Analysis Of Prisonomics: Lessons From America's Mass Incarceration

Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission)

Mass Incarceration is a huge problem in United States culture. No other country in the world incarcerates its population the way that America does. “The U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world – both per capita and in terms of total people behind bars. The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet it has almost 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population.” Worse yet the majority of the incarcerated individuals belong to a minority group despite not participating in illegal activity any more frequently than their white counterparts. Is the United States criminal justice system racist and if so what is the cause behind this racism. After the end of slavery, many southern black Americans traveled to the north to escape endless violence and discrimination. In the south they could only find low paying field jobs whereas in the northern cities there were steady factory jobs promised as well as the hope that discrimination could be escaped. The northerners while against slavery were not egalitarian and were not in favor of hoards of black Americans surging into their cities and taking jobs away from the white working poor. The need for social control by white Americans only grew with the population of black Americans living in the cities and working in the factories. The rhetoric of “law and order” first came about in the late 1950s as white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was encouraged by southern governors and law enforcement.

More people have been locked up in the United States than any other country. In the article “Prison Industrial Complex Economics”, it states, “the United States has approximately 6.5 million people under the criminal justice supervision. Incarcerated rate has grown from 176 in 1973 up to 700 in the year of 2000” (Waquant). Incarceration is a big business that feeds into drug violence, corrupted guards, and racism in criminal justice system, taxpayer cost, and racism in the criminal system and through privatization of prisons.

Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV.   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison.   Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.

In any given year now, incarceration rates has tripled with approximately 13 million people introduced to American jails in any given year. This increase in the prison population far outpaced the crime rate and the US population growth. Today, America has around 5% of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prison population.

The U.S. holds five percent of the world’s population, but carries twenty five percent of the world’s prison population. This staggering statistic should be a rude awakening to the way we punish and imprison our degenerative citizens. It seems like the common consequence for these individuals is to lock them in a room and throw away the key. The decent majority of people that make up this population are African Americans and Hispanics. The real question is why do we have such a racially disproportionate amount of inmates? The U.S. has some of the strictest drug

Mass incarceration has recently become a major problem within the United States. Although crime rates have dropped since the 1990s, incarceration rates have soared. This trend is largely associated with increased enforcement of drug-related crimes. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, this problem involves racial discrepancies when regarding these mass incarcerations. Incarcerations appear to be the most prominent throughout urban areas and the south, which happen to be the areas where African American males often reside or where racial politics are known to be apparent. In turn, this leads to disproportionate imprisonments. This problem requires immediate attention, but aspects of state and local politics have intensified incarcerations due a variety of factors, which include the state’s focus on the financial incentives that the federal war on drugs has created, the “tough on crime” stance that many politicians posses (largely republican), and the lack of rehabilitation services.

Why prisoners need to go to the prison? I can never forget the scene in The Shawshank Redemption, which Brooks Halten finally committed to suicide when he was released after 50 years life incarceration. The form of mass incarceration, prison, is supposed to be the place where prisoners can rehabilitate in order to return into society. Ex-offenders aren’t eligible for public welfare such as Medicaid and public housing (Stevenson, 2012). They are legally discriminated against when applying for appropriate jobs (Stevenson, 2012). So the issue rises: prisoners rehabilitate for what? To be thrown back into economy without jobs? To go back into communities without hope? If modern mass incarceration isn’t primarily concerning with rehabilitating prisoners, what is its purpose? Why the prisons are continuing in expansion? Whose interests do prisons serve?

“One out of every 31 Americans (7 Million) are in prison, jail, or some other form of correctional supervision. A high incarceration rate in the United States has led to the prison-industrial complex, which has provided jobs and profits to legions of companies and people. The field of corrections is big business.”1 I believe that this fact is the best way in which to start my paper. The main idea of corrections, as the name suggests, is to correct the behavior that has caused an offender to stray from the straight and narrow. However, as our prison population grows and recidivism rates increase we are not only seeing our prison system fail, but we are seeing a new and emerging industry take hold in this country. Increasing prison populations and the number of re-offenders is showing a relatively obvious failure of the current system. In my time as a criminal justice major I have taken a variety of classes on criminal justice, one of the most interesting for me (aside from this class) was restorative justice. In my restorative justice class I was introduced to the idea that the criminal justice system was taking the conflict away from the victim and the community and was focusing too much on punishment and not enough on rehabilitation. I understand that some people feel that restorative justice is too lenient, that by allowing offenders to bypass jail restorative justice gives them a pass and allows them to basically get away with an offense, however restorative

The United States is known for being the greatest country in the world. Land of the free, home of the brave, and leader of the free world, but the United States is actually the world's leading jailer. Incarceration rates have been increasing exponentially in the United States, however the crime rate has been on a steady decline over the last quarter of a century. These increasing number of imprisonments has resulted in the United States leading the nations by highest percentage of incarcerations per capita. The high incarceration rate in the U.S. has negatively affected the economy. As stated by Christian Henrichson “ such as employee benefits, capital costs, in-prison education services, or hospital care for inmates”, it is costly not only for state governments to maintain the correctional facilities, but many are funded by taxpayers. Taxpayers are deluded by state and federal governments by convincing them that if prisons aren’t supported and unfunded, the safety of citizens is in jeopardy due to crime rates increasing and low incarceration rates.

The United States is one of the largest countries in the world so high incarceration rates are expected. However, this rate has drastically increased in the past forty years, surpassing those of countries such as China, which has a population four times larger than the United States

The United States is home to five percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoner. There must be a change to the current prison system which is doing more harm than good in American society and must be reformed. Reasons for this claim are that American prisons are too overcrowded with inmates, which creates a dangerous and unhuman environment. The cost to run a prison has gotten too expensive for tax payer pockets, and lastly the prison system is more as a punishment instead of rehabilitation with about sixteen percent of inmates most serious offence being drug charges. Prisons fall short of reforming criminals and the government is obligated to completely reform the prison systems in the United States.

The Unites States of America’s prison system is a flawed mess. To open the eyes of our government we must first take a stand against unlawful government decisions, and show support for the greater good of society. What are our own tax-dollars paying for, what are the flaws in the justice/prison system, why is overcrowding in prisons causing tension, and what are ways our society and government can rebuild the system that has been destroyed over the years? Most criminals in prisons are not a danger to our society because they commit crimes just to use jail as a shelter, causing the overcrowding of prisons and wasting away of what we really should be paying for.

The United States needs to crack down on crime and punish criminals to set an example. This is a very unpopular notion that is “backwards” however The United States prisons have not been doing a good job with punishing and rehabilitating criminals. Life is fairly comfortable, free cable, access to educational opportunities and psychiatric counseling in prisons, on average 52% of criminals return to crime. These people that committed horrible acts and need to be separated from society gets a life where everything is paid for and they worry about very little. Before recent time’s people avoided prison because they knew it would be hard. Why? Because it was not nice inside. Today however prison is easier to live in and it’s an easy life.

America’s social justice compared to Europe’s when it comes to the prison systems is something to take a look at. In America, we have over 685 prisoners per 100,000 and we support the death penalty while Europe has 85 per 100,000. As T.R. Reid states in The United States of Europe, “Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading ‘Love Thy Neighbor,’ but they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any European nation.” What tends to be a bigger concern than the prison systems is America’s economy and its social costs.