The Constitutional Rights Of The United States

For the last forty years, women have been steadily increasing the prison populations. The United States has one third of the world’s female prison population. Incarceration rates for females have increased more drastically than for males since the early 1970s. By 2010, the women’s incarceration rate ascended twice as fast as the male prison population. One of the biggest reasons women have become

The number of women incarcerated is growing at a rapid pace. This calls for a reevaluation of our correction institutions to deal with women’s involvement in crime. Increasing numbers of arrests for property crime and public order offenses are outpacing that of men. The “War on Drugs” has a big influence on why our prisons have become overcrowded in the last 25 years. Women are impacted more than ever because they are being convicted equally for drug and other offenses. Female criminal behavior has always been identified as minor compared to Male’s criminal behavior. Over the years women have made up only small part of the offender populations. There is still only a small

women has increased significantly, increasing at a rate double to the rate of male incarceration since 1980 (Covington & Bloom, 2006). Braithwaite, Treadwell and Arriola note that incarcerated women have historically been a forgotten population, and despite the rapid growth of the population, their needs have continued to be ignored (2005). In addition to the stigma that comes with being or having been incarcerated,

Male and female offenders alike are incarcerated every day for various reasons. Some commit violent crimes while others are arrested for drug use or public-order offenses. The difference between the two are the rates at which they are incarcerated, the length or harshness of their sentences, for the same or similar crimes committed, patterns of drug use, and previous correctional history. While men still lead in violent crime rates, 54.3 percent male verse 36.6 percent female, women are more likely than men to serve sentences due to drug-related offenses and other nonviolent property crimes (American Corrections, 2016).

In 1791, the Bill of Rights was created to specify the individual rights of every human being. Madison James is the creator of the 10 Amendments, he believed it was necessary to create the document to further explain what the Constitution will provide for each person. The Bill of Rights gives every citizen the right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, as well as the freedom of the press, and lastly the due process rights. This document was formed when the Constitution in 1789 was drafted. Federalist viewed the Bill of Rights as an unnecessary document that the Anti-federalist wanted in order to feel safe in knowing what the Constitution was really about and what was entitled to them.

Robertson-James and Nunez (2012) suggests that the needs of incarcerated women have traditionally been ignored due to the tremendous percentages of incarcerated persons being men. While this may be true, women and men have issues that differ from one another and should be treated as separate issues. The physical and mental health needs, as Robertson-James and Nunez (2012) puts it, may be inferior than those of incarcerated men or women in the overall population. It is almost as if the problems of incarcerated women are undetectable or are seen as less important in the criminal justice

When a nation leads the world in the population incarcerated, women incarcerated and recidivism rate a question of what policies are causing these high statistics. Commonalities such as lack of supportive programing, conditions and over sentencing seem to appear in all these statistics. Although the controversial American prison system is often overlooked it is a grave social issue that no longer focuses on the rehabilitation of inmates.

After visiting www.womenandprison.org a website created by incarcerated women, I learn the ins and outs of what are some of the leading factors for women and prisons now. Most of the women interviewed have a brutal past with drug addiction, prostitution or abuse. These are the main reasons women today still are being incarcerated. However gender experience in prison expressed by women is very painful. Unlike men women suffer from the state of mind where they are home sick. Those who tend to have made families back home it begins to be tougher for women to be separate from her child. Also it is said to be all mind games a lot of women loose a sense of social control where they are no longer accepting to the reasoning which has brought them to

In regards to human rights, the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are often thought as being violated when civil-asset forfeiture takes place (Worrall, n.p.). The fact that owners of seized property have few means to challenge said in cases in a court of law and are considered guilty until proven innocent only make retrieval of the property that much more difficult. Because asset forfeiture is part of the Civil Justice System, there are no provided attorneys for defendants as their are in most criminal trials. This forces victims who cannot afford an attorney to have slim chances of recovering their property or having their case thrown out altogether because of the absence of a lawyer.

Virginia 's document ultimately influenced the Bill of Rights being created for the federation as a whole, rather than state by state. In December 1791, James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights. The Founding Father 's took to the Magna Carta as a historical precedent, after the Parliament adopted their own Bill of Rights in 1689. Some of these rights written by the Parliament can be seen in America 's Bill of Rights, such as: due process of law, unlawful imprisonment, and the ban on excessive bail (2*).

The United States Constitution was designed to enfranchise the white men who, in 1787, were the only citizens included in John Locke’s conception of the social contract (outlined in his Second Treatise of Government). At this time in history, women were not invited to be free and equal, in relation to their husbands and fathers or as citizens in the founding fathers’ new republic. Therefore, the Constitution never addresses abortion, contraception, or marriage. Arguments made in laws and court cases on these topics, specifically reproductive rights, have therefore traditionally rested on a right to privacy the court has interpreted as being found in the first, fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, rather than a right to freedom from sex-based discrimination found in the nineteenth amendment. The landmark supreme court cases Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade were both won on these grounds, both setting a precedent for the expansion of the right to privacy. This protection has also been affected by the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban and the Hyde Amendment.

“Under modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, the right to petition, along with the right to peaceable assembly have been almost completely collapsed into Freedom of Speech.” (www.heritage.com). The U.S. Constitution was written as a new set of rules for the nation in place of the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution consists of three parts known as the Preamble, the 7 articles, and the 27 amendments. Of these amendments, the first ten are referred to as the Bill of Rights. “The Bill of Rights sets limitations on the government.” (www.constitutioncenter.org). Our five most important rights are Freedom of Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition, and Religion which are all provided by the First Amendment. To understand Freedom of

In my research, I read an academic journal, articles and watched two documentaries that support my claim. Which is that women go through many obstacles like mental health, sexual harassment, and inequality in and out of prison. In the Documentary 20/20 “A Nation of Women Behind Bars,” by Diane Sawyer. She visits four prisons and interviews women on the crimes they committed and if they changed in the time they were incarcerated. Nicole Koester is from Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup. She is married

Overview of the Issue On average, women make up about 7 percent of the total federal and state incarcerated population in the United States. This has increased since the 1980s due to stricter and more severe laws that focus on recreational drug use, a lack of community programs, and fewer treatment centers available for outpatients (Zaitow and Thomas, eds., 2003). According to the National Women's Law Centers, women prisoners report a higher than statistically normal history of domestic violence in their immediate past, and the fastest growing prison population with a disproportionate number of non-Whites forming over 60 percent of the population. In fact, over 30 percent of women in prison are serving sentences for murder involving a spouse or partner. The incarceration of women presents far different cultural and sociological issues than those of men issues with children, family, sexual politics and more (NWLC, 2012).

Meanwhile, “the number of incarcerated adult women has jumped by a shocking 757% since 1977, at nearly twice the rate of male prisoners” (Harrison & Beck, 2006). “The number of women in prisons and jails has reached a milestone,” explains Kara Gotsch, director of advocacy for the Sentencing project in Washington, DC. One of the main reasons why women are being locked up at an alarming rate is a result of a policy of mass incarceration. “Mass incarceration is a rate of incarceration so high that it affects not only the individual offender, but also whole social groups.” (American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2011) Pursuing further, another main reason of the increase of incarceration of women are the sentencing policies brought about by the “war on drugs.”