The Prison Reform Movement was triggered by George Zimmerman not found guilty, which led to public outrage. The minorities make up most of the prisons. “According to the Sentencing Project, which promotes sentencing reform and alternatives to incarceration, the likelihood that a white man will spend time in prison in his lifetime is one in seventeen; for Latino men, the likelihood is one in six, and for black men, it is one in three”(When we fight we win 56). People do not know that the prison system is a way to keep minorities locked away. They do not know that a black or latino person are most likely to be in prison than a white person. The power holders have done a good job on hiding it but it is time to reveal it. A trigger event is when a shocking incident occurs which increased public support and inspired activism. …show more content…
The article, Trayvon Martin protests being held in more than 100 US cities, states, “Demonstrators are set to gather outside federal court buildings and police headquarters in more than 100 cities, to call on the Department of Justice to file a civil rights case against George Zimmerman, the man who was found not guilty of second-degree murder of the 17-year-old.” The fact that Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, was not plead guilty caused the people to get angry. Zimmerman killed an innocent 17 year old because he had his hood on and that looked
Researched Argument Essay Having accurate representation matters. Unfortunately, that is a concept that the media industry has not quite grasped. The portrayal of African Americans in the media, whether it be plays, television, news, movies, or social media has always been negative since the birth of slavery in the United States of America. Playing on the negative stereotypes of African Americans, white Americans have gone on to believe their false impressions of Africans Americans and this has hindered African Americans from gaining social change and respectability.
This is the case of George Zimmerman vs Trayvon Martian is case where George Zimmerman is the shooter who shot Martin down. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer when this murder happened. It has been about three years that Trayvon Martin passed away and there still hasn 't been any justice served upon George Zimmerman. Martin was an armed individual making his way home from a corner store through a gated community. Despite the fact that he got shot down by a White man makes a difference on how this case was judged.
By Zimmerman receiving no punishment he and thousands of others were outraged by the results. Courts saying
On February 26, 2012, a 17 year old boy named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a man named George Zimmerman. George was found not guilty in July of 2013. President Obama spoke upon the ruling of this case. “It could have been me 35 years ago” stated Obama. Most African Americans went through being followed in the stores, hearing the doors on the car lock as they passed by, or had a woman move her purse closer to her as they walked in the elevator.
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.
The murder of an innocent, young man, not bothering anybody. He was 17 years old. If you notice somebody walking at night with a hoodie on, would you let the police deal with it or take it upon yourself not knowing what that other person is carrying? Trayvon Martin’s murder happened at a Gated community in Sandford, Fla. He was walking and wearing a hoodie at the wrong time.
Eduardo Mendieta constructs an adequate response to Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? in his article, The Prison Contract and Surplus Punishment: On Angela Y. Davis’ Abolitionism. While Mendieta discusses the pioneering abolitionist efforts of Angela Davis, the author begins to analyze Davis’ anti-prison narrative, ultimately agreeing with Davis’ polarizing stance. Due to the fact Mendieta is so quick to begin analyzing Davis’ work, the article’s author inadvertently makes several assumptions about readers of his piece. For instance, Mendieta assumes that readers will automatically be familiar with Angela Davis.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world with about 2.3 million people in prison. According to Vitanna.org’s statistics, an estimated one million of these prisoners are African American. 12.3 percent of the population is black, yet over 43 percent of America’s prisoners are black. This disparity is certainly unnatural, seeing as how African Americans are no more likely to be criminals than whites. Black men are overrepresented in prisons because of the unfortunately common stereotype that they are all remorseless criminals.
“African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population.” The majority group of this statistic are people who come from african american backgrounds. The fact that black people are to make up nearly half of the prison population alone, really conveys the rate at which they are being arrested. Black men are often victims of racial profiling by police. They are targeted by police officers, and security guards, and are accused of crimes unrelated to them, simply on the basis of their skin color.
There’s a multitude of things that need to be repaired in our system, and prison is one of them. Prison reform is an important issue because we need to take care of everyone and with the way we treat criminals, we do not see them as equal. We need to assess illegal acts correctly instead of trying to put people in jail for the rest of their lives. We also need to work more on how we try to rehabilitate people. Instead of barring convicts off from the rest of us, we need to teach them how to integrate, so they can live better lives than they did
It's going to be hard because the standard story put the shocking story out which are not essential problems facing prison population. People more likely to gravitate that story rather than the story that could help the country. According to lock in, “in a survey of registered US voters by the Pew Research Center in early 2016, 44 percent of all residents said they believed that “reforming the criminal justice system should be a top priority”; the percentage rose to 73 percent for black respondents and 48 percent for Hispanics" (Pfaff,2017, P5). People have faith in reforming the justice system. This survey was carried to see if people are satisfied with the justice system and have the voter’s responses that they believe it should reform.
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.
Poor choices can lead to bad things. Yet if you set your mind to something positive, you can achieve it, and can change your life around in a positive direction. A story on how you can change your life even though you’ve done something terribly wrong. This is why if you want to be successful it doesn't take changing your surroundings, but changing your mind. Chris Green wasn’t Chris Green anymore.
This preconceived notion could not be farther from the truth. In reality, these reform movements are idiotically placing a bandaid over the tremendous issue that the prison system is. An imbalance of reforms between women and men, unrestrained sexual abuse in women’s prisons, and tyrannical gender roles are just three of countless examples of how prison reform movements only create more misfortune and fail to provide any real solution to worsening prison conditions. Perhaps instead of conjuring up additional ideas on how to reform prisons, America’s so-called democratic society should agree upon abolishing prisons as a whole. This being said, it is crucial to identify ongoing issues in today’s society, understand how they contribute to unlawful behavior, and seek a solution.
When discussing prison reform, success is often difficult to measure. One measure of success that the government uses is the recidivism rate. If the rate is lower it means that more inmates are adjusting to life outside of prison. If the rate is higher, like it is now, then prisoners are struggling to gain a footing in society and are going back to prison. As a current measure of success, a recidivism rate that is upwards of fifty percent in most states shows that prison reform and the prison system is failing.