Eugene Jarecki States that ,“The prison industrial complex, to put it in it’s crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there’s what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It’s hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise” (Jareckil 1). Mass incarceration is high rates of imprisonment. Even though when you commit the crime you should do the time. The United States has large numbers of mass incarceration and something needs to be done to prevent this or lower the chances. Authorities like to make a profit by locking people up and keeping them there instead of creating more programs or incentives to decrease the number ,the Joe Martinez parable discusses several points that deal with incarceration. Correction is to improve or to change or do something different than before. In The Joe Martinez parable treatment is used to underscore drug treatment because, when he …show more content…
Unfortunately there is not much we can do to prevent this awful behavior. The best thing we can do is to be a law abiding citizen. And try as hard as we can to stay out of jail and or prison we have rights and laws but, even though there are ‘laws” to protect us as African Americans the laws were not made to help us really they hurt us in a way. There claim is the laws were made for the people and by the people and by people they meant their people Caucasians, not other races in this case in particular not African Americans. This parable was a great reminder for me to see all of the difficulties Africans face in today’s society. Currie discusses that “ An incarceration rate that is many times higher than that of comparable countries is a signal that something is very wrong. Ether the country is punishing offenders with a severity far in excess of what is considered normal in otherwise similar societies” (currie
In the documentary film Private Prisons, provides insight on how two private prisons industries, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group, generate revenue through mass incarceration. It is no surprise that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The United States represents approximately 5% of the world’s population index and approximately 25% of the world’s prisoners due to expansion of the private prison industry complex (Private Prisons, 2013). The number of people incarcerated in private prions has grown exponentially over the past decades. To put into perspective, the number of individuals increased by 1600% between 1990 and 2005 (Private Prisons, 2003).
This article, written by William Spelman, focuses on the controversial relationship between prison populations and crime rates. Spelman demonstrates the controversy by referencing studies that yielded a wide array of results ranging from rising prison populations causing a decrease in crime to having no effect at all, and even a study that showed crime increasing as prison populations did. Spelman states that this controversy has long been present when discussing this issue. He expresses concern with the divergent findings due to the fact that they are largely all based on the same data set. This, Spelman believes, is largely due to the fact that the varying studies used different methods in conducting their research.
Introduction Since the War on drugs began American has had a prison problem. The goal of this era and the tough on crime era that proceeded it the goal was to be tough on crime in order to stop it. This meant mass incarceration and hard time for offenses such as drug use (drug policy: facts). The 1990’s saw the biggest increase of the prison population with federal policies such as three strikes. Today these polices has made America the number incarcerated group in the planet despite having only 5% of the world’s population (ACLU: Prison Facts).
Lastly, mass incarceration is spillover from the war on drugs that we can see right in our own backyards. In a speech to the NAACP in July of 2015, President Obama insisted that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that “over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” The War on Drugs has disproportionately harmed minorities, which creates a class of people that are unable to participate in the democratic republic: only causing more crime and making a full circle. Therefore, with all these externalities combined, if most resources are going toward fixing these problems, there are none left to allocate toward
In addition to greatly affecting the otherwise unlikely citizens of America, Tough on Crime policies have greatly affected minority groups in America; perhaps more so than of any other group of citizens. To begin, from the 1980 on through the year 1995, the incarceration rates among drug offenders increased by more than 1000 percent. Notably, by the year 1995 one out of every four inmates in any given correctional facility was a drug offender. In addition of that 1000 percent increase, drug offenders accounted for more than 80 percent of the total growth in the federal inmate population and 50 percent of the growth of the state prison population from 1985 to 1995 (Stith, web). In addition, once in the system, the probability of receiving harsher
A shift is happening in America. The pendulum is swinging from the ideals of get tough and mass incarceration. The swing has both positive and negative affects on the prison system. On the plus side, prison populations are decreasing. By shifting away from incarcerating any who break the law, there are fewer drug dealers and fewer violent offenders in the system.
Incarceration rates have skyrocketed over the last forty years-- which could be interpreted as good or bad. There have been many questions surrounding incarceration directly being linked to a drop in crime rate: both positive and negative. One pair of economical authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, approached this concept from a mostly-positive outlook: the high incarceration rate was responsible for one-third of the crime drop in the 1990’s (123-124). The authors use high incarceration rate along with innovative police strategies, plummet of the crack market, and aging in the population to make a base argument of reasons for crime drop; however, the main argument they utilize is the legalization of abortions (Levitt and Dubner 120-121,
The latter of the two creates a situation where incarceration “ceases to be incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population” (Bobo & Thompson,
Introduction Since the innovation of the prison system in the nineteenth century, crowding has consistently been a feature of American prisons (Mullen 31). In the past couple of decades, crowding has gone unnoticed and become more problematic in the United States. Prisons are essentially storage lockers for inmates to punish them and keep them from criminal activity, yet the more prisoners that are stored, the more conflict that arises. Joan Mullen, a former vice president and manager of the Law and Justice Area of Abt Associates, Inc., and sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, evaluates how prisons fail to meet standards of human decency when there is crowding (Mullen 33). A lack of privacy, harmful mental and physical conditions,
The amount of mass incarceration in the United States as reached an all time high over the years. Mass Incarceration is the incarceration of a person or race based off of them being different and can be identified as a trend among law enforcements. These tensions have reached a certain extent and has received the attention of American citizens and the nation’s government. The laws of the United States seems fair, however with the enforcement of these laws, specific groups are targeted and abused by them daily.
According to a Washington Post article written by Jerome G. Miller, The US has the highest incarceration rate of any democratic country. US Prisons hold more than 2.4 million inmates, or 1% of the US population. Based on the percentage of the population in Prison, the United States incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany, and 12 times more than Japan (Miller). These high incarceration rates are coupled with high recidivism rates, which lead to prisons being overcrowded. The majority of criminals in prison will be released.
A comparison between American prison systems and other prison systems around the world shows the massive difference in the way the United States views and handles crime and punishment. When looking at numbers revolving around prison, the public tends to reflect on the amount of people detained and how it seems that crime rates are at such a high. “Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent” (Schlosser 54). When reviewing the systematic functions of United States prisons, we overlook the issues that surround prisons across the nation. Issues that not only affect those incarcerated but those who are living on the outside, in addition
Another reason for the mass incarceration is due to private prisons. The privatization of prison can be the driving force behind why so many American are in prison .no -one wants to go to jail but as a society that does not believe in dealing with delinquents, we tends to believe in the phrase “out of state out of mind.” So society problem seems solved when their perpetrators are out of sight. Mass incarceration has become a business and like every business it’s about profits and the bottom-line; as such, correction is no longer the goal it becomes about maintaining an inventory with humans being its capital.
The term "Prison Industrial Complex" (PIC) is used to express the rapid expansion of the United States inmate population. The prison industrial complex (PIC) is an expression used to describe the connection between the interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment the resolution to economic, social and political problems. The P.I.C helps to maintain the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic, social and other privileges. Power is collected and maintained through the PIC in many ways, including creating mass media images that reinforce the stereotypes associated with people of color, less fortunate people, homosexual people, immigrants, youth, elderly and other oppressed communities. These stereotypes imply that those who are associated with these groups of society are criminals, corrupt, delinquent, deviant, etc.
Focusing on punishing criminals is too important today and with businesses earning millions of dollars on it, there’s no one that is there to stop it. The government debts are rising higher for every day that passes and prisoners keep falling into the cracks that are called the prison system, either spending their life in enclosure or are unsuccessful in resocializing. What is seen today is a loss for everybody, the prisoner’s life, the government’s money and yet it’s still in existence. Making a prison reform is not easy, neither is the process of changing the society’s view on criminals but it’s a process that must go through.