Vivian Stern's Creating Criminals

Vivian Stern’s book “Creating Criminals” is an accurate representation of how the system created criminals and filled prisons. However, there were a few concepts in the book that might have been tougher to understand and are in need of visual aid. Luckily, the documentary “The 13th” is also an accurate representation of the ideas discussed in “Creating Criminals” and provides a different approach to explaining the more complex topics one might have trouble with. After reading “Creating Criminals” by Vivian Stern, some confusion can arise about the topics discussed, but the documentary “The 13th” epitomizes how the prison system took blacks and minorities and used crime policies to create criminals, privatize and fill prisons, resulting in the mass incarceration …show more content…
“The US keeps 6 times as many of its people in prison as does the bordering country of Canada. The US has 4.6% of the world’s population and 23.1% of the world’s prisoners and the incarceration rate has risen to 724 per 100,000” (Stern, 47). With such high statistics of incarceration, it isn’t hard to link the ideas of the poor and minority individuals that make up those numbers. Further statistics from Stern’s book that support this claim are “evidence shows that people at the lower end of society (poor) are least likely to be protected from crime, and are most likely to suffer from injustice within the criminal justice system” (Stern, 73). “New laws were passed in 1986 and 1988 making punishments worse for involvement with crack cocaine much more severe than for power cocaine, with the main users of crack cocaine being poor black people” (Stern, 79). “Unemployed people are subject to harsher sentencing, but unemployed black and Latino young men are sentenced more harshly than unemployed white men” (Stern, 80). Pulling these direct quotes from the book give us a visual representation of the