The Underlying Foundations Of America 's Mass Imprisonment Arrangements

Bruce Western’s, Punishment and Inequality in America, discusses the era of the “Prison Boom” that occurs from 1970-2003—when incarceration rates climbed almost five times higher than they had been in the twentieth century—while stating the effects and consequences that mass imprisonment created within the United States penal system. By discussing the disparities of incarceration between sex, age, race and education level, and how post-incarceration affects opportunities such as marriage and high-waged employment. Western provides an analysis of how the risk of incarceration accumulates over an individual’s lifespan.

Mass incarceration became a public policy issue in the United States in the early 2010s. Now in 2016, there is still much debate over the country’s incarcerated population and incarceration rate. The nation has the highest incarcerated population in the world, with 2,217,947 inmates, in front of China with 1,649,804. America incarcerates 693 inmates per 100,000 residents, only the African island nation Seychelles incarcerates at a higher rate, with 799 for every 100,000 residents. The problem of mass incarceration continues to be assessed in various contexts. Recent analyses are historian Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and criminologist Dr. Elizabeth Brown’s “Toward Refining the Criminology of Mass Incarceration: Group-Based Trajectories of U.S. States, 1977—2010.”

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.

For my analysis, I decided to read the 2006 book Punishment and Inequality in America by author Bruce Western. The book takes a look into the relationship among crime, incarceration, and inequality and what really connects them together. Western shows that although there was a decrease in crime rates about 20 years ago, the reason behind this decrease is not what it may seem and that the decrease may of even come at a significant cost to those effected by the prison boom. Through my analysis, I hope to explore and convey what Western has claimed and examine if his arguments hold truth or not in dealing with our prison systems. On top of this, I will attempt to connect a few theories we as a class have learned about throughout the semester to what Western has has claimed in his book.

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

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 U.S. prison system is one of many great controversies when compared to other correctional systems. America’s prison population has increased by 700% (2.4 million current inmates) since the start of the war on drugs in 1971. As a result of this “war”, people that fall into the racial minority have suffered as a direct consequence of unjust legislation. Our prison system is known for its overrepresentation of minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics. This unfortunately gives these groups of people a perennial negative stigma as a result. I argue that the U.S. prison industrial-complex emphatically displays signs of prejudice and racism and disproportionately incarcerates people of color at a rate higher than whites. Yes, there are skeptics who think “the left’s prison-complex” is wrong about their theory of mass incarceration but the statistical data and concrete facts in support of my argument are very compelling.

Racial inequality is growing. Our criminal laws, while facially neutral, are enforced in a manner that is massively and pervasively biased. My research will examine the U.S. criminal justice policies and how it has the most adverse effect on minorities. According to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, out of a total population of 1,976,019 incarcerated in adult facilities, 1,239,946 or 63 percent are

The past quarter century has seen an enormous growth in the American incarceration rate. Importantly, some scholars have suggested that the rate of prison growth has little to do with the theme of crime itself, but it is the end result of particular U.S. policy choices. Clear (2007) posits that "these policy choices have had well-defined implications for the way prison populations have come to replicate a concentrated occurrence among specified subgroups in the United States population in particular young black men from deprived communities" (p. 49).

America has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world, surpassing countries like China, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Though the United States is home to roughly a small percent of the global population, it holds at least a quarter of prison inmates. And the decreasing rate of incarceration appears to be underwhelming in the circumstances of the last few decades. In his book, Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and The Future of Prisons in America, Jonathan Simon, who is a professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, explores the policies that led to the mass imprisonments rates through the stories of prison conditions in California. Simon examines California court decisions by using Brown vs

The United States prison system is having a terrible time. In 2000 the US inmate population reached a record of two million. which means that 1 person in 140 in the United States was imprisoned. Over the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of inmates tripled, and the United States locked up mor people per capita than almost any other country, almost tying up with Russia for this dubious distinction. Incarceration rates are six times those of Briton and 17 time those of Japan. The rising numbers have made prisons a growth industry, California builds a new prison every year to keep up with the demand. The burden of imprisonment falls disproportionately on racial minorities. In California for example, a young black man is 5 times as likely

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

“The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison” (Alexander, 2012). The numbers tell the story better than words can: black people are more likely to go to prison than any other race in the United States, shown by the fact that more than 60% of the prison population is composed of people of color (The Sentencing Project, 2016). These statistics can be traced back to several different cause, including the Era of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs, both of which led to higher policing in minority areas.

The Unites States of America’s prison system is a flawed mess. To open the eyes of our government we must first take a stand against unlawful government decisions, and show support for the greater good of society. What are our own tax-dollars paying for, what are the flaws in the justice/prison system, why is overcrowding in prisons causing tension, and what are ways our society and government can rebuild the system that has been destroyed over the years? Most criminals in prisons are not a danger to our society because they commit crimes just to use jail as a shelter, causing the overcrowding of prisons and wasting away of what we really should be paying for.

Of the almost 200 recognized independent countries, American prisons detain about 25% of the population of inmates, “though only 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States” (Sakala). This obvious disproportion feeds into the notion that the United States prison system is in no way representative of the overall national population and also the population of crime. Of the disproportionate number of inmates in U.S prisons, “blacks are incarcerated five times more than Whites are, and Hispanics are nearly