Crime In The United States

No matter where you live throughout the world, there is always going to be crime in that area. But when you compare the United State’s crime rate to that of countries like Canada, Norway, and Sweden, the result are shocking. According to the textbook, “over 1.9 million people were incarcerated in 2010 (1 in every 104 adults in the United States), by far the highest rate in the world” (pg. 306, Stanely, Zinn, and Smith). As a nation we need to stop using our prisons as a place of punishment and instead promote rehabilitation and correction. There are a number of reasons why the United States consistently has one of the highest crime rates. The first reason dates back to the Reagan administration. On October 28, 1986 President Reagan signed a bill that ordered mandatory minimum sentences …show more content…
When you think about the type of movies popular in American culture today, they often glorify violence. Super hero movies are an excellent example of this. While the movies can have some good qualities tied in, they often always have at least one fighting scene, if not multiple. When these young kids want to be just like their favorite super heroes they begin to adopt some of those violent traits. In an article related to this topic, Douglas Gentile states, “When one watches an individual example of media violence, one has an opportunity to learn several specific features: what can be used as a weapon and how to use it, what kind of damage can be expected, what to say, etc. If this is all that was learned, however, it would not be interesting. With repeated viewings, however, common elements can be extracted, such as scripts. Scripts are a cognitive knowledge structure that encodes ‘what events are to happen in the environment, how the person should behave in response to these events, and what the likely outcome of those behaviors would be” (Gentile