Affluenza Argumentative Analysis

I agree with the speaker that the criminal justice system in America treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. I believe that in not only in American society but also around world, wealth has a major roll in the outcome of a situation. Money does what money does best, it buys. Unfortunately, money can buy you your freedom and a judge. With money people look up to you, but without money people look down on you.

Ever since the first prison opened in the United States in 1790, incarceration has been the center of the nations criminal justice system. Over this 200 year period many creative alternatives to incarceration have been tried, and many at a much lower cost than imprisonment. It wasn’t until the late 1980’s when our criminal justice systems across the country began experiencing a problem with overcrowding of facilities. This problem forced lawmakers to develop new options for sentencing criminal offenders.

"I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed." (Stevenson 313)

However, statistics have shown that the death penalty is applied racially and discriminatorily. Three out of five murder cases in which the victim was white and the defendant was black resulted in the defendant receiving a death penalty. Professor Katherine Beckett of the University of Washington reechoed this fact by stating that, jurors in Washington “were four and a half times more likely to impose a sentence of death when the defendant was black than they were in cases involving similarly situated white defendants.” So where is the justice that advocates of the death penalty are imploring? Moreover, the rich are more likely to escape a death penalty than the poor. The DPIC has reported that most defendants in capital cases cannot afford an attorney. Thus, if equal justice for all is anything to go by, then justice should be equally distributed regardless of race and economic

When we think about prisons, jails, and courthouses, our minds are meant to draw a connection to cold, hard, justice and fair punishments for guilty and deserving parties. Yet, in our judicial and prison systems around the world, this idea is nowhere close to reality. From inhumane punishments, to mass incarceration, and “trapping” people in the system based on race or financial status, justice is far from being served.

The case sends the message that “families that have money, you can drink and drive . This is a very , very dangerous thing we're telling our children.” This proves that “society is often Unequal” because poor people are treated differently than the rich people.

The criminal justice system is made for two groups of people: the poor and the wealthy.

"I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed." (Stevenson 313)

Almost every day, we hear about justice being served upon criminals and we, as a society, feel a sense of relief that another threat to the public has been sentenced to a term in prison, where they will no longer pose a risk to the world at large. However, there are very rare occasions where the integrity of the justice system gets skewed and people who should not have been convicted are made to serve heavy prison sentences. When word of this judicial misstep reaches the public, there is social outcry, and we begin to question the judicial system for committing such a serious faux pas.

Mass Incarceration is a growing dilemma in the United States that populates our prisons at an alarming rate. Michelle Alexander is a professor at Ohio State University and a graduate of Stanford law school. She states in her award winning book, The new Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness “In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million” (Alexander, 6). These young men and women are unable to afford a decent lawyer because they come from such a poverty-stricken background. Men and women are at a financial disadvantage in our justice system. Lawyers and attorneys cost a fortune and most people can just simply not afford them. Others plead to their charges because

“Did the entire Brooklyn got arrested today?” said Pinto in his article titled, “The Bail Trap” (page 6). Why do we arrest so many people daily? 365,000 people got arrested in New York City in 2013. The overburdened justice system cannot handle the large number of people that gets arrested daily. However, plea bargain is the way that the system deals with this issue of arresting over a thousand people daily for low offense charges. Ninety-seven percent of the people that are arrested plead guilty. The U.S. is at the highest incarceration rate in the world, therefore, we need a reform to get rid of bail and to prevent police officers from arresting so many people.

Only five percent of the world’s population live in The United States of America, but twenty-five percent of the incarcerated people live here. Our country has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and not because we are criminals, but because prisons operate under a corrupt system.“We only kill black people.’ Police Officer Says During Traffic Stop”. Yes, unfortunately, this is a legitimate news article published by Christine Hauser and Jacey Fortin on August 31, 2017. We are currently living in a society where wealth and race dominate exterminating any sense of justice and kindness remaining in our society. Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy is a memoir about how our justice system is shaped in a way in which according to Bryan Stevenson, “treats you much better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent ”(Stevenson, Bryan. "We need to talk about an injustice." TED. Feb. 2012. Lecture.). In addition to this, it also treats you better if you’re white. This memoir also tells us how the system treats the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned many people based on their race and socioeconomic status. In other words, the system is shaped in a way that the broken get punished because the system wants them to remain broken. In Just Mercy, Stevenson successfully uses ethos, pathos, and logos to persuade his audience to see a different perspective of our justice system which I believe is the reality of our justice system.

I never realized how money affects the level of justice people receive. As perfectly exemplified through the OJ Simpson, the richer a person is, the better chance they have at getting the verdict they desire. Although not all for hire defense lawyers are better than public defenders, but good defense lawyers are able to charge so much money because they are extremely good at their job and help get their client acquitted. In any other circumstance other than OJ Simpson, a black male accused of double homicide would never have been able to get acquitted. OJ could afford a legal team made up of experts and his legal team costed him $50,000 a day, more than some people make in a whole year. If he wasn’t rich, he would currently be in jail and there for the rest of his life. This is true most cases; money, which gets someone a better lawyer, gives them a better chance at a better sentence. To me, this says that having money and being rich means the law works more in their favor, or is able to argue better in their favor, and that is a fundamental error in our justice system.

In recent years, there have been many cases of the rich “getting away with murder.” One example that I absolutely love is, Ethan Couch.All at the age of 16, Ethan Couch was driving under the influence of stolen beer cases. When he killed 4 people and injured 9 people all together. Couch was then indicted with 4 charges of intoxicated manslaughter, but the judge only gave him 10 years of probation. Since it was argued that he had “affluenza.” Affluenza’s dictionary definition is “a psychological malaise supposedly affecting wealthy young people, symptoms of which include a lack of motivation, feelings of guilt, and a sense of isolation.” This basically gave him a get out jail free card, since his parents were too rich to teach him to be a

or the same criminal behavior, the poor are more likely to be arrested; if arrested, they are more likely to be charged; if charged, more likely to be convicted; if convicted, more likely to be sentenced to prison; and if sentenced, more likely to be given longer prison terms than members of the middle and upper classes.1 In other words, the image of the criminal population one sees in our nation’s jails and prisons is distorted by the shape of the criminal justice system itself. It is the face of evil reflected in a carnival mirror, but it is no laughing matter.