Left's Prison-Complex Essay

The United States prison system struggles eminently with keeping offenders out of prison after being released. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than third of all prisoners who were arrested within five years of released were arrested within six months after release, with more than half arrested by the end of the year (Hughes, Wilson, & Beck, 2001). Among prisoners released in 2005 in 23 states with available data on inmates returned to prison, about half (55 percent) had either a parole or probation violation or an arrest for a new offense within three years that led to imprisonment (Durose, Cooper, & Snyder, 2014). Why are there many ex-offenders going back to prison within the first five years of release? Are there not enough resources to help offenders before or/and after being released from prison.

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 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.

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).

The United States is less the 5% of the world population but has almost 25% of the world’s prison population (Coates, 2015; Waldman, 2016). In the last 40 years, the number of American civilians imprisoned by the United States has increased 500%. (Mauer, 2011). However, this explosion in incarceration rates has not been evenly distributed throughout the American population (Waldman, 2016). While one in seventeen White men will be imprisoned in their lifetime, one in sixteen Latino men will face this fate and for Black men, the number is one in three (Mauer,2011). Neither the racial disparity in incarceration nor its scale was accidental (Coates, 2015). The mass incarceration of Black men in the United States was a direct result of the “War

Of the many tribulations that plague Americans today, the increase in the amount of African American men and women in prisons is unbelievable. It would be naïve to say that the increase is due to the fact that more African Americans are committing crimes now than before. When in actuality it has very prevalent connections to a systematic plan to incarcerate a race of people by creating harsh drug laws to

According to the U.S. census bureau, 76.9% of the American population is white, yet according to the chart, they make up just over 50% of the prison population. These findings highlight a current racial bias in the prison system that is continually perpetuated through generational path dependence and other factors. This disparity represents a failure of the criminal justice system to adequately rehabilitate individuals. The systemic racism that is rooted in the criminal justice system is a major ethical debate calling for a change in the policy surrounding incarceration.

The “War on Drugs” established that the impact of incarceration would be used as a weapon to combat the illegal drug problem in this country. Unfortunately, this war against drugs has fallen disproportionately on black Americans. “Blacks constitute 62.6% of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons in 1996, whereas whites constituted 36.7%. The drug offender admissions rate for black men ranges from 60 to an astonishing 1,146 per 100,000 black men. In contrast, the white rate begins at 6 and rises no higher than 139 per 100,000 white men. Drug offenses accounted for nearly two out of five of all black admissions to state prisons (Human Rights Watch, 2000).” The disproportionate rates at which black drug offenders are sent to prison originate in racially disproportionate rates of arrest.

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.

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

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.

The prison population in the United states has increased 500% in thirty years. Since the 1970s social inequality has impacted the American prison system. America has 2.3 million people in prison which is “five times more than England and twelve times more than Japan.” We want to know why our prison population is growing and what are the core reasons. Has our society caused mass incarceration? Is it based on conflict theory or social stratification? Our research will include a comprehensive analysis of sentencing guidelines from the war on drugs , race, and poverty and respectively its impact on mass incarceration. “The United States has the dubious distinction of leading every other nation in both the largest total

Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV.   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison.   Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.

Within this paper, you will find a comprehensive review of the United States prison system, and why it needs to analyzed to better support and reform the people of this country. I plan to persuade the other side (politicians and society) into seeing that the way the prison system is now, is not ethical nor economical and it must change. We have one of the world’s largest prison population, but also a very high rate of recidivism. Recidivism is when the prisoners continuously return to prison without being reformed. They return for the same things that they were doing before. So, this leads us to ask what exactly are we doing wrong? When this happens, we as a nation must continuously pay to house and feed these inmates. The purpose of a prison needs to be examined so we can decide if we really are reforming our inmates, or just continuing a vicious cycle. What is the true purpose of prison besides just holding them in a cell? There must be more we can do for these hopeless members of society.

In the previous 30 years, the United States has come to depend on detainment as its reaction to a wide range of wrongdoings. Research has found that, “overcrowded prison populations continue to be the greatest challenge facing the American prison system” (O’connor, 2014). Indeed, even minor infringements of parole or probation frequently prompt an arrival to jail. Moreover, probation and parole violations led to quickly imposed sentences. Complications in this field is only fueled the recidivism rate, which of course worsened the overcrowding epidemic (Camper, 2012). This has made a prison arrangement of uncommon size in this country. In the 1980's, when Ronald Regan started "The War on Drugs", the individuals who were captured with even little measure of drugs were given to a great degree long prison sentences. Eventually, following 35 years, these elderly detainees are greatly wiped out and failing horrendously due to old age. The war on drugs quit nothing, yet it filled the confinement facilities and the enterprises accepted control because of the money they could make. As per slate magazine, the distinguished court case, Brown v. Plata, expressed that congestion levels in California jails—where the normal inhabitance rate over all state establishments was 187 percent from 1991 through 2010—added up to a type of pitiless and irregular discipline. What is the motivation behind giving someone a fifty-year sentence for drugs? In case he has done a wrongdoing,