Matt Taibbi's The Divide

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.

Over the past few decades, the United States has witnessed a huge surge in the number of individuals in jail and in prison. Evidence suggests the mass imprisonment policy from the last 40 years was a horrible catastrophe. Putting more people in prison not only ruined lives, it disrupted families, prevented ex-prisoners to find housing, to get an education, or even a good job. Regrettably, the United States has a higher percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is increasing exponentially. The expense produced by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. Although people are incarcerated for a number of reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. By researching mass incarceration, I hope to get society to understand that incarcerating an individual not only effects the family, but we will look at the long term consequences on society and how the United States can remain safe and, at the same time, undo much of the damage that results from large-scale imprisonment.

“Poverty goes up; Crime goes down; Prison population doubles. It doesn 't fit, unless some sort of alternative explanation comes into play. Maybe all those new nonviolent prisoners fit into some new national policy imperative. Maybe they all broke some new set of unwritten societal rules. But what?” – Matt Taibbi

Have you ever been to prison before? Unfortunately it is not uncommon for many people in the United States to end up in prison at any given time in their life. Chances are, if you have not been to prison you know somebody that has been imprisoned, as America has the highest rate of incarceration in the whole world. Although America’s population only accounts for 5% of the world's population, we have the highest prison rate at 25% of the whole world’s incarcerated population (Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2015). Why do we continue to see these prisons overcrowded, and how exactly does this affect the inmates?

No matter how you look at it, the prison system within the US holds too many people without valid reason. The last decade has seen a lot of states cut down on crime while also cutting down on their prison populations. In the years between 1999 and 2012, for example, both New York and New Jersey cut their prison populations by 30%, and crime rates fell “faster than they did nationally.”

Prison Overcrowding: Prisons have become warehouses of human beings as opposed to institutions meant to provide a means to engage in restitution by delinquent individuals in society. “One necessary condition for rising incarceration rates has been the massive expansion in prison construction and capacity, without which prison populations could not have grown so dramatically” (Guetzkow & Schoon, 2015). As more prisons are being built, more delinquents are being incarcerated in order to fill them. “Prison facilities are filled 38 percent beyond rated capacity, with overcrowding being particularly acute in higher-security institutions” (Rowland, 2013).

The United States currently has the highest number of prisoners in the world. According to Glaze and Herrmann (2013), approximately 6.9 million adults are under some form of correctional supervision in the United States. Crime in the United States is relatively equal to that of any other industrialized nation, so why does the United States house so many inmates irrespective of the fact that the nation cannot successfully manage a budget for the institution as well as manage the inmates? An inmate, Victor Hassine, provides insight as to what prisoners physically and mentally experience during incarceration as well as his ideas on the effects of prisons on inmates in his book, Life without Parole.

There are many offenders within the criminal justice system, the political economy of the prison crisis in America has

In the U.S. there has been a rise in incarcerations, the numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago despite the fact that crime is at historic lows. So what are we to make of the leap in time typically served for crimes in America’s society? Either the justice system was too lenient in the past, or the justice system is too strict now. Have we just now realized the real gravity of murder, or are we now overreacting? The United States currently over-incarcerates its citizens, prisoners have become part of the economy, manufacturing and assembling products for major corporations. Based on the research, it would be unethical to continue a trend of mass incarceration when the conditions are unsustainable, inhumane, and the product of unethical polices.

An uninformed person might say that the amount of imprisonment is going up because there are more crimes being committed. In the time between 1960 and 1990, property crimes rose by 200 percent and violent crimes rose by 400 percent. So it is clear that rising crime rates did play a part in the increased incarceration rate during that time. However, in recent years, this has not been the case. This is because

in recent decades, violent crimes in the United States of America have been on a steady decline, however, the number of people in the United States under some form of correctional control is reaching towering heights and reaching record proportions. In the last thirty years, the incarceration rates in the United States has skyrocketed; the numbers roughly quadrupled from around five hundred thousand to more than 2 million people. (NAACP)In a speech on criminal justice at Columbia University, Hillary Clinton notes that, “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.” (washington post) How could this be? Are Americans more prone to criminal activity than the rest of the world? How could they be more prone to criminal activity if crime rates have been dropping? Numbers like that should be cause for concern, because if crime rates are dropping then it is only logical for one to expect the number of incarceration to go down as well; unfortunately, the opposite is true. Shockingly, there seem to be a few people who actually profits from keeping people in jails. The practice of mass incarceration who most see as a major problem in the United States of America is actually beneficial to some. The prison system in the United States who was create to

Between 1980 and 2000, there was a fifteenfold increase in the number of people sent to prison on drug charges. Many other sentences, especially for violent crime, were lengthened. By 2000, more than two million people were in prison- roughly four times as many as in 1972...and nearly half of that took place in the 1990’s. In explaining the crime drop of the 1990’s - imprisonment accounts for roughly one-third of the drop in

The subject of prison evokes fearful and violent images seen in movies or on television; outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water that are intended to repulse people and deter them from committing crimes and ending up in such a position. Unfortunately, the reality of the American prison system is just as troubling as the dated stereotypes surrounding it. Despite its success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the modern prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society. It has proven to be an inefficient and ineffective system by focusing on punishment over rehabilitation, leading to issues such as overcrowding, wasting taxpayers’ money and a high recidivism rate.

The promise of the original American Dream has become an illusion due to the lack of opportunities available for Americans to succeed in present-day America. To demonstrate this issue, The Divide by Matt Taibbi focuses on the increasing wealth gap between the rich and the poor. Particularly, Taibbi tells us a story about a young man who suffers from the unfair treatment in the American justice system because of his homelessness. Taibbi writes, “He wasn’t educated, but he knew this math cold: a cop writing something meant he was about to be handed a summons, which in turn meant a court appearance and then jail if he couldn’t pay the two-hundred-dollar fine or whatever it was, which he probably couldn’t” (55). In this quote, the author is referring

Today’s prison population shows that an overwhelming majority of prisoners are the product of social breakdown. Prisoners are far more likely to have lived in poverty, to come from broken families, to be unemployed and in considerable debt and to be experiencing an addiction. Deprivation is an important factor that leads to crime. Poverty doesn’t cause crime but there is an obvious direct relationship between them. Effects of deprivation can impact on