Economic Impacts Of Mass Incarceration In The United States

Although the United States composes a mere five percent of the world’s population, it holds twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners (13th 0:01-0:05). In recent years, mass incarceration, or the practice of arresting vast amounts of people, has become a relevant issue within the United States. As rising amounts of individuals, primarily minorities, are arrested, for both serious and petty crimes, government spending on jails and inmates has undergone a drastic increase as well. The large sum of money that has been directed toward correctional facilities has initiated a great amount of controversy, as many believe that it should be used to cover the rising cost of education instead. Since the majority of inmates are currently minorities,

In today’s society, discrimination is an issue that is considered to be a thing of the past. In a country with such diversity it is hard to believe that people living in the “land of the free” face issues of racism. This paper will focus specifically on the social problem of mass incarceration of minority groups and how the criminal justice system targets these groups. Although this social problem can be linked to specifically African Americans, the impacts of mass incarceration can be felt by almost everyone. I have chosen three articles that focus on how the criminal justice system is masking mass imprisonment a major problem in minority communities.

The United States is less the 5% of the world population but has almost 25% of the world’s prison population (Coates, 2015; Waldman, 2016). In the last 40 years, the number of American civilians imprisoned by the United States has increased 500%. (Mauer, 2011). However, this explosion in incarceration rates has not been evenly distributed throughout the American population (Waldman, 2016). While one in seventeen White men will be imprisoned in their lifetime, one in sixteen Latino men will face this fate and for Black men, the number is one in three (Mauer,2011). Neither the racial disparity in incarceration nor its scale was accidental (Coates, 2015). The mass incarceration of Black men in the United States was a direct result of the “War

Mass incarceration became a public policy issue in the United States in the early 2010s. Now in 2016, there is still much debate over the country’s incarcerated population and incarceration rate. The nation has the highest incarcerated population in the world, with 2,217,947 inmates, in front of China with 1,649,804. America incarcerates 693 inmates per 100,000 residents, only the African island nation Seychelles incarcerates at a higher rate, with 799 for every 100,000 residents. The problem of mass incarceration continues to be assessed in various contexts. Recent analyses are historian Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and criminologist Dr. Elizabeth Brown’s “Toward Refining the Criminology of Mass Incarceration: Group-Based Trajectories of U.S. States, 1977—2010.”

Before her conclusion, Alexander points out the multiple similarities between current mass incarceration and Jim Crow (182). One major comparison is how mass incarceration segregates the community physically through

Second, mass incarceration impacts society by aleinating the convict and his or her family in numerous ways. For example, Professor Gottschauk argues that mass incarceration negatively impacts the convict and the family unit in the following four areas: (1) Disturbance of free and fair elections; (2) Loss of the promise of the American dream; (3) Forfeiture of pensions, disability benefits, and veerans’ benefits; and (4) Failure to achieve future job potential in

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.

Mass incarceration became a public policy issue in the United States in the 2000s. Now in 2016, there are still many questions about America’s incarceration rate, 698 prisoners per 100,000 people, which is only surpassed by Seychelle’s at 868 for every 100,000. They concern the phenomenon’s beginning, purpose, development, and essentially resolution. In her book published this year, assistant professor of history and African and African-American studies at Harvard Elizabeth Hinton challenges popular belief that mass incarceration originated from Reagan’s War on Drugs. Mass incarceration’s function as a modern racial caste system is discussed in a 2010 book by Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, civil

Mass Incarceration in the United States has been a large topic of choice because rapid growth in the prison and jail populations, the long sentences the inmates face, and the inability for some inmates to incorporate themselves back into society. Since the 1970’s the U.S. prison population quadrupled from 158 to 635 people per 100,000, causing the U.S. to gain the title of country with the highest incarceration rate. (Massoglia, Firebaugh, & Warner, 2013, p. 142; Muller, 2012) As the growth of the U.S prison and jail population rapidly increased, so did the growth of the three major contributors to that population – African Americans, Hispanics, and whites – with African American and

The United States has the biggest imprisonment rate on the planet, and paying a high cost for it. Detainment strength finished in the mid-1970s when the jail populace expanded from 300,000 to 1.6million detainees, and the imprisonment rate from 100 for each 100,000 to more than 500 for every 100,000. Nonetheless, there is by all accounts little relationship between the wrongdoing rate and the imprisonment rate (Clear et al., 2013).

Mass Incarceration is a predicament in the U.S. because in the land of the free, there are more than two million people in prison. Prisons are homes to the majority of twenty-two percent of the U.S. population. The U.S. has a massive incarceration rate, seven hundred and sixteen per every one hundred thousand. The U.S. makes five percent of the world’s population and the third country in which most people live in but number one incarcerating humans.

In the United States incarceration is inevitable for most americans, this dilemma has created mass incarceration throughout the country. "Almost 30 years ago there were over

In the eyes of many, mass incarceration constitutes a brutal technique of punishing individuals for excessive periods of time. There are many reasons to be doubtful that the system of mass incarceration has helped the nation in any form. Rather, locking up millions of people for nonviolent crimes seems just too excessive and redundant. According to “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” by Ta-Nehisi Coates published in The Atlantic magazine, the majority of those incarcerated are minorities mainly African American. More clearly, the technique of mass incarceration is used to limit the numbers of minorities in society or control the minority population. Regulations regarding incarcerating millions must be reviewed thoroughly on a federal level and refine precedent to a better future. What major actions must be taken into account to change the turmoil of mass incarceration? Is it possible to adjust the law in reparation for a better future?

America is experiencing a social phenomenon commonly referred to as mass incarceration, in which the rate of incarceration has increased by, “...has grown by 700 percent.(Goffman)” in the last 40 years. Mass incarceration is difficult to digest in totality due to its immense nature, nuance and variety of answers with the essence of ‘could be right’. In order to decipher the complex puzzle of mass incarceration, we must establish borders to manifest clarifying order in the overwhelming clutter of data. Theory will assist in demonstrating how the general and specific facts of issues, in this case mass incarceration, relate by essentially declaring the philosophical frame of the interpretation. In order to gain a nuanced understanding of America’s mass incarceration, three relatively distinct theories will be applied: conflict theory, structural functionalism and symbolic interactionism. These theories are categorized by two approaches of sociological investigation- macrosociological, which emphasizes the analysis of social systems and populations on a large scale, and micro sociological, which emphasizes the impact individuals have on social structure.

In America’s tough economic society, over population has become an exceedingly hot topic issue. However, overcrowding in America’s prison system has been a severe problem since the 1970's. The majority of the changes have come from different policies on what demographic to imprison and for what reason. The perspective of locking up criminals because they are "evil" is what spawned this (Allen, 2008). Because of this perspective the prison system in America is in need of serious reorganization. Since 1980, most states have one or more of their prisons or the entire system under orders from the federal courts to maintain minimum constitutional standards (Stewart, 2006).