Gordon Witkin The Crime Bust Analysis

The criminal justice system may be more corrupt than the people who fill our prisons. It is amazing to see the many ways that certain parts of society actually benefit from the current system we support. This book,The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Prison, by authors Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton, has open my eyes to a very corrupt idealism. They are very precise in their supporting examples as well by walking the reader through each step and analogy.

Contrary to the common belief, crime has been on the decline for the past three decades. Yet, news and media have been covering crime more than ever, resulting in the public belief that crime is at an all time high. The sharp drop in crime since the early 1990s has left experts curious to discover the reasons for the decrease in crime. As I compare the article Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not by Steven D. Levitt and the article Evaluating Contemporary Crime Drop(s) in America, New York City, and Many Other Places by Eric P. Baumer and Kevin T. Wolff, I will briefly describe the articles, compare their agreements and disagreements, as well as discuss my personal preferences.

In 1972, former President Richard Nixon made his infamous statements regarding crime and drug abuse. In this speech, he declared a war on crime and drugs and intended to decrease the number of people using drugs and the amount of crimes that were committed. Since this declaration, incarceration rates in the U.S. have gone up by 500%, even though the amount of crime happening has gone down. One of the reasons why I feel our rates have risen, is because sometimes, we put people in jail when they don’t need to be there in the first place. 46.3% of prisoners are in jail

In this day and age, There are five times as many people in jail as there were in the 1970s. Almost 5 percent of the population of the United States will go to prison at in point of their life. Conservatives believe that imprisonment reduces crime in two ways: it removes criminals from the public so they can not commit more crimes, and it also discourages people who would commit a crime as they consider the consequences. Unfortunately, neither of these outcomes have come to be true. In fact, mass incarceration and “tough on crime” laws have been extremely ineffective that instead of reducing crime, it increases it. There are several different ways to effectively reduce crime other than these two strategies, such as reforming certain policies

This was not the case in the 1980s. As a result, only certain parts of the broken windows theory were embraced. Policies across the country focused on heavily policing disorder, but largely ignored the community-building aspect. Bill Bratton’s reign as New York City Transit Police Chief in 1990, and later as NYPD Commissioner from 1994-1996, saw him embracing this movement. The broken windows theory was established to target small problems throughout neighborhoods, such as vandalism on walls, litter on sidewalks, or broken windows in abandoned buildings. This theory was established to prevent more serious crime from occurring over time. This article examined the effects of the Broken Windows Policing Approach involving these following topics under the direction of Bill Bratton’s Tenue: implementations, success, and failures. It also demonstrates whether or not the “Broken Windows Effect” has a minimal impact on the crime rate throughout the Bill Bratton’s era and did he remained “an exemplar of “good ‘broken windows’ practice” during his two-year stretch as NYPD commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Based on this concept, the New York City Police Department implemented a “zero tolerance” policy for policing petty

Over the past 40 years U.S. incarceration has grown at an extraordinary rate, with the United States’ prison population increasing from 320,000 inmates in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million inmates in 2013. The growth in prison population is in part due to society’s shift toward tough on crime policies including determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing laws, and mandatory minimums. These tough on crime policies resulted in more individuals committing less serious crimes being sentenced to serve time and longer prison sentences.

The justice system is constant work in progress as the system must change and evolve to meet the needs, demands and requirements of the times we live in. The justice system and its statutes sometimes struggle to keep up with the ever-changing world; thus making them lag behind. As stated, one of the core functions of the justice system is to provide intervention programs for those individuals who are deemed to be at risk. Intervention programs do exist but still the justice system is overburden with many criminal cases. The inability of justice programs to work as they are intended to is seen as one of the significant problems facing the justice system. Welsh and Harris (2013) seeks to explain the inability of the justice programs to not work in stating, “The problem is that many criminal justice interventions fall short of their goals because of poor planning, poor implementation, and poor evaluation. It is fair to say we have not yet discovered “what works” to reduce crime.” From this, it is clear that the development of interventions is not the issue and not the cause for them to not succeed in their mandates but the problem is within their planning.

Furthermore, most of this increase is the result of Chicago 's murder rate increasing so significantly. We are thrilled that crime rates are decreasing, but wish to know what is driving up the murder rates in certain cities. Some experts believe it is due to fewer police officers and/or fewer programs designed to prevent violence. Poverty does appear to play a role in this problem, and the same is true of a rise in gang violence in these cities. With the current administration looking at gun control laws, this may be changing, but no one can say what impact this will truly have. The administration will need to take into account the fact that the overall crime rate is decreasing, even as murder rates climb, when they are making decision as to what laws to enact.

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,

Mortimer B. Zuckerman argues that we need to change the way our criminal justice system operates. He explains that there are more prisoners in a cell than the amount it was originally created for. Zuckerman also acknowledges the fact that incarceration rates are extremely high and that the vast majority of prisoners are nonviolent. The author believes that the way nonviolent criminals are dealt with today brings about negative consequences that could easily be avoided (Zuckerman). Zuckerman successfully convinces the reader that reform is needed in the criminal justice system by using several tactics such as eradicating common myths about incarceration, talking about the problem and solution while using logos, and appealing

The end of the twentieth century saw the demise of the great cities of the United States. After World War II, “…cities were, at least in the popular and commercial imagination, the lifeblood of the nation” (Thompson, 706). The same could not be said at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Among other aspects, of course, mass incarceration changed the way urbanites lived in unprecedented ways. New punitive drug legislation and extensive prison terms, directed at men and women of color especially, soared the prison population across the country. Even minor offenses, and more surprisingly, mere association with various illegal drugs guaranteed years behind bars. Furthermore, “due” to the uprisings for racial and civil equality, school district officials across the nation embraced more severe penalties and employed law enforcement to

In a viewpoint by Nicole Flatow titled “History Indicates Varied Results in Improving Police Brutality in America,” She believes that there has been little reforms regarding police brutality. Nicole argues for years, America has barely made any effort on improving the use of force by police officers. For example, victims such as Rodney King and Amadou Diallo, led to some reforms, but did not solve the violence of police brutality. With the beating of Rodney King that was captured on camera, it sparked massive outrage that led to a riot when the police officers received no charges. Because of the riots, it created a momentum for a reform of the police. “One of the most significant reforms that did come out of the commission was ending the policy of lifetime terms for police chiefs.” (Rodney King, 1991, Los Angeles) This led to a police chief named Daryl Gates to resign and made serving for a lifetime over. In another case of police misconduct, Amadou Diallo was shot by police because they thought that his wallet was a gun. Just like the Rodney King case, the officers that were involved were also not charged. After a lot of protest, the only changes that were instituted were “adding more minority officers to the special Street Crimes unit whose officer had shot Diallo and requiring all officers in the unit to wear uniforms.” (Amadou Diallo, 1999, New York City) However, these reforms didn’t solve the problem at all. According to data statistics, this tragedy happened because of the law called Stop-and-frisk. The police were overusing this tactic to aggressively made police stops. Data shows that stop-and-frisk was getting extremely worse and the number of police stops that was being conducted is due to racial profiling. After a successful campaign, new legislations were introduce that will have an inspector to oversee NYPD and would allow citizens to sue the

Incarceration refers to the constitutional deprivation of an offender the capacity to commit crimes by detaining them in prisons. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation. The U.S incarcerates five times more people than the United Kingdom, nine times more than Germany and twelve times more than Japan (Collier, 2014, p.56). Incarceration has several objectives. One of these is to keep persons suspected of committing a crime under secure control before a court of competent jurisdiction determines whether they are guilty or innocent. Incarceration also punishes offenders by depriving them of their liberty once the court of law has convicted. Moreover, incarceration deters criminals from committing further crimes

Within the jail and prison system there are many types of offenders living together. Some of these offenders require special attention and programs while incarcerated. These special requirements can be based on a mental or physical health issue, age, or type of offense; such as sex offenses or particularly violent offenses. For the purposes of this paper the focus will be on the special requirements of drug offenders, and more specifically drug abusers. On the surface it may not seem like these offenders need any special considerations while incarcerated. However, a deeper look will show that drug addicted offenders bring more than just an addiction with them, and if these things are not addressed they can pose additional problems for correctional

Every day on the news there are all kinds of reports. Crime reports are a major part of today's events. Almost every day there are posts about crimes. The level of crime has risen immensely in every corner of the world. People have tried to understand the causes of crime, but if we look around the world we can see that many of the crimes are caused by people who abuse drugs and alcohol, people who think negatively towards others, and poverty.