Race, Class, and Incarceration The main goal of the U.S. law enforcement has been to make the world a safer place but in the process of making the world a safer and “better” place there have been quite some downfalls. One of those many downfalls would have to be the American prison system. In today’s society police enforcement has given so much focus on prosecuting street crime while failing to acknowledge white-collar crime and other major crimes that occur every day. As demonstrated in Trends in U.S. corrections, the U.S. has had the highest rates of incarceration as of 2011 adding up to more than seventy hundred thousand(The Sentencing Project 3). Race and class play an important role on who is punished for such crimes as well as who gets …show more content…
This has only led to more and more prisons being created which cost a lot of money. “Since 1984 more than twenty new prisons have opened in California , while only one new campus was added to the California State University system and none to the University of California system”(Davis 686). Instead of focusing on creating safer environments for those who live in areas where crime is predominant we are only building more prisons to just lock everyone up. This is not really solving anything rather it is just avoiding the whole issue itself. Creating theses prisons cost a lot of money because there are man things required in maintaining a prison running. All the money being used for prisons could be used instead as stated by Davis, “…to subsidize housing for the homeless, to ameliorate public education for poor and racially marginalized communities, to open free drug rehabilitation programs for those who wish to kick their habits…”(Davis 686) as well as many other beneficiary programs that can help better a community where crime is visible …show more content…
What they don 't see is that by using the money on beneficial programs they can reduce the amount of crime in communities who are crime based. Policing in communities of color is beneficial to the Prison Industrial Complex. Which is merely a form of exploitation that prisoners accused of such crimes undergo. They give their labor in return for nothing. “Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines,waterbeds and lingerie for Victoria’s Secret- all at a fraction of the cost of ‘free labor’”(Davis 686). This is beneficial to the Prison Industrial Complex because communities of color are known to be crime filled. Police can purposely search for criminals in those neighborhoods which then later amount to the number of people who will become workers under the Prison Industrial Complex. People of color become targets because they can easily be found. It isn 't that only people of color are committing crimes it is just that white people are wealthier therefore it is easier for them to hide the fact that they are committing crimes. Criminals are thought to be people from low-income communities. People who have no other option but resort to crime in order to survive day by day. As stated by Davis, “Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth
Throughout the course of the semester our class discussions have centered around the question, how did the United States come to hold the title of the highest rate of incarceration in the world. All of the books and films covered in class have pointed out how race and policing practices are linked to mass incarceration. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis by Christian Parenti discusses these issues. In his book Parenti analysis how the criminal justice system came to be what it is today, economically and politically. Parenti then discusses policing and policing on immigrants.
The author’s studies indicate that the criminal justice system choose majority of their targets and suspects predominantly by race. According to studies conducted by the U. S Department of Justice, the imprisonment rate by race per 100,000 residents over 3,000 black males were imprisoned in the year 2000 compared to white males imprisonment rate of less than 500. This shows that conviction of crime, robbery, murder, and other violence and drug related crimes has a clear discrepancy across racial groups.
Yet the fact is that African Americans are incarcerated, on probation, or parole in numbers unacceptably disproportionate to the population. The official explanation for the inequality is: higher crime rates among African Americans, which is consistent with dominant racial accounts going back to slavery. African Americans, are exposed to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods, resulting in jaw-dropping figures of African Americans and Latinos filling the nation’s prisons and jails every
To begin with, the most common inequality in modern society is the corrupted criminal justice system. Racial bias and profiling persuades judgments when sentencing minorities; especially African Americans. " African Americans make up 6.5% of the American population but 40.2% of the prison
Enforcing what some calls “being tough on crime” can have a negative effect in both a social and economic way. It cost more for taxpayers as well as a city or state to build a new facility to hold more criminals. The economic costs would be accepted mainly by the districts and risk redirecting resources away from poverty decrease.
Even before our nation’s founding, people of color have been discriminated. Decades pass and the criminal justice system is still “racist” labeling people of color as criminal, meaning black equal criminals therefore is fine to discriminate people of color just because they’re criminals. In “The New Jim Crow” the system targets black men because they are associated with crime, meaning crime stands in for race. In the other hand, As Heather Mac Donald writes in her book “The War on Cops”, “The criminal-justice system does treat individual suspects and criminals equally, they concede. But the problem is how society defines crime and criminals” (154).
It sad to see that more than half of the young men in our American cities are under the control of the criminal justice system. Where’s the justice when our system automatically demotes them to a permanent second-class status, and challenges their chances of happiness and freedom. When minorities from the justice system are released, they are harshly discriminated against. This discrimination does nothing but regenerates a cycle of imprisonment. With the world at their backs, the result usually ends up with repeated behaviors that places them back into the system.
Mass Incarceration and Minority Communities Mass incarceration within the United State of America is a controversial topic in politics today because of the negative effects it has on minority communities. “The United States leads the world in the percentage of its population that serves time in prison or jail.1,2 As of 2012, nearly 7 million men and women are on probation, parole, or under some other form of community supervision, which means that nearly 3% of the American adult population is currently involved in correctional supervision,” (Hatzenbuehler, Keyes, Hamilton, and Uddin, 2015). How does it affect the minority communities?
“A good first step forward is to start treating prisoners as a human being, not profiting from their incarceration.” ( Bernie Sanders). The prison system is only thinking about money because they don't care the effect it has in people's life when they are sentenced unfairly. The U.S Prison system is unfair, and two of the most important aspects to understand about it are the war on drugs and racism. One important aspect of the U.S Prison system is the war on drugs and how they go to jail for an unreasonable amount of time for having a small amount of drugs on them and when they have to go to prison it affects the prisoner's family.
People of all different races and ethnicities are locked behind bars because they have been convicted of committing a crime and they are paying for the consequences. When looking at the racial composition of a prison in the United States, it does not mimic the population. This is because some races and ethnicities are over represented in the correctional system in the U.S. (Walker, Spohn, & DeLone, 2018). According Walker et al. (2018), African-Americans/Blacks make up less than fifteen percent of the U.S. population, while this race has around thirty-seven percent of the population in the correctional system today.
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.
There are more African Americans in prison now, than there were enslaved in 1850. These individuals are not in prison because they are committing more crimes than their white counterparts, but because of a discriminatory system that targets african americans. Blacks can commit the same crimes as whites, but are more likely to be imprisoned and or receive a steeper sentence. This disproportionate racial sentencing has been a growing issue the United States for four decades, and started with the Reagan Administration's War On Drugs. Private prison organizations lobby for harsher punishments, and profit from the influx of inmates.
The issue of mass incarceration sparked conversation about racial disparities within the prison system. Following the abolishment of Jim Crow, legal racial segregation in the United States appeared dead. According to civil rights advocate, Michelle Alexander this is not the case; racial segregation appears dead, but mass incarceration perpetuates a racial caste system that preserves this outdated practice. In Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, she points to the cause, enforcement, and victims of this system, but her arguments lack the depth to stand against counterarguments.
For years now there has been a lot of controversy involving the looming question: Is the criminal justice system racist? Racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one 's own race is superior. Ever since the Trayvon Martin case of 2012, the justice system has been in a complete downfall including all of the police brutality cases since then also. According to sources, 1 of every 4 African American males born this decade are expected to go to prison in their lifetime. Census Bureau reports that the U.S. is 13 percent percent black, 61 percent white, and 17 percent latino.
The United States is the country that has most people incarcerated and the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world. This level of incarceration does not stem from abnormally high crime rates, but is more strongly linked to our nation’s sentencing practices and drug policies, both of which have been developed to be “tough on crime.” This and harsher stance is not as effective as approaches other nations use, which focus more on crime prevention and rehabilitation. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration at 716 prisoners per 100,000 people.