America's Influence On Mass Incarceration

The United States is one of the largest countries in the world so high incarceration rates are expected. However, this rate has drastically increased in the past forty years, surpassing those of countries such as China, which has a population four times larger than the United States

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.

Mass incarceration is the tool of government to corporate with the capitalist to boost the economy, to discriminate the minority stealthily and to convince us to buy the propaganda.

The vast societal effects from mass incarceration have caused an increasingly alienated population to form in the U.S., which can be broadly classified in the dual areas of lasting effects and impacts to the family unit. First, the lasting effects of high incarceration rates are that they impact the rights of the convict, particularly African Americans. For example, noted civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander posits that the long term effects of mass incarceration operate to deny black Americans the future right to volte, the ability to obtain public benefits, the possibility to sit on juries, and ultimately the opportunity to secure gainful employment (Steiker, 2011), Moreover, professor Alexander argues that this mass incarceration together with the prior Jim Crow laws and the past practice of slaery in the U.S. operate to ensure that black Americans remain s subordinate class of citizens defined primarily by their race (Steiker, 2011).

Preview and Thesis: We, the United States of America are the world leaders in incarceration, but sadly, according to the webpage Federal Bureau of Prisons, under the section titled “Inmate offenses”, 46.2 percent are behind bars due to

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.

The prison population in the United states has increased 500% in thirty years. Since the 1970s social inequality has impacted the American prison system. America has 2.3 million people in prison which is “five times more than England and twelve times more than Japan.” We want to know why our prison population is growing and what are the core reasons. Has our society caused mass incarceration? Is it based on conflict theory or social stratification? Our research will include a comprehensive analysis of sentencing guidelines from the war on drugs , race, and poverty and respectively its impact on mass incarceration. “The United States has the dubious distinction of leading every other nation in both the largest total

Mass Incarceration in the United States has been a large topic of choice because rapid growth in the prison and jail populations, the long sentences the inmates face, and the inability for some inmates to incorporate themselves back into society. Since the 1970’s the U.S. prison population quadrupled from 158 to 635 people per 100,000, causing the U.S. to gain the title of country with the highest incarceration rate. (Massoglia, Firebaugh, & Warner, 2013, p. 142; Muller, 2012) As the growth of the U.S prison and jail population rapidly increased, so did the growth of the three major contributors to that population – African Americans, Hispanics, and whites – with African American and

The United States has the biggest imprisonment rate on the planet, and paying a high cost for it. Detainment strength finished in the mid-1970s when the jail populace expanded from 300,000 to 1.6million detainees, and the imprisonment rate from 100 for each 100,000 to more than 500 for every 100,000. Nonetheless, there is by all accounts little relationship between the wrongdoing rate and the imprisonment rate (Clear et al., 2013).

Mass incarceration has recently become a major problem within the United States. Although crime rates have dropped since the 1990s, incarceration rates have soared. This trend is largely associated with increased enforcement of drug-related crimes. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, this problem involves racial discrepancies when regarding these mass incarcerations. Incarcerations appear to be the most prominent throughout urban areas and the south, which happen to be the areas where African American males often reside or where racial politics are known to be apparent. In turn, this leads to disproportionate imprisonments. This problem requires immediate attention, but aspects of state and local politics have intensified incarcerations due a variety of factors, which include the state’s focus on the financial incentives that the federal war on drugs has created, the “tough on crime” stance that many politicians posses (largely republican), and the lack of rehabilitation services.

The figure above compares the U.S incarceration rate with the rates of countries such as Canada, Australia, and European countries. The Western European democracies possess a rate of incarceration that taken together is only one-seventh the rate of the United States. Moreover, the rate imprisonment of Russia is only two-thirds of the U.S. rate. For instance, there is a reason why the rate of incarceration is significantly high compared to the rest of the world, profit. The bigger the number of people incarcerated, the bigger the pool of workers in correctional institutions.

Mass incarceration became a public policy issue in the United States in the early 2010s. Now in 2016, there is still much debate over the country’s incarcerated population and incarceration rate. The nation has the highest incarcerated population in the world, with 2,217,947 inmates, in front of China with 1,649,804. America incarcerates 693 inmates per 100,000 residents, only the African island nation Seychelles incarcerates at a higher rate, with 799 for every 100,000 residents. The problem of mass incarceration continues to be assessed in various contexts. Recent analyses are historian Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and criminologist Dr. Elizabeth Brown’s “Toward Refining the Criminology of Mass Incarceration: Group-Based Trajectories of U.S. States, 1977—2010.”

Mass Incarceration is a predicament in the U.S. because in the land of the free, there are more than two million people in prison. Prisons are homes to the majority of twenty-two percent of the U.S. population. The U.S. has a massive incarceration rate, seven hundred and sixteen per every one hundred thousand. The U.S. makes five percent of the world’s population and the third country in which most people live in but number one incarcerating humans.

After decades trying to prevent it, prison population continued to increase. Mandatory minimum sentences and the privatization created more prisoners, rather than cutting down on the amount incarcerations. Since the 1980’s, the prison population has quadrupled and today one in every one hundred adults are in prison (Mandatory Minimums (HBO)). Infact, America leads the world in prisoners with 20% of the earth’s prison population (The Prison Crisis). In a study done by The American Prospect, charts and graphs provide information about the overpopulation crisis. The data from the charts show that while the crime rate has decreased, the rate of incarceration has been on a steady incline since 1990 (Waldman). America also leads the world in the number of prisoners- 760 prisoners per 100,000 population (Waldman). Not only does America have more prisoners than developed countries, like Russia, the united states beats undeveloped countries as well. Rwanda, which has the highest amount of prisoners in Africa, has 595 prisoners per 100,000 population (Waldman). The overpopulation of prisons in America creates poor conditions for the inmates and with each prisoner, more money has to go into the prison system, hurting the economy.

Austin, J., Irwin, J. (2001). “It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge.” Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co