Sentencing Changes In Prison

According to the Sentencing Project, which is a non-profit organization that promotes reduced reliance on incarceration and increased use of more effective alternatives to deal with crime, states that the United States correctional system of the past thirty years has been characterized by a population increasing the exponentially in response to changes in policy towards mandatory minimum and determinate sentencing (Sentencing). In other words, individuals convicted of a crime today are more likely to be sentenced to incarceration and spend longer terms in prison, than their counterparts in previous decades (Sentencing). In 2002, state and federal prison and local jail populations exceeded 2 million, a trend that has contributed to prison overcrowding and has overwhelmed state governments with the burden of funding this rapidly expanding penal system (Sentencing). These changes in policy have resulted in the reality that prisons today are filled with large numbers of non-violent and drug …show more content…
More than two-thirds of the individuals who are in prison are racial and ethnic minorities, and for African American males in their twenties, one in every eight is in prison or jail on any give day (Sentencing). An African American male born today has a one in three chance of being incarcerated during his lifetime, compared to a one in seventeen chance for white males (Sentencing). These trends have been exacerbated by the impact of the “war on drugs,” with roughly three-fourths of all drug offenders being persons of “color,” which is vastly out of proportion to their share of drug users in society (Sentencing). Racial disparity in the criminal justice system is a product of higher rates of involvement in some offenses, social and economic disparities, legislative policies, and the use of discretion by criminal justice decision-makers