Levitt And Dubner Analysis

The overcrowding of prisons in California and the rest of America is the result of “manufactured crime”. These are crimes which have no victim yet are considered felonies and follow the three strike law. Many people do not know that there are more incarcerated people in America than any other country on earth. According to the American Civil Liberties Union “America contains 5% of the world 's human population while also containing 25% of the world’s prison population. Since 1970, our prison population has risen by some 700% - an increase far outpacing rates of population growth and crime1”. The reason America has so many incarcerated people is not because Americans commit more crimes or the police are just better at finding criminals,

Racial Disparity in the criminal justice system is when a certain ethnic group that does not represent the majority of the population is in charge or holds more power within the system than other ethnic groups. A misrepresentation of ethnicity with the Criminal Justice System. This misrepresentation can lead to the assumption that people of different ethnic backgrounds and the same crime will be treated differently within the criminal justice system. But, in some cases this assumption becomes reality. This reality is what must change. This reality that White, Black, Hispanic and Asian criminals can and will be treated differently even though they have committed similar crimes must be done away with. How to go about it is the where the issue lies. Do you incarcerate more white criminals to help

One of Levitt’s main four causes of the 1990s crime was the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Levitt argued that unwanted children were at higher risk for crime and the legalization of abortion reduced the number of unwanted children. His hypothesis was brought about because “the five states that allowed abortion in 1970… experienced declines in crime rates earlier than the rest of the country” (Levitt, 2004, p. 182). His statistics are compelling, but the reasoning seems slightly irrelevant, as argued by Baumer and

With almost half the nation divided among their views, abortion remains one of the most controversial topics in our society. Since Roe v. Wade, our views in society as well as following court cases have been progressing toward the woman’s right to choose. The precedent set by Roe v. Wade made the Supreme Court acknowledge that it cannot rule specifically when life begins and it also affirms that it is the woman’s right to have an abortion under the 14th Amendment. In the 1st Amendment, the Establishment Clause forbids the government from passing laws “which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another”. Many Christian pro-lifers use their religious beliefs to dispute when life begins. Although through the Free Exercise

Something will always need to be fixed in society because society is a reflection of us, and we are not perfect. Recently, there’s been many issues that have caught the attention of people living all across the world. Things such as police brutality, sexual assault in the workplace, and immigration law, just to name a few, but there’s also been an underlying issue that people are becoming more informed about, and that I believe matters - prison reform. Prison reform matters because in many instances, prisoners are treated inhumanely when they are locked up, and aren’t treated as humans when they have served their time. I believe we can bring about change in the prison system by changing the way we punish people who do commit crimes and focusing more on actual rehabilitation.

Worldwide, 42 million abortions occur every year, 20 million of which happen on unsafe terms (Haddad and Nour 122). As of late, abortion incidence has begun to decrease due to the creation and distribution of contraceptive medications, as this resulted in fewer unintended pregnancies. However, the overall number of unsafe abortions has remained the same, making the proportion of unsafe to safe terminations greater as time goes on (Sedgh et al. 629). This trend is especially evident in the United States, and does not appear to be ending soon; the epidemic of unsafe abortion in America will only continue to increase under current conditions. In this essay, I will use research conducted on the United States’ legislations to examine how the lack

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.

He then moves into detail on the effect of the slow-aging population from legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized through the Roe V. Wade case. By 1980, over a million women in America had an abortion. There were actually certain types of women who took advantage of the type of the new law; these women were referred to be young, poor, unmarried, etc. Unlike the case in Romania, these babies were fifty percent more inclined to live in destitution and become criminals. It is then stated that legalized abortion definitely had a big effect on the crime rate. This chapter shows how humans rely on things they can direct, rather than believe in something they cannot

Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow is a truly thought provoking book attempting to show the enduring issues of racial inequalities in our Criminal Justice system. Racial inequality in America is a huge and controversial topic, especially in reference to America’s system of Criminal justice. In “The New Jim Crow” Alexander focuses on the racial undertones of America’s “War on drugs”. Alexander uses the chapters of her book to take us on a journey through America’s racial history and argues that the federal drug policy unjustly targets black communities.

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

Roe v Wade is one of the most prominent rulings to be handed down by the United States Supreme Court in the twentieth century. This case effectively legalised abortion nationwide, establishing that the termination of a pregnancy is protected by the constitutional right to privacy. The plaintiff, Jane Roe, sought to nullify a Texas statute declaring that the termination of pregnancy is an indictable offence. Notwithstanding the sizeable precedent set by Roe v Wade, abortion continues to be one of the most highly contested issues within the political discourse. This paper will analyse the legal, social and political impact that Roe v Wade has had on America since it was handed down in 1973. It will refer to the content of the case itself and

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

In recent years abortion has become a conflicting issue. During the past several years due to its tremendous rate of increase, it has become a frequently talked about topic. As we approach the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, Research from the Pew Research Center indicates that 7 in

McBride (2008) further points out how the 1930s, during the Great Depression, destitute families did all they could to prevent bringing more children into the world. Women that ended up pregnant generally sought out risky alternatives to abortion and ended up in hospitals where the majority died. During this period as many as 17,000 out of 800,000 performed abortions ended in death count. Turning abortion into a criminal offence only helped increasing the number of unsafe abortions that were executed in

In our country today, we account for roughly five percent of the world’s population, yet we hold over twenty-five percent of the globe’s inmate population. According to John Irwin, we currently imprison more people for lesser crimes than any other country in the world. In 1987 alone, our prison population rested steadily at just 500,000 incarcerated inmates in the U.S. Although in the past twenty-seven years, the American prison population has actually quadruped to almost 2.4 million (Pratt, 2009). With that being said, we as a nation hold the highest recidivism rates compared to any other country. Each year, state, federal and local penitentiary’s release more than 630,000 prison inmates back into the general