of Children of Incarcerated Parents” by Susan Phillips and Trevor Gates, explains the how stigmatization affects the families of the incarcerated by instigating financial hardships and delinquent behavior. “Mass Incarceration, Family Complexity, and the Reproduction of Childhood Disadvantage” by B.L. Sykes and B. Pettit talks about the concept of multiple partner fertility as a form of family complexity, and how this outwardly affects the nuclear family decline. And “Young Adult Outcomes and the Life-Course Penalties of Parental Incarceration” by Daniel P. Mears and Sonja E. Siennick introduce the turning point theory and how it provides further explanation of the perpetuation of intergenerational incarceration. All of the articles address the subject of mass incarceration, and how it disproportionately affects families of color. These theories all support the idea that parental incarceration affects the decline of the nuclear family among minorities in the United States by creating current problems for the families involved with the system, and also perpetuating a cycle that is bound to affect future generations. The perpetuation of the cycle is what keeps the incarceration rates up and the nuclear family rates down over…
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.…
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).…
Three major consequences or costs of mass incarceration is, one, sever social consequences. Another consequence is sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy. The third consequence is the ability to vote. These three consequences are severe enough where it affects America as a whole. Now, I will discuss each consequence in a little more detail. This will help in the answer of why these consequences are so detrimental to America. I will also, be summarizing the article the Sentencing Project’s (2013) policy brief which touches on major social interventions which helps with the mass incarceration problems we face…
Clinton increased funding for prions to be built, more money given to law enforcement. The number of people arrested spiked. By ninety-ninety, there was over one million, one hundred thousand, one hundred, seventy-nine thousand, two hundred prisoners. Federal law’s set a trend that was overdone; he was wrong for his ninety-ninety-four criminal bill.…
Every day people are entering and leaving the American Prison system. Maybe a co-worker, neighbor, family member, etc. are re-entering the world and becoming part of “civilization” again. Peter Wagner, in his article Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016, says that “Every year, 636,000 people walk out of prison gates, but people go to jail over 11 million times each year.”Where are those 10.6 million something people that vanished? That is basically the basis of mass incarceration which in other terms mean that more people are in jail then leaving which causes overpopulation. Mass incarceration must end due to its effects.…
America land of the free and home of the great, But in all reality is America as great is…
Prisoners are erased from the nation’s economic picture, leading standard estimates to underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24 percentage points for less-educated black men. Young African American men were the only group to experience a steep increase in joblessness between 1980 and 2000, a development directly traceable to the increase in the penal population.…