Effects Of Bill Clinton's Mass Incarceration

Decent Essays
goal in mind: to minimize Clinton’s moral culpability for what went on back in the 1990s. Mass incarceration was already happening, these stories agree. And besides, not everything in the crime bill was bad. As for its lamentable effects, well, they weren’t intentional. What’s more, Bill Clinton has apologized for it. He’s sorry for all those thousands of people who have had decades of their lives ruined by zealous prosecutors and local politicians using the tools Clinton accidentally gave them. He sure didn’t mean for that to

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    While slavery in America was ended by the US Civil War, racial discrimination was legally retained in the Jim Crow Laws. These laws, which were prevalent in all southern states, separating black and white Americans in all social settings. The Jim Crow Laws were turned over in the 1960s heavily due to the Civil Rights Movement. However, despite the trends in law enforcement allow discrimination to continue in other forms. Mass incarceration refers to America’s experimentation in incarceration, defined by historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in disadvantaged neighborhoods.…

    • 1120 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    All of the articles I have read stated the same things when it came to the demographics of the prison population. They stated that the people who are mostly incarcerated are people of color, predominantly African-American and then Hispanic men. In the article “Inside Rikers: The Social Impact of Mass Incarceration in the Twenty-First Century” by Jennifer Wynn, she stated that when she visited Rikers and was waiting in the waiting room, she was the only white person there (Wynn, pg.1). She later found that ninety percent of the inmates were black or Hispanic (Wynn, pg. 2) and that ninety three percent were male (Wynn, pg. 4). Although not as large as black men, there has also been an increase of minority women’s imprisonment.…

    • 1562 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Felony is the new N-word. They don’t have to call you nigger anymore”(Kilgore). The N-word was a label given to African-Americans to serve as a verbal means of oppression. In similar ways, the word felon is now being used as a means of keeping African Americans out of work, reinforcing negative stereotypes, and perpetuating the white-black class divide. Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, introduced the preceding quote when arguing that mass incarceration is just another form of racial oppression, the modern versions of chattel slavery and the original Jim Crow.…

    • 1011 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In her award-winning article, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” author Heather Ann Thompson writes that “historians have largely ignored the mass incarceration of the late twentieth century and have not yet begun to sort out its impact on the social, economic, and political evolution of the postwar period.” Historian Elizabeth Hinton’s book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, is one response to Thompson’s article in that Hinton traces the birth of the War on Poverty as a culmination of government policies. As her central thesis, Hinton posits that “the expansion of the carceral state should be understood as the federal government’s response to the demographic…

    • 669 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Hello guys, Our direction is going to head to Mass Incarceration & Black, Blown Females & Community (including family) [The mass incarceration of black and brown women has devastating and lasting impacts on their communities.] might also considering Policing of women Domestic violence abuse Sex work Drug use The reason why chose Mass Incarceration & Black, Blown Females & Community : Fastest growing the U.S prison population Often acting as head of household Strongly affects family, children, and men How/ where we can find the artists Open call: Using Web/ Pages…

    • 258 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In today’s society, more African Americans compared to any other race are under the control of the criminal justice system than were enslaved in the 1800s. In 2007, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission over 81% of convicted felons were African Americans. Since majority of felons are of colored people the system of mass incarceration depicts that racial discrimination remains as powerful as it was during slavery and the era of Jim Crow. In this paper, we will discuss Michelle Alexander’s viewpoints and relate the connection between mass incarceration and the –isms (classism, sexism, racism). Also, we will we argue how discrimination still exists in housing, education, employment when labeled as a “felon”, and give possible recommendations…

    • 895 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The tough on crime bill gave 8.7 million dollars to build and operate new prisons. This allowed members of ALEC to create new contracts to gain revenue off of prisons. Rather they were buying cheap labor or selling their goods to the prisons, they increased their profits. This act just gave Greedy America another motive to keep prisons cells full.…

    • 1514 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    For the last couple of years social justice advocates have loudly sung the praises of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which has garnered a huge following and spawned an allegedly new designation for racial inequity in the United States. However, while I do agree with Alexander that there is a humongous issue with mass incarceration in the United States, I believe that Alexander’s work promotes a false understanding of mass incarceration in the United States. My objection to the Jim Crow analogy is based on what it obscures. Proponents of the analogy of mass incarceration to the Jim Crow Laws focus on those aspects of mass incarceration that most resemble Jim Crow and minimize or…

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Have cotton fields been replaced with prisons; mass incarceration is an ambiguous problem minority’s faces today. Over the past decades, the United States has incarcerated over millions of people and minorities make up nearly half of the total. More importantly making the United Stated the highest country with incarceration rates. In 2013, the state of Georgia had 2.6 million people with criminal records; 4.3 percent of the populations were Hispanics, 33 percent were Caucasians and 61 percent of them were African-Americans. Furthermore, making the state the fifth highest prison population in the nation.…

    • 720 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    That rather than remembering the events and acknowledge the pain of the affected families, they are trying to just look past the unfortunate circumstances. Near the end of his essay, Mitch references a moment in his private life and explains how apologies get so complicated “We say sorry when we are responsible and when we are not. We say sorry when we were present or when we were far away. We are ambiguous about what apologies mean in the smallest personal interactions. How can we expect our political apologies to be any less complicated?”…

    • 754 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Tyra Thomas Professor Holder December 6, 2016 African Studies Mass Incarceration Many believe that slavery didn’t end in 1865, rather it was reformed. We can look at slavery and how African labor was exploited and the harsh conditions they were under to perform this labor for the white men. After the exploitation of Africans in Slavery there was Segregation, which existed solely to separate races due to nothing more than the color of your skin. Race something that is social constructed and has nothing to back it up, but society has instilled this thought as one being superior due to skin color.…

    • 1426 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    In her article Why Mass Incarceration Matters; Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History, Heather Thompson discusses how mass incarceration lead to the decline of poor African American’s economic and social standing, in some cases took jobs from white rural areas, raised profits of businesses in the prison industry, and increased the amount of prisoners performing full time labor. She argues that the greater increase of disparity between African Americans and Whites arose during the New Deal era, which eliminated most of the unfavorable assumptions based on Whites’ social standing. This further divergence eventually allowed greater prejudice to be more narrowly focused on poor African Americans rather than the…

    • 1553 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mass incarceration is ideally a part of American history. The increasing number of the prison population is alarming contrasting to the decrease of crime in the United States. The Caging of America depicts the relationship between mass incarceration and racism and mass incarceration and the crime rate. Gopnik shows that during the period of which incarceration rates were going up in the entire country, the crime rate was dropping, particularly in New York, therefore showing the cause of the crime fall had no linkage with prison over population. Gopnik sheds light to high rates of incarceration and the fact that incarceration should not be a method of crime control.…

    • 1125 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Many people think that incarceration is like a vacation at a country club until they see what really happens behind the bars. Offenders do not get the help that they need when they are in prison. When offenders go to prison and when they are let out nothing has changed and they usually end up back in prison. The rates of population have gone up and prisons are becoming over populated. Craig Jones and Don Weatherburn proves, “The sentenced adult prison population has increased by about 20 per cent since the mid 1990s” (10).…

    • 1725 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Mass Incarceration After the thirteenth amendment was passed in 1865 abolishing slavery, racial tension was still at an all-time high. The idea that white people were still superior to any other race specifically African Americans, this made things even more difficult. Due to this racial tension Jim Crow laws were created.…

    • 1449 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays