The Criminal Justice System Across The Country Essay

There are three significant issues concerning law enforcement, namely enacting the law, police discretion, and assessment of criminal behavior. Different entities create and enact laws that are specific for the societies those laws represent.

Currently, African Americans make up nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. Nearly one in three African American males born today can expect to serve time in prison during their lifetime (NAACP, 2015). A central issue in today’s society is the rate of criminalization of African American males. There are many speculations on this topic; however, the central one is when a crime is committed then there is “time” to be served. However, the time served by African American males is disproportionate than that of Caucasian counterparts for the exact same crime. The lack of concern that is presented over the clear overrepresentation of African American males in the prison system is appalling.

Before proposing a reform to the American criminal justice system, we must first examine the problems that plague the process of justice on all levels. American society plays an important role in shaping the criminal justice system. Their beliefs and values determine the type of deviants and the consequences of the crimes. Often their beliefs contradict each other.

The criminal justice system is composed of three parts – Police, Courts and Corrections – and all three work together to protect an individual’s rights and the rights of society to live without fear of being a victim of crime. According to merriam-webster.com, crime is defined as “an act that is forbidden or omission of a duty that is commanded by public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law.” When all the three parts work together, it makes the criminal justice system function like a well tuned machine.

Although we would like to believe the world is not as racially charged in 2013 as it was in the 1960s, a look in our penal system would show that minorities are still arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate than whites. The United States has experienced a rise in its prison population over the last 40 years and our incarceration rate is nearly 5 times higher than any other country. Even though 13% of the US population are African American males, they make up 38% of the prison population. Contributing factors to these numbers are mandatory minimum sentences, high crime and poverty areas, and lack of rehabilitative resources within our system (p.77-78).

In order to keep a safe society, it is important to establish a nation with

African American’s make up nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population, and they are incarcerated at nearly 6 times the rate of whites. (NAACP, 2009-2015) There are many reasons that play a factor in racial disparities in jails and prisons, and although some of these reasons are out of our control, some hold room for major reform. In order to understand why there is such disparity, we need to look at all of the possible contributing factors, and in order to make changes, we need to start from the bottom and work our way up.

Incarceration rates have increased from 400,000 people in 1975 to 2.1 million in 2003; a fivefold increase, making the United States a leader in rates compared to other nations (Morenoff & Harding, 2014). These numbers bear a great burden on individuals, families, and communities in various ways. First, with 700,000 individuals being released from prison annually comes difficulty in reentering society both socially and economically; difficulty finding work, education, strained relationships, and social stigma (Morenoff & Harding, 2014). Second, the increasing rates of incarceration are disproportionately and unfairly impacting minorities, specifically African-Americans, and poor urban communities (Morenoff & Harding, 2014). A New York Times article by Furman and Holtz-Eakin (2016) states that $80 billion dollars--$600 per household--is spent on corrections annually, or a 1,700 percent increase in the federal prison budget in just thirty years. These increases have a deep historical background, many complex and interweaving factors, and require urgent reform.

American prison systems encompass all three spheres of criminal justice: law enforcement, judiciary, corrections. Within this system, a massive problem exists. America is known as the “mass incarceration nation” (Hamilton, 2014, p. 1271). Comparatively, the United States encompasses the majority of global prisoners, yet the population is nowhere near that proportion. Just how “free and equal” is this system? Since Gideon v. Wainwright, the racial divide in the criminal justice system has grown, which is contradictory to its intentions. The American criminal justice system has failed to provide the justice and protections it promises. There are many injustices caused by the mass incarceration of American citizens, especially those of minority descent. More harm is done by incarceration to the individual, their community, and the nation, than if other forms of justice were used. The criminal justice system is divided, with racial and income disparities defining the nation in way never intended.

The Judiciary system encourages systematic criminalization of Blacks and mass incarceration as they contribute to keeping them in the cycle that oppresses them. In the 2016 Prison Policy Initiative article, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie” an attorney and advocate for social justice reform, Peter Wagner, summarizes the distribution of criminals and their convictions within federal, state, and local jails and prisons. 2.4 million people are incarcerated in the U.S., the highest amount of incarcerated people in the entire world. It is ironic given that

However, evidence indicates that growing incarceration has significantly increased poverty and negatively impacts the socioeconomic opportunities for prisoner’s families upon release (Wacquant, 2010). Because African-American men are disproportionately incarcerated, increased numbers of African-American women have increased ties to prison members. The result is that African-American women disproportionately experience the effects that mass incarceration produces on social and economic success. African-American women are forced to struggle with the economic loss and stresses caused by mass incarceration and poverty (DeFina and Hannon, 2013).

“Beginning in the 1970s, the prison population began swelling, climbing steadily through 2009. Now, this nation imprisons more of its residents, 2.2 million, than any other.The United States jails a quarter of the world 's prisoners, although it contains only 5 percent of the world 's population. The statistics are sobering for a republic that celebrates justice, fairness and equality as the granite pillars of its democracy. (Walsh, 2016).” The underlying foundations of America 's mass-imprisonment arrangements are tangled ever, legislative issues, social clash and imbalance. It 's a pretzel-rationale maze, and to fathom it or even disentangle it, investigators say, will require clearing, head-on changes. However, those early endeavors in the long run exploded backward, Hinton said, throwing “ "low-income youth — whose families are on welfare, who live in public housing projects, who attend urban public schools, and who have family members with arrest records — as potentially delinquent." ( Walsh, 2016). With regards to the criminal equity framework, examiners say that lessening imbalance essentially would require an update of the country 's sentencing framework, better preoccupation and avoidance programs, jail changes, more successful policing arrangements and preparing, and complete support for previous detainees attempting to shape stable lives. The prison system is unfair because of the mass incarceration of blacks, the war on drugs, the population and the prison

Within African American communities, individuals with low incomes or low education levels are at increased risk of incarceration due to less options for legal employment and little resources to successfully navigate the legal system (Crutchfield and Weeks, 2015; Mtichell & Caudy, 2015; Pettit & Western, 2004). Although the incarceration of black people is an international issue (Warde, 2013) which affects both men and women (Christian & Thomas, 2009), the substantial size of the African American male incarcerated population within the United States suggest that this a

The United States of America has the largest prison population in the world. The United States incarcerates six hundred ninety-three people per one hundred thousand people and boasts an incarceration rate that is almost five times higher than most other countries (Wagner & Walsh, 2016). The incarceration rate within the U.S. is significantly higher than the incarceration rates of other countries due to the prevalence of institutional racism within the American criminal justice system. While the criminal justice system unjustly targets minority individuals, African Americans and Hispanics are especially targeted (Brennan & Spohn, 2009). African Americans and Hispanics account for a minority of the U.S. population but make up the majority of the U.S. prison population. Despite comprising only 13.6% of the U.S. population (Rastogi, Johnson, Hoeffel, and Drewery, 2011), African Americans account for 37.8% of all prisoners in the U.S. (Inmate Race, 2017). Hispanics are also targeted by the criminal justice system at abnormally high rates. Hispanics make up

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