Reflective Essay On Criminal Justice

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is known as one of the most important books of out time. This is a book that makes the reader appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration. As noted, this book is not for everyone. It’s for people who are interested in seeing the injustice that many people of color have to face in the United States. In this book, we will see many similarities about our criminal justice system and something that looks and feels like the era of Jim Crow, an era we supposedly left behind.

The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Alexander (2012) examines the Jim Crow practices post slavery and the correlation to the mass incarceration of African-American. The creation of Jim Crows laws were used as a tool to promote segregation among the minorities and white Americans. Alexander (2012) takes a look at Jim Crow laws and policies that were put into place to block the social progression of African-Americans from post-slavery to the civil rights movement.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Before stating my intention about the course for which I seek admission to the St Joseph University Criminal Justice Program with emphasis in behavior analysis, I would like to take this opportunity to briefly introduce myself. I am an African immigrant of Liberian descent. I am the oldest of my parents seven children. The African tradition demands that I am just as responsible for the wellbeing of the family as my mother. At an early age, mother ingrained in me that education was an essential prerequisite to the empowerment I needed to fulfil my obligation to my immediate and extended families and myself.

Whereas some do better with no family by their side some argued having the same situation as other delinquents who may have had a secure family structure and we see on the two positive borders how family makes an impaction on a child life. In the black community the education field for the youth is vital. Education is one of the few ways out of poverty, prison, and the only way to attain sustainable success, but not if its unequal for a child to receive or the different penalty that go along with being in school as black schoolboy/girl. A lot of favorite athletes and even top rappers was channel in the school-prison pipeline such as Curtis James Jackson, III was a piece of data in the concept.

My undergraduate studies, volunteer service, and employment have prepared me for study and future employment in criminal justice policy and administration. While studying criminology and criminal justice (CCJS) at the University of Maryland, College Park, I had the option of completing three additional CCJS courses that were not required for my major. I chose to take classes about drugs, race, and human trafficking because I believed they were critical criminal justice issues.

Michelle Alexander, similarly, points out the same truth that African American men are targeted substantially by the criminal justice system due to the long history leading to racial bias and mass incarceration within her text “The New Jim Crow”. Both Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Michelle Alexander’s text exhibit the brutality and social injustice that the African American community experiences, which ultimately expedites the mass incarceration of African American men, reflecting the current flawed prison system in the U.S. The American prison system is flawed in numerous ways as both King and Alexander points out. A significant flaw that was identified is the injustice of specifically targeting African American men for crimes due to the racial stereotypes formed as a result of racial formation. Racial formation is the accumulation of racial identities and categories that are formed, reconstructed, and abrogated throughout history.

Imagine wasting 30 years of your life behind bars in a six by eight-foot cell, no windows, and cold brick walls. For most African Americans spending their lives behind bars is an inevitable future in the 21st century. In the 13th documentary directed by Ava DuVernay, they unfold a series of patterns relating the African American community to mass incarceration. The United States of America has the highest incarceration rates in the world. Today America makes up about 5% of the world’s population, yet they hold more than 25% of the world’s prisoners (DuVernay 00:00:00)

Not only does Berstein call for an overall reform of this nation’s juvenile prisons, she goes as far as saying the practice of locking up youth is in need of a “more profound than incremental and partial reform” (13). The fact that Bernstein outlines the numerous failed strategies and goals of this practice with her compelling use of studies and statistics is enough to promote an audience to reject the practice of locking up youth. The statistic she shares that “four out of five juvenile parolees [will be] back behind bars within three years of release” as well as the studies she conducted on numerous instances when a guards abuse of power lead to the death of a child work to further prove her point: being that “institution[s] as intrinsically destructive as the juvenile prison” have no place in a modern society (13, 83). Bernstein refutes this false sense effectiveness further by sharing her own ideas on what she believes works as a much more humane solution to rehabilitating

Students in the criminal justice department are taught that our main objective in the justice system and our careers is to serve and also protect those involved in our community. For as long as I can remember, my goal in life has been to provide service by protecting and serving those who are close to me. My penchant for service is what eventually led me to the Criminal Justice program at Valdosta State University. This passion for service began at a very young age when my life was turned upside down when I relocated from Puerto Rico to the state of Georgia due to a tragic car accident that led to the end of my father’s life. This sudden change of lifestyle and heartbreak came with an extreme amount of struggle and culture shock not just

Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

Within the urban communities, negative perceptions are magnified. Adolescents are more prone to be a product of their environment, especially those whose parents are incarcerated. Because of this trend adolescents are being incarcerated at an alarming rate and sentenced to adult facilities. Lambie & Randall (2013) states, the United States have imposed harsher penalties on serious young offenders, and have consequently increased rates of incarcerated youth and made it easier for youth to be treated and incarcerated as adults within the justice

There are three components that make up the criminal justice system – the police, courts, and correctional facilities – they all work together in order to protect individuals and their rights as a citizen of society to live without the fear of becoming the victim of a crime. Crime, simply put is when a person violates criminal law; the criminal justice system is society’s way of implementing social control. When all three components of the criminal justice work together, it functions almost perfectly. For a person to enter the criminal justice system, the process must begin with the law enforcement.

Reflection Paper Being my future career is heavily grounded in the criminal justice system, I was very excited to take this class and begin deepening my knowledge in regards to this subject. Coming from a secular college, it was unusual to not only be able to cite a source like the Biblical Principles presentation, but for it to be mandatory. The presentation honestly did open my eyes on how the Bible truly is the foundation for every single thing in this world, and as the semester went on, I was able to understand this more and more. When studying about the police system my eyes were opened to the importance of the selection process of officers (Bohm and Haley 248- 251). I learned how truly mentally and physically exhausted it is to be an officer, and how ones psychological state can effect ones

Over the past three and a half years I have spent my life studying in school. I have studied for hours and hours about the field of criminal justice; the reason it exists, its history and development, theories that are used to explain topics in criminal justice, and cases that have been monumental in changing the way that criminal justice works. While all of these are great to learn about the field of criminal justice itself cannot be learned from reading textbooks and memorizing theories. This is why I am interested in an internship with the Griffin Police Department. I want to learn how the criminal justice system is in action, how things actually play out outside of the scholastic setting.

Last week in lecture we learned that crime statistics weren't real indicators of the amount of underlying criminal activity and this seems to be the case in the readings for the week, where there are a lot of discrepancies on whether crime, in certain areas and across the nation as a whole, is increasing or decreasing. The statistics in Tab 5 highlighted the fact that crime rate has been higher in recent years, i.e. 4.1% higher in 2016 than 2016, but a lot lower than previous decades, i.e. 12.3% lower than it was in 2007. The articles in Tab 6 show an inconsistency in messages, with one asserting that crime in the Los Angeles County has increased while crime in California as a whole has decreased and another article stating that crime in New