Lets take a minute to delve into the demographics of incarcerated prisoners today. According to Schmalleger, in 2012, 93% of all prisoners were male, with females picking up the remaining 7%; this is a 3% increase from 1980. 35% of all prisoners are white, 38% are black, and 21% are Hispanic (Schmalleger, 2015). Approximately two-thirds of prison inmates are between the ages of 25 and 44 years old. Why are women and minorities being incarcerated? Well, to be perfectly blunt, they broke the law. The last time I took a gander at old Lady Justice, she was wearing a blindfold; she doesn't care about your color, sex. or religion, she cares about justice. But since I am sure that is not the answer anybody is looking for on here, I'll play along.
On 4/3/2016 at approximately 2055 hours we were conducting cell searches in T12B pod of Lower Buckeye Jail (LBJ) at 3250 W. Lower Buckeye Rd.
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” –Nelson Mandela. Life in prison is unimaginable to most of the population of this world. Prison is a place of great diversity. An article from crimemuseum.com states the ratio of races in prison populations from 2007: “Statistics from 2007 indicate that 93% of the prison population is made up of males, and 7% of inmates were female. Comparisons with data from 1995 and 2000 indicate that those numbers remain nearly constant from year to year. Out of those locked up, 33% were White, 39% were Black, and about 20% were Hispanic” (“Prison”, 2017, p. 1). In prison, there is
Criminality in our country is often assigned to you at birth determined by trivial categories such as race, class, gender, immigration status, religion, and the list can continue forever. Life outcomes can be predetermined when taking all of these identities into account, making someone more susceptible to the reach of the mass incarceration system. However, I will be focusing on undocumented immigrants and how being seen as “illegal” is part of their daily lived experiences and how there are very strong parallels between the immigration detention centers and prisons in the United States. Undocumented people experience similar forms of social and political disenfranchisement that people affected by the criminal justice system also have to
Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to end up in prison. As Carroll writes, “According to the U.S. census, blacks are incarcerated five times more than whites are, and hispanics are nearly twice as likely to be incarcerated as whites. Hispanic men are 2.4 times more likely, to a sentencing project analysis of the data”. Given these statistics, the most important question is: why is the disparity so great between whites, blacks and Hispanics in terms of the prison population.
Hello Jamie, I agree with you in the reason why more and more women are being incarcerated. Women are steadily moving into more skilled careers and as a result, the temptations to commit crimes that are punishable by prison are more accessible. As in both males and females, parents are driven to provide for their children by any means necessary. The steady increase of drug offenses also plays a part in more and more women being incarcerated. I agree with you that black and whites do sell drugs at similar rates, but the majority of minorities live in the heavily policed cities so the offenses are noticed more. The majority of whites live in the suburbs or in the rural parts of the county where there is less police presence and less likely
Since the mid 80’s, the number of women incarcerated has tripled.The majority of women incarcerated are unskilled, impoverished and disproportionately women of color. As a result, African American children are nine times more likely to have a parent in prison than a White child.
On 10/06/17, at approximately 1743 hours, I Ofc Smith B3168 was serving chow by the front of D9 when I observed inmates grouping behind rows A, B and C. I stopped serving chow and walked to the rear of D9 and observed a food tray that had been dropped in front of the tables. Some inmates claimed that someone had dropped a tray and that is why everyone came over. I looked around and did not see any signs of any other activity taking place.
Politicians all throughout America accept bribes from private prisons in the form of lobbying and campaign donations, private prisons support politicians who will ensure their cells remain full. Private prisons use their wealth and political influence to pass laws that require minimum sentencing, expand penal labor, and increase punishments for prisoners adding time to sentences. According to the private prison contractors Corrections Corp of America, in October 2015 California governor Jerry Brown signed a deal that would remove thousands of prisoners from Federal prisons in California and relocate them to a private prison outside of California, The deal requires California to fund the prisons with hundreds of millions of dollars at an annually
Today, “the number of girls and women doing time is utterly unprecedented in U.S. history. In 1977, there were just slightly more than 11,000 women in state or federal prison. By 2004, the number of women in prisons had increased by a breathtaking 757 percent. At the end of 2006, there were 203,100 women in jails, state and federal prisons, plus another 1,094,000 women on probation or parole, for a total of 1.3 million females under some form of correctional supervision. Another 15,000-20,000 girls are being held in juvenile detention.”(CDC 2016). While Euro-American women still outnumber any other demographic group in jails and prisons, African American women are four times more likely to be locked up than their Euro-American
American prison is filled with minorities. The boom of minority in prison started after the 1980s war on drugs. Once arrested minorities are more likely to be convicted and their more likely to face hard sentence after begin convicted. In the article 1 in 3 black males will go to prison in their
It is not fair to have mentally ill offenders in prison. But not only is it not fair, it is also not right for them. How is it fair someone who can not control their mind be put in jail? They do not deserve to be in there. They need help, they need someone to show them what is right, they just need someone to be there for help .
The figure above compares the U.S incarceration rate with the rates of countries such as Canada, Australia, and European countries. The Western European democracies possess a rate of incarceration that taken together is only one-seventh the rate of the United States. Moreover, the rate imprisonment of Russia is only two-thirds of the U.S. rate. For instance, there is a reason why the rate of incarceration is significantly high compared to the rest of the world, profit. The bigger the number of people incarcerated, the bigger the pool of workers in correctional institutions.
here is a serious problem with our justice system. It is not a secret that people are judged by the color of their skin, ethnicity and in some cases by religious beliefs. I strongly believe that race affects how an individual is perceived/ treated and it plays an important role in the American criminal justice. Unfortunately, race plays an important role in the American criminal justice system, also this issue exists in other countries and societies. The American justice system is not an exception of this wrongdoing. For instance, minorities, such as African Americans and Latinos, are often prosecuted differently than Caucasians offenders. Verdicts not only tend to be much harsher, but are also accompanied by longer-term sentences. According to the article titled, “Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4 m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults.” where for the most part, the majority of inmates are minorities (Too Many Laws, Too Many Prisoners). “The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men” ([infographic] Combating Mass Incarceration – The Facts). The question is, why have minorities have become the majority of the American prison population?
In the 1830s and beforehand, jails were used for all purposes throughout the time period. The offenders held within them lived among their own filth and were treated inhumanely, because of these undesirable conditions of being put in jail, crime was decreased greatly. Though no one really cared if anyone who didn’t deserve to be in jail ended up in there anyway, like those with mental illnesses or the wrongfully accused. At the time, people viewed those with ‘retardation’ to be a family’s burden and something to be shameful of, most commonly the family would abandon the mentally ill family member at a hospital or in a public place for authorities to turn in.
The public has no idea how much it costs family members to keep in touch with their loved ones incarcerated in jail or prison. In-person visits are free but phone calls are extremely expensive. Family members on the outside are the ones paying for the inmate to make calls to them, yet they have few of the protections that other consumers enjoy. Unless the mainstream press, like the New York Times, features an article about the issue, families go on paying up to 20 times more per call than similar calls not initiated from within a prison. If people, like Heather Kofalt that was featured in the article, don't drive, their only contact is via telephone.