Mass Incarceration Literature Review

The issue of prison overcrowding has been an increasing in America. There are about 2.2 million Americans in jail or prison. The number of people in prison have gotten so large that about one in every 100 adults are behind bars. The increase in inmate population in the United States is a concern to me because some of these people have committed non-violent crimes or have drug related crimes. These people should be placed in rehabilitation centers or be counseled about drug distributing.

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.

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought.

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.

Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration–The Problem of the United States In America, the private prison industry was made for necessary profit based off of the management of prisons by large, private companies. In David Shapiro’s insightful report “Banking on Bondage”, he discusses the logistics of the United States prison system, saying “In America, our criminal justice system should keep us safe, operate fairly, and be cost-effective”. Today, the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran.

Suppose there is a man, this man is married and also has three children whom he provides for. Now imagine another man, this man is a criminal and is sentenced to 55 long years in prison for his crimes. Based on the second description one may think this man would have committed a violent or at least very damaging crime. In reality, the crimes committed were not violent and some may argue, not even damaging. The aforementioned men are one in the same and describe the case of Weldon Angelo.

purported race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or other races ; racism is a particular form of prejudice defined by preconceived erroneous beliefs about race and members of racial groups”. According to U.S. Bureau Census of 2012, there are 3,138,725 African Americans living in Texas, making the state the third largest place where black people live in the United States. On the other hand, Hispanic population settled in Texas is one of the biggest, becoming the largest ethnic or racial minority in the country. According to data gathered from the U.S. Bureau, there are 55 million Hispanics.

Slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the carceral apparatus are all structural institutions that share a mutual beneficial relationship where each has supplemented and historically progressed into more advanced subtle forms of oppression and racism. Past and current regimes served as social functions with the objective of encompassing African Americans in a permanent subordinate position. In each generation, newer developments of a racial caste emerge with the same objective of repudiating African Americans citizenship. The only thing that has changed since Jim Crow is the language we use to justify racial exclusion (Alexander, 2). These four regimes are genealogically linked because they all advanced and developed from one another.

Juvenile Incarceration: Should Juvenile Offenders be Rehabilitated or Incarcerated? Working Thesis: While many believe juvenile offenders should be incarcerated for their crimes since regardless of their age, they are still committing a crime and deserve to be punished, however, juveniles should in fact be rehabilitated rather than incarcerated due to the negative effects prison has on young offenders’ physical and mental wellbeing, the prison system’s failure to deter juveniles from reoffending, and because juveniles are less likely to make rational decisions about things that affect them long term due to their brains not being completely developed. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, in 2014, over one

The skin is the largest organ of the human body and can display a range of different colors depending on the amount of melanin, a protein produced by special skin cells, that is in the skin. The more melanin that is created, the darker the skin tone. Despite the fact skin color is such a minor physiological difference, many have decided that it is enough of a reason to hate and discriminate against the minorities who possess a little more melanin than they do. This prejudice has managed to extensively infiltrate the justice system and law enforcement, causing black men to face multiple injustices such as being more likely to be convicted and given longer prison sentences than white men for the same crimes, having higher chances of being shot