Black Family In The Age Of Mass Incarceration Analysis

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896, 163 US 537) For centuries people of African descent have suffered of inhumane treatment, discrimination, racism, and segregation. Although in the United States, and in other countries, mistreatment and marginalization towards African descendants has stopped, the racism and discriminations has not.

Mass incarceration of minorities has been considered one of the numerous pressing issues of civil rights. Public policies, criminal justice officials, lawmakers, and the media has contributed to this issue. Issues underlying this injustice include other injustices such as racism, class inequalities and inequalities in education. In turn, the injustice of mass incarceration of minorities also play minor and major roles in disproportionate effects on employment, housing, and standard of living. Rawls believed that society cannot be organized in a way which disadvantages the worst off.

This piece of work is mainly about the social analysts position to the issue of racism and mass incarceration and also how the various principles of distributive justice can be applied to different positions in our issue of focus. It is quite evident that the main work of the social policy analysts is to identify current problems, evaluating them and coming up with solutions regarding to it. Once they discover the problem they try to check for the causes that may leading to that problem and also other problems that may be related to it. However, different social policy analysis’s have differing views regarding a certain problem and also

According to the text the criminal justice system is racist, because Martin Luther King day, for instance ,senator Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates and receive very different sentenced.” A example for this would be the book we are currenting A lesson before dying . A black man went to the store with two of his black friends and they shot a white man the boy name jefferson didn't do anything but by him being a black man and a white man is dead he is going to get charged with murder and a death sentence. If it was the other way around and a white man killed black mans he would of been let go and not charged but if they do charge him he would not get that much time. Our justice system is just messed up but that's just how things are today.

Racism in the Criminal Justice System Over the years, several people have studied the subject of racism. Moreover, several people have argued about numerous topics they assert to be racist. One side of the story claims that one’s action establish his retribution, while the other side of the story says that racism is still a tremendous botheration today, especially in the Criminal Justice System. The Criminal Justice System accumulates tremendous criticism for being assumed to be racist and incriminating too many blacks.

Since the Reagan administration, all proceeding presidents have continued to win votes by using this dog-whistle strategy. It sends abstract messages through coded language that sounds neutral on the surface, but plays on white resentment to minorities without appearing racially motivated (SG 16). The effectiveness of this strategy becomes obvious when reflecting on some statistics about drug usage and incarceration rates. Since 1983 when mass incarceration truly began escalating, African American incarceration has increased by 26 percent. This increase has caused approximately 80 to 90 percent of drug offenders currently in prison to be African American while no evidence exists that Blacks use or sell drugs any more than Whites (NJC).

My findings focused on the points that mass incarceration substantially affects families and jobs, which then become factors in the issue of recidivism. Moreover, these problems especially target minorities at high rates. To strengthen these points, I could have done more interviews, especially with past convicts or convicts who have returned to jail in order to get more first-hand experiences. As well as interviews with different ages of children exposed to incarceration to see if or how the effects differed. In the future, I hope to expand on the other ways incarceration affects lives, such as through health, especially mental health, or college opportunities.

My older brother Larry has been in and out of jail since he was 17 years old for hanging out with the wrong crowd. Soon after my brother’s first arrest, my mother lost strength in both her knees and was unable to stand and walk for long periods of time, which made it impossible to work. She developed blood clots in her legs. I was home for spring break during my first year of college when a blood clot in my mother’s leg traveled to her heart and killed her.

In the novel The Known World by Edward P.Jones, the theme of most family life is chaotic, sorrow and a little bit of happiness. Because of the slavery, black family life faced more hard time than white family. They faced hunger, punishment and separation from their family. Meanwhile, white family is more calm and peaceful.

Statistics prove that Mandatory Minimums affect minorities disproportionately. In fact, African Americans are over 10 times more likely to enter prison for drug offenses than their Caucasian counterparts despite both racial groups using drugs in equal amounts. This shows the racial bias of the Justice System at work by using Mandatory Minimums to punish minorities with harsher sentences. Blacks and Hispanics make up 74.4 percent of the people convicted of drug charges while only making up less than 30 percent of the population. Indicative of this widespread problem, 39.4 percent of convictions in 2011 involved Mandatory Minimum Sentencing (United States Sentencing Commission 148).

The 1960’s was a critical decade for the civil rights movement filled with frustration and violence. As the movement fought for the equal rights of African Americans, the efforts of the movement had not resolved all the issues African Americans faced on a daily basis. African Americans faced housing discrimination where if they”tried to move into working class “white neighborhoods,” they were attacked and some had their homes burned”(112). Although racism was being fought through bills and acts, legal action was not going to halt all societal racism in the nation. Just because a black person could own a house, it did not mean they were socially welcome to own any house they could afford, they had restrictions to what was ‘their place’.