Debtor's Prison Case Study

As seen in the War on Drugs comic (comix refers to underground comics, which I don’t believe The Real Cost of Prisons Comix really counts as, so I use comic instead), the incarcerated find it difficult to find jobs, welfare, and an education after leaving the prison system. In this way, the criminal justice system functions as a form of social control. We lock up as many poor people as possible in order to prevent their futures and further income inequality in the United States in favor of the rich. Poor people are considered second-class citizens simply because they are given more direct benefit from the government, and, as we’ve read in Taibbi’s book, even that is not a guarantee. This hatred of those who are without food and shelter stems from a fear of possibly being in that position someday as well. When talking about poverty, I always think of the song “Kill the Poor” by the Dead Kennedys, which has the lyric, "Away with excess enemy, But no less value to property.” When people are inclined to destroy families in order to gain a slightly higher return on profit, disaster

In our country, hundreds of people are apprehended every day for misdemeanors crimes. Our local justice system will then charge these individuals with fines that can be as much as $2,000 or more. Failure to pay this said fine can immediately result in potential jail time. Yet, if you can pay your bail, you will spend no more than 24 hours in a local facility. Many of these people are poor, while the remainder of these people tends to be middle to upper-class citizens.

Many people who are homeless use jail as an alternative to sleeping outside especially during the winter months. They jump between shelters and jail because it is the only place for them to go. A survey conducted with 363 prisoners that have spent 5 or more consecutive nights in jail in the greater Toronto area showed that 22.9 percent of the prisoners were homeless9. When looking at all the homeless that were incarcerated 30% of them that were questioned admitted to committing a petty crime in order to get off the streets10. One fifth avoided bail to ensure that they would be in jail for as long as possible10. Before being discharged 85% of the homeless anticipated being homeless again9. This restarts the cycle which leads them to going back to jail for a few nights of food and medical service. This is not a solution to the problem as nothing is solved and people remain homeless.

Taxpayers will experience an increase of approximately $27.5 billion over the next five years that will be spent on prison and the prison system. (Riordan 2007).

Adoption of laws and policies that punish homeless people rather than addressing the problems that cause homelessness is an ineffective approach. Penalizing people for engaging in innocent behavior – such as sleeping in public, sitting on the sidewalk, or begging – will not reduce the occurrence of these activities or keep homeless people out of public spaces when they have no other place to sleep or sit or no other means of living. With insufficient resources for shelter and services for homeless people, enforce punishment for unavoidable activities is not only pointless, it is inhumane (Brown,1999, July/August). Relying on law enforcement officials and jails to address homelessness and related issues, such as mental illness and substance abuse, that are more appropriately handled by service providers, causes problems and widespread frustrations within the criminal justice system. Police officers are not adequately trained to respond to the situations that arise, the criminal justice system does not provide the necessary treatment

For my analysis, I decided to read the 2006 book Punishment and Inequality in America by author Bruce Western. The book takes a look into the relationship among crime, incarceration, and inequality and what really connects them together. Western shows that although there was a decrease in crime rates about 20 years ago, the reason behind this decrease is not what it may seem and that the decrease may of even come at a significant cost to those effected by the prison boom. Through my analysis, I hope to explore and convey what Western has claimed and examine if his arguments hold truth or not in dealing with our prison systems. On top of this, I will attempt to connect a few theories we as a class have learned about throughout the semester to what Western has has claimed in his book.

More than 3 billion people are living in poverty across the world, among those an estimated 43.1 million people in America are living in poverty. There are many causes of poverty, but mass incarceration is one of the most prominent ones. When people get out of prison or jail, they have a very low chance of getting a job and finding a home because they have the label of being a criminal. People tend to explain poverty especially poverty in America is that people are lazy and do not want to work, but that is not the reason at all. The government is ultimately responsible for distinguishing who is in poverty and what measures are going to be done to help those people get assistance. But because people do not particularly talk about this

Crime rates are down in America, yet there is an unproportionately large number of Americans incarcerated. This paper will delve into and examine this problem and how it is closely linked to private prisons and the issues surrounding them. While private prisons claim to be cost effective and well-run, evidence has shown that these profit-driven companies ignore ethical consequences by purposefully lengthening prisoners’ sentences, target certain groups for incarceration and maintain despicable living standards for the prisoners; ultimately, these prisons have caused more harm than good for the state.

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

The United States prison system struggles eminently with keeping offenders out of prison after being released. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than third of all prisoners who were arrested within five years of released were arrested within six months after release, with more than half arrested by the end of the year (Hughes, Wilson, & Beck, 2001). Among prisoners released in 2005 in 23 states with available data on inmates returned to prison, about half (55 percent) had either a parole or probation violation or an arrest for a new offense within three years that led to imprisonment (Durose, Cooper, & Snyder, 2014). Why are there many ex-offenders going back to prison within the first five years of release? Are there not enough resources to help offenders before or/and after being released from prison.

Mass incarceration has grown and developed so much, that it’s come to define and create fear in America’s minority communities. “America contains approximately 5% of the world’s population, but has 25% of the world’s incarcerated.” (DeVernay, 2016) There’s always been an underlying tension between minorities and authorities, and that’s due to the unjust discrimination they face in the eyes of the law.

“Americans cannot be imprisoned for debt,” is a statement that I am sure most of the public believes is true, while people who are more knowledgeable of criminal justice know it is untrue. The statement is true due to there being no explicit law stating that Americans in debt must be imprisoned. There are currently no laws in place that specifically target indebted citizens for imprisonment. Debtors’ prisons were banned in 1833, and the practice of imprisoning someone due to debt is a civil-rights violation. In 1983 this decision was upheld when incarcerating debtors was determined to be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause (Hager, 2015).

Within this paper, you will find a comprehensive review of the United States prison system, and why it needs to analyzed to better support and reform the people of this country. I plan to persuade the other side (politicians and society) into seeing that the way the prison system is now, is not ethical nor economical and it must change. We have one of the world’s largest prison population, but also a very high rate of recidivism. Recidivism is when the prisoners continuously return to prison without being reformed. They return for the same things that they were doing before. So, this leads us to ask what exactly are we doing wrong? When this happens, we as a nation must continuously pay to house and feed these inmates. The purpose of a prison needs to be examined so we can decide if we really are reforming our inmates, or just continuing a vicious cycle. What is the true purpose of prison besides just holding them in a cell? There must be more we can do for these hopeless members of society.

Crimes that would be expected to be done by adults are being done by juveniles such as a killing of a woman and her kid’s execution style. This type of crime was done by a 16 year old male (Murphy, W. (2012). Crimes that are being committed, that would normally be done and seen doing by an adult is being done juveniles as young as 12 years old. Sending them to facilities just for juvenile offenders for treatment or to get advice or for long-term sentences isn’t working. Studies done by Richard Mendel show that juveniles being sent to these types of facilities are becoming either more violent or recommitting the type of crimes once they’re out. Juveniles who do crimes that put society in danger should be sentenced to adult prisons with an adult

In Chapter 1 of the book A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as punishment for the poor by Alexes Harris it deals with monetary sanctions or legal debt owed to the state. The problem is that the ones getting the most affected are the disenfranchised, the poor and minorities, in debt owed to the government. Harris stated that he will be making two arguments. One of them is stated,” First, monetary sanctions imposed by the criminal justice system create and sustain inequality in the United States” and the second is,” Second, the system of monetary sanctions is enforced by criminal justice bureaucrats whose discretion is shaped by a culture of accountability”. The author later describes how he will support those two arguments throughout the chapters