America land of the free and home of the great, But in all reality is America as great is…
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.…
In the documentary, 13th, the director, Ava DuVernay, conducts a detailed analysis of the system of mass incarceration in America. More specifically, how the prison structure of America affects people of color. The 13th amendment may have physically removed the shackles that enslaved African Americans, but replaced them with “mass incarceration, police brutality and policies that have continually disenfranchised people of color.”…
incarceration is another term for enslavement, except for this time, the US has found a way to…
executed by lethal injection. Prior to being executed, Carlos had spent some time in prison,…
What is meant by mass incarceration is shown a american’s disproportionately high rate of imprisonment of young men. Some causes according to the reading of mass incarceration is that it generally deters crime and incapacitates offenders. However, it is not limited to weakening poor families and keeps them socially marginalized.…
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…
Mass incarceration is a form of functionalism theory because the reason mass incarceration is seen not as a problem by other people it is because they have shared beliefs that when you do wrong you should be imprisoned regardless of the crime you have committed. The government has sent laws that every citizen should abide by and therefore if you break the law you should be imprisoned , sadly this system has mostly affected the minority group: black people and latino's who are given longer jail time than white people even the crime is the same. these people are sent to jail are seen as people who are unable to interact with society and therefore they do not belong to society and most people agree with this because they all share the same beliefs…
Who knew that an uprising that occurred in the fall of 1971 at a New York correctional facility would help change the American penal system forever? It was the culmination of a storm that had been brewing for months. There was a tension between the guards and inmates that had not gone unnoticed. With little to no attention given to the circumstances of the inmates, they had had enough.…
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…
Mass incarceration reveals the essence of the problems in America’s criminal justice system. It shines light on the presence of inequality as well as the flaws in the policies. Mass incarceration became a huge problem in the US with the onset of the War on Drugs. Since then, the number of prisoners has increased significantly and a great proportion of the prisoners include drug offenders. Beckett and Sasson argue that the inequality here lies in the fact that members in the minority populations are sought after because unlike many private transactions that happens amongst upper class individuals, those that take place between members of the lower class tend to be more visible.…
Benefits that were in placed to help African Americans were no longer there or they were hard to get. There were a certain amount of benefits in the African American communities that were limited to certain amount of people due to the restrictions the benefits had. Welfare was replaced with AFDC, which came with TANF, and TANF limits the amount of time you can use the benefits and restricted convicted felons with drug offenses from getting it (Alexander). This clearly is going to affect the Black communities, because if they can not get these benefits then they are going to go back on the streets to sell drugs, which is going to lead to jail. If the system wants to help people, then why put restrictions on the things they need. It seems as…
Incarceration rates in The United States have grown drastically and are rapidly increasing. About 5% of the population will, on average, serve a sentence of about 60 months or more in prison . This rise in incarceration rates has disproportionally affected women . From 1988 to 2008, the imprisonment rate for women has increased by 600%, while for men it has increased by 300% . Currently about 1 million women pass through prisons every year of about 3.2 million arrests. Out of these sentences, about 67% were drug convictions.…
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.…
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…