American Incarceration : Where We Are, And What Can Be Done?

Ever since the first prison opened in the United States in 1790, incarceration has been the center of the nations criminal justice system. Over this 200 year period many creative alternatives to incarceration have been tried, and many at a much lower cost than imprisonment. It wasn’t until the late 1980’s when our criminal justice systems across the country began experiencing a problem with overcrowding of facilities. This problem forced lawmakers to develop new options for sentencing criminal offenders.

Bohn & Hanley (2011) expresses a clear dramatic increase in the number of people incarcerated in the United States since the early 1970’s, mostly because of drugs (pg. 365). Another notable fact reveals the increase of confinement is the rising charge in price per day to house prisoners; as well, keep jails and prison overcrowded to make more profit (Bohn & Hanley, 2011, pg.369). Although efforts to provide alternatives methods to long-term incarceration exists, the fact still remains that private sectors that own prisons and jails still depend on a high rate of imprisonment (Bohm & Hanley, 2011, pg. 370). Noticeably, the strategic approach taken is to build larger facilities to house more offenders, make more profit from their crimes and

The main argument within this article was that America has a poor approach to incarceration and is ultimately an expensive failure. However, the article provided many points on how our justice system could be improved upon. For example, they could change the harsh sentencing rules, crimes that are currently felonies (drugs), and the rehabilitation programs. All of these things would help to lower the incarceration rate which would ultimately lower overcrowding within our jails and prisons. Though these tools may take time to be put in place they would have highly beneficial outcomes.

Name: Lecturer: Course: Date of Submission: Mass incarceration in American Prisons Introduction More than 2.3 million Americans today are prisoners, a population that represents more than a quarter of the number of prisoners in the world. This means that 760 Americans in one hundred thousand are prisoners in America (Detotto and Pulina). The rise in prisoners’ numbers has sharply risen since 1980 with the cost of maintaining the prison going to over four hundred percent within the same period.

Before discussing the privatization of the penal institutions, we should understand some of the history of the penal system. Going back to 1790 in Philadelphia, “ the Walnut street jail was converted from a simple holding facility to a prison, it is commonly referred to the nation’s first prison.” ( Bohm, Haley, 2012, p.358.). I have enjoyed learning how the criminal justice system has shaped our country in the last 200 years. In the next few paragraphs I will discuss the privatization of the penal institutions and the factors that support it.

Mass incarceration is a barrier effecting many minorities and communities. The growth in incarceration rates in the United States over the past 40 years is historically reoccurring. According to statistics the war on drugs is the number one drive into our prisons. It took a toll on how diligently police enforcement do their jobs, communities, citizens and our 14th amendment rights which addresses equal protection under the law to all citizens, the amendment also addresses what is called "due process", which prevents citizens from being illegally deprived of life, liberty, or property. Marijuana and Narcotics are the most common drug when it comes to distributing and possession. Drug use and abuse is an expensive problem in the United States, both financially and socially. Another factor that contribute to mass incarnation rates

The hype around globalization and the negative impact of the social media have obscured discussion on the most immediate and pressing issues that need immediate attention in the U.S justice system. The number of incarceration in the United States beginning 1970 has swollen to all time higher (Walker et al., 2012). According to Binswanger et al. (2012), American judicial system has imprisoned 2.3 million of its populace, and these are more than any other country in the world. Davis (2007) mentioned ironically that the U.S jails a quarter of the world prisoners albeit it contains merely 5% of the global population. These statistics are mind boggling for a country that has opted to teach the world fairness, justice and equality.

Mass incarceration has grown and developed so much, that it’s come to define and create fear in America’s minority communities. “America contains approximately 5% of the world’s population, but has 25% of the world’s incarcerated.” (DeVernay, 2016) There’s always been an underlying tension between minorities and authorities, and that’s due to the unjust discrimination they face in the eyes of the law.

Mass Incarceration is a huge problem in United States culture. No other country in the world incarcerates its population the way that America does. “The U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world – both per capita and in terms of total people behind bars. The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet it has almost 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population.” Worse yet the majority of the incarcerated individuals belong to a minority group despite not participating in illegal activity any more frequently than their white counterparts. Is the United States criminal justice system racist and if so what is the cause behind this racism. After the end of slavery, many southern black Americans traveled to the north to escape endless violence and discrimination. In the south they could only find low paying field jobs whereas in the northern cities there were steady factory jobs promised as well as the hope that discrimination could be escaped. The northerners while against slavery were not egalitarian and were not in favor of hoards of black Americans surging into their cities and taking jobs away from the white working poor. The need for social control by white Americans only grew with the population of black Americans living in the cities and working in the factories. The rhetoric of “law and order” first came about in the late 1950s as white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was encouraged by southern governors and law enforcement.

Have you ever question about the justice in the United States? Stevenson states that, “Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today” (15). Is United States is a modern country that doesn’t serve justice to her citizen? 2.3 million of prisoners are just embarrassing the whole country. You might want to know how bad the justice system is and how the heck cause 2.3 million prisoners to be in prison. Our system is define by an error; which serve justice to the rich and injustice to the poor. It’s common to know that poor and color people are more likely to be convict if they commit a small crime. We created a system like “Three strikes and you’re out” to show how strong we can be, and as the result of that, we have created the mass incarceration that no other countries can’t do. We are no better than a beast. We condemned the poor because we know they are helpless and we condemned the color people because of racial bias. What does justice really stand for? The justice should be change in order to prevent mass incarceration in the future and focus on a fairness when it comes to trial.

In the past four decades, there has been a staggering increase in the United States prison population at the local and state level. Currently there are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails that has added up to a 500% increase over 40 years (The sentencing project). The cause of this prison growth is a variety of laws and punitive sentencing policies that were initiated starting in the early 1970’s. Policies such as harsh drug penalties for non-violent crimes, Mandatory Minimum Maximum sentences and the Three Strikes law have all contributed to America’s current problem of mass incarceration.

in recent decades, violent crimes in the United States of America have been on a steady decline, however, the number of people in the United States under some form of correctional control is reaching towering heights and reaching record proportions. In the last thirty years, the incarceration rates in the United States has skyrocketed; the numbers roughly quadrupled from around five hundred thousand to more than 2 million people. (NAACP)In a speech on criminal justice at Columbia University, Hillary Clinton notes that, “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.” (washington post) How could this be? Are Americans more prone to criminal activity than the rest of the world? How could they be more prone to criminal activity if crime rates have been dropping? Numbers like that should be cause for concern, because if crime rates are dropping then it is only logical for one to expect the number of incarceration to go down as well; unfortunately, the opposite is true. Shockingly, there seem to be a few people who actually profits from keeping people in jails. The practice of mass incarceration who most see as a major problem in the United States of America is actually beneficial to some. The prison system in the United States who was create to

Though many Americans are aware that their nation imprisons more of its own citizens than any other country in the world, what much fewer of them are aware of is the increasing number in which those citizens are housed in facilities with little to no government oversight. From 2002 to 2009, the amount of inmates held in private prisons grew thirty-seven percent while the overall number of incarcerated Americans during that same timeframe grew by only fourteen percent (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010), a statistic that reveals a worrying trend; that of a disproportionate amount of citizens being housed in what has come to be known as the prison-industrial complex, a term used not only for the growing

The United States prison population has expanded at an increasingly rapid rate over that past several decades. Each day, more and more criminal offenders are sent to prisons; most of which were designed to house fewer inmates but are now packed to their limits. This “mass- incarceration era” as many scholars and commentators of the Criminal Justice System call it, is a result of several key issues that have created an environment within the correctional system that forces many inmates to serve longer prison sentences while increasing recidivism rates. Current federal and state sentencing policies have resulted in historically high rates of offender recidivism and the highest incarceration rates in the world (Warren, 2007). As a result, prison population and overcrowding has rapidly increased and has become a serious issue across the country however, a reform in sentencing policies, more early-release incentives, and reintegration back into society through rehabilitation will help reduce recidivism and prevent the continuing rise of prison populations. (change once paper is complete)

In America’s tough economic society, over population has become an exceedingly hot topic issue. However, overcrowding in America’s prison system has been a severe problem since the 1970's. The majority of the changes have come from different policies on what demographic to imprison and for what reason. The perspective of locking up criminals because they are "evil" is what spawned this (Allen, 2008). Because of this perspective the prison system in America is in need of serious reorganization. Since 1980, most states have one or more of their prisons or the entire system under orders from the federal courts to maintain minimum constitutional standards (Stewart, 2006).