Mass Incarceration : A Small Look Into Our Predicament

Mass incarceration is an issue that defines us as a society. Today, the United States of America makes up about five percent of the world’s population and has twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. Also, one of every one hundred adults are locked up, and one in every thirty-seven adults in the United States is under some form of correctional supervision: in addition, African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. Young black people went through many difficulties; however, they are still called super predators by Hillary Clinton. One of many difficulties is the African slavery, although it was over a century ago, it left a scar and a horrible memory in everyone's mind. All the phenomenons that occurred in our country during the last century gathered thoughts and escalated the problem of mass incarceration which made the people including the police look differently at African American people. I am against the mass incarceration issue. Opposing Donald Trump, I think we should reduce the number of people behind bars with cautions, because It is a complex subject that has many causes and effects in the long term to the people inside and outside the prison.

Overall, the United States prison system and society’s view of African Americans needs to change. People need to make sure that the mistakes society has made in the past do not repeat themselves. In order to fix many of the existing problems it is important to focus on reforming the prison system. Doing so would prevent many future cases of injustice and racial

There is no question that mass incarceration is a worldwide epidemic that needs to be discussed and addressed. America has five percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prison population (Just Leadership USA, 2017) Various policies dated back centuries helped to create this problem of mass incarceration (Just Leadership USA, 2017). Today there are 2.3 million Americans incarcerated throughout the state, local, and federal jails (Just Leadership USA, 2017). New York City (NYC) houses approximately 10,000 inmates per year; 43.7% of these inmates are diagnosed with having a mental health disability (New York City Department of Corrections, 2017). 54% of the inmates on Rikers Island are arrested for a minor offense and should be able to fight their cases from home; however, in many instances the family members are of low socio-economic status and unable to post bail (New York City Department of Corrections, 2017). Minor offenses include loitering, jumping the turnstiles, unnecessary Parole / Probation violations, and trespassing. In many instances, it is the mentally ill and homeless individuals who are arrested for trespassing as they elect to sleep in the subways instead of taking residency in a shelter. Moreover, many of these offenses does not have to result in an arrest. Police officers have the autonym to let some of these individuals go with a warning, desk ticket, and/or summons.

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.

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 accounts for 5% of the world population, but our prison population makes up 25% of the world’s (Nagin, 2014). African Americans account for the largest percent of our prison population because they have the highest incarceration rate compared to other races. This essay will argue that African Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate than Caucasians. Proven by statistical data, there are grounds to establish that the racial disparity in incarceration rates is a social problem. To address this social problem, public policy should be implemented by the Federal Government.

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 of African American men has become a social injustice of our time. It can also be proclaimed to be known as a civil rights issue of our time. From the first time Africans were taken from their homeland and stripped of all human rights to become slaves, they- or we perhaps- have never truly possessed any real social justice. What does mass incarceration really mean to our black America? How does it affect our communities? When we really look at it, mass incarceration means a lot more than being placed in the back of a police car with handcuffs clinching your bones. It means a lot more than sitting in a jail or prison cell waiting for your time to be served.

Mass incarceration the United States has pervasive effects on minority populations. Having disproportionately high rates of minorities in prison has negatively affected the communities that are left behind. “After moderately stable rates for most of the twentieth century, the number of Americans in prison or jail accelerated so rapidly starting in the 1970s that legal scholars widely use the phrase mass incarceration to describe its scale,” . The effects span across generations and are largely unstudied. The long-term implications of mass incarcerations cannot be fully understood because we still have a large population of prisoners in the United States compared to other countries.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness goes into great detail on race related issues that were specific to black males, the mass incarceration, and how that lead to the development of institutionalized racism in the United States. She compares the Jim Crow with recent phenomenon of mass incarceration and points out that the mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that have been working together to warrant the subordinating status of black males. In this paper I will go into a brief examination of the range of issues that she mentions in her book that are surrounding the mass incarceration of black male populations.

Race, Incarceration and American Values explains how incarceration is a legalized form of genocide that is slowly destroying the fiber of African American communities. Glenn Loury, along with Pamela Karian, Tommie Shelby and Loic Wacquant discuss how America has let fear and greed cause a inequitable landscape for its inhabitants who have unfortunately been born on the wrong side of the hill. The principals of equality and freedom on which America was founded on has become nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Maybe the pride America displays to the World as a Global power, incapable of wrong doing is what is holding it back from recognizing the mistakes it made and undergoing to process of change. Or maybe it 's what we fear most, it 's what we thought in our head but never dare to say. That it 's a careful crafted system to keep those with power in power.

Two million African Americans are presently under the criminal-justice system, in prison, or on probation. The past few decades, millions of more people have been in and out of the System. To be 100 percent; nearly 70 percent of people released from prison are re-arrested within three years. Most people appreciate that millions of African Americans were locked into a second-class status during slavery and Jim Crow. These earlier systems of racial control made a reminder of Political, social, and economic discrimination that this nation is still haven’t overcome. This non-ending; disturbing issue to this day; has a widely effect many families and communities. Prisoners are released and fear is increased.

The United States is said to be the largest jailers in the world. Holding roughly 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. alone holds about 25% of the world’s total prison population (Lee, 2015). As the class has learned repeatedly in senior seminar, the prison population in the U.S. is overwhelmed and overcrowded. The class has also learned that the War on Drugs is a huge contributing factor for the increase of mass incarceration, but is that the only contributing factor? My theory to the mass incarceration rates in the United States is correlated with racial profiling. Nearly 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the U.S., of that population; 1 million are African Americans alone and one in six black men have been incarcerated since 2001

For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. (The Editorial Board)

“As the walls of the ghetto shook and threatened to crumble, the walls of the prison were correspondingly extended, enlarged and fortified. . .” (Wacquant 2002:52). In his account, Wacquant implies that once ghettos began to disperse, American society required a new place for African Americans to reside: prison. Reading this article, one would never know that African Americans existed outside ghettos and prisons. The concept of African Americans in suburbia or anywhere of decent living standards is ignored completely. There is no dispute over the “racially skewed mass imprisonment” (Wacquant 2002:56) of black men and women, but not only African Americans inhabit ghettos and the “inner city.” However, the “centuries-old