Rates Of Incarceration

This book written by Bert Todd R. Clear, a distinguished Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was published in 2007 at the Oxford University Press being a summary of a number of sources. Clear is an accredited source because he is the founding editor of the journal Criminology & Public Policy and an author of eleven books, numerous articles, and book chapters on criminal justice. The intended audiences are for people that are in interested in the justice system but you do not need to be knowledgeable to understand the context of this article. This text is very argumentative, Clear makes the claim that mass incarceration effects poor neighborhood in negative ways. The date that this book was written is not that many years ago so will still have usefulness towards the research.

Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission)

Once upon a time, Americans could proudly say that America was the land of freedom and opportunity. As the Pledge of Allegiance states, “One nation under God, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” However, under the current criminal justice system, more and more people lose their liberties because of the crimes they have committed. According to Roy Walmsley, a consultant of the United Nations and Associate of the International Center for prison studies, “In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represent about 4.4 percent of the world 's population, it houses

The vast societal effects from mass incarceration have caused an increasingly alienated population to form in the U.S., which can be broadly classified in the dual areas of lasting effects and impacts to the family unit. First, the lasting effects of high incarceration rates are that they impact the rights of the convict, particularly African Americans. For example, noted civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander posits that the long term effects of mass incarceration operate to deny black Americans the future right to volte, the ability to obtain public benefits, the possibility to sit on juries, and ultimately the opportunity to secure gainful employment (Steiker, 2011), Moreover, professor Alexander argues that this mass incarceration together with the prior Jim Crow laws and the past practice of slaery in the U.S. operate to ensure that black Americans remain s subordinate class of citizens defined primarily by their race (Steiker, 2011).

The United States of America is phrased by many, as being “the land of the free.” Yet, the Unites States currently has the highest per capita prison population than any other country. The United States makes up only 5% of the world’s population and of that 5%, 25% of our overall nation’s population is currently incarcerated. A few factors that attribute to our high rates of incarceration include, sentencing laws: such as mandatory- minimum sentencing, lack of initial deterrence from crime, the war on drugs and the presence of recidivism. With our ever growing incarceration rates and the cost of housing individual offenders averaging $22,000 a criminal justice agenda. Recidivism refers to a person 's relapse into criminal behavior resulting in rearrests, reconviction or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the prisoner 's release (National Institute of Justice.) Many programs have been implemented in our prison system to help reduce the recidivism rates. Programs such as educational/ vocational programming, reentry programs, substance abuse programs and subsidized employment are among many programs in which have been proven effective. Yet, due to costs deficits, the clock is ticking to find evidence based programs to invest in. So, the question currently being sought after is, which method is most effective in reducing recidivism rates?

There are a lot of important issues that Americans face today. But one of the most important is mass incarceration. This problem is affecting the economy, the government spends billions of dollars to keep people in prison. Private own prison are getting a lot of money just to house prisoners. Prison is one of the biggest businesses in America. These prisons are profiting from minorities and by holding undocumented immigrants. A lot of people that are incarcerated didn’t commit serious crimes. Some people are in prison on nonviolent drug charges. Does America Needs a Alternatives to Incarceration, maybe the government should try to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders.By population china is the most populous country on earth. And yet America a country with four times less the population has more prisoners. This is happening in a country that advocates freedom and democracy. A country sometimes called the free world .Is this happening because America has the most violent criminals in the world? What are the causes for the unusually high incarceration rate in America? Because of government continuously implying new strict laws America has become the country with the highest incarcerated.

From the article titled “The Punishment Imperative : The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America” by Todd Clear, and Natasha Frost, it goes into full detail on why the incarceration rate is failing. America incarcerates way more people that far exceeds the rate of our top allies. “With just under ten million people incarcerated in prisons and jails worldwide, America incarcerated more than one-fifth of the world’s total prison population.” (The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America, Page 17) The United States now is in the lead in the world of incarceration, that beats countries like Russia, Rwanda, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Cuba, and the country has four times the rate of European nations. Maintaining the prisons came with a staggering price. In 2006, jurisdictions would spend around $68 billion on correctional supervision. They went from spending from $9 billion in 1982 to an 660 percent increase of $68 billion in 2006. Around the same time period, direct judicial expenditures has increased by 503 percent and the policing expenditures increased by 420 percent. The huge majority of the correctional dollars, with was around 90 percent, went to stabilize mass incarceration. “With a national average annual price tag of almost $29,000 per person per year of incarceration, it cost taxpayers at least ten times more to incarcerate a person than it would have cost to maintain him or her under supervision in the community.” (The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America, Page 21) In general, this is an issue because the taxpayers are forced to pay a lot of money to maintain a person in prison. Locking up a serious violent offender is justified, however, for thousands of lower-level inmates, it costs taxpayers more than preventing

Mass incarceration is a barrier effecting many minorities and communities. The growth in incarceration rates in the United States over the past 40 years is historically reoccurring. According to statistics the war on drugs is the number one drive into our prisons. It took a toll on how diligently police enforcement do their jobs, communities, citizens and our 14th amendment rights which addresses equal protection under the law to all citizens, the amendment also addresses what is called "due process", which prevents citizens from being illegally deprived of life, liberty, or property. Marijuana and Narcotics are the most common drug when it comes to distributing and possession. Drug use and abuse is an expensive problem in the United States, both financially and socially. Another factor that contribute to mass incarnation rates

As Americans, we live one of the greatest countries in the world. Things are not perfect, but they can range from good to great. However, there is one area that seems to continuously fall behind our great national standard. This area is the level of people that to fill up our prison system. The United States has only five percent of the world 's population, but it has houses 25 percent of its prisoners, which is around 2.2 million people (Collier, 2014). One of the main reasons the United States has become the prison capital of the world is due to the hard stance on all drugs. This stance led to the use of mandatory minimum sentencing laws to keep drug offenders locked up for longer than they should be.

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

The criminal justice system has many flaws that many people believe It is broken. The first step of fixing the system is by acknowledging that the system is broken. According to the documentary Fixing the System, the increase of incarceration is due to nonviolent drug offenses. There are more drug offenses than for homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, immigration, sex offenses, etc., combined. The cost for incarceration has dramatically increased as people kept getting incarceration due to the nonviolent drug offenses. President George W. Bush decided that building more prisons and jails was the best way to teach the lesson of war on drugs. Although incarcerating individuals’ due drugs wasn’t helping get rid of the problem because they

That unequal incarceration rates is a result of crimes committed, and not racial bias. Being more black males were in jail or prison, does not mean the criminal justice system is racist. “ They concluded that large racial differences in criminal offending; not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionally more than whites and for longer terms.” They also stated “For example found that blacks frequently received more lenient punishment.” A 1994 justice department survey of felony cases from the country’s largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Blacks were more likely to receive prison

The United States is one of the largest countries in the world so high incarceration rates are expected. However, this rate has drastically increased in the past forty years, surpassing those of countries such as China, which has a population four times larger than the United States

The United States is home to five percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoner. There must be a change to the current prison system which is doing more harm than good in American society and must be reformed. Reasons for this claim are that American prisons are too overcrowded with inmates, which creates a dangerous and unhuman environment. The cost to run a prison has gotten too expensive for tax payer pockets, and lastly the prison system is more as a punishment instead of rehabilitation with about sixteen percent of inmates most serious offence being drug charges. Prisons fall short of reforming criminals and the government is obligated to completely reform the prison systems in the United States.

Currently as a nation we use severity as our biggest form of deterrence; our threat of imprisonment has grown dramatically over time. In 1985 the average release time for a conviction of robbery was 32 months and in 2002 it jumped to a minimum of 53 months (Incarceration and Crime). We focus heavily on severity and longer incarceration rates; the idea is that a 10% increase in incarceration would lead to a 1.6%-5.5% decrease in crime (Lieka 2006) but this is not true. Prison rates have increased tenfold since 1970 and yet the crime rates have not dropped near those percents.The leading argument against increase in incarceration uses other states as examples of how ineffective it is; for example Florida heavily focuses on imprisonment to reduce crime with no effect (Incarceration and Crime). This idea would be great and a good mode of deterrence if those who go to prison actually learn their lessons and mend their future ways. Also if the unwanted effects of prison were at least tolerable this might deter crime but sadly even after experiment and evidence it is not a well functioning theory. The cost of funding our mass incarceration does balance out the decrease in overall crime. Besides when we have a nation who is majority hard on crimes compared to other crimes we end up severely punishing people who probably would respond better to rehabilitation than jail.