The Prison Boom

Improved Essays
When dissecting the effects of the prison boom, one may be tempted to overlook the children involved. The epidemic of mass incarceration has been one of the most devastating sociopolitical issues of the past three decades. Not only was the prison boom facilitated, it was engineered. There were policy’s put into place that geared there effort towards a specific demographic which untimely lead to the mass incarceration that America sees today. One could summarize that the steady rise in the prison population could be attributed to get tough on crime legislation. Likewise many could use Nixon’s war on drugs as a significant factor in the prison boom of recent decades. The criminalization of poor and urban America has wreaked havoc on the family …show more content…
You understand what I’m saying,” Ehrlichman continued. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war on blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (New York Daily news ADAM EDELMAN MAR 23, 2016) I believe that this statement shows clear intentionality towards the disenfranchisement of one people over another. In fact, having such an inflammatory statement given in confidence Mr. Ehrlichman provides the motivation for one to see the clear racial bias and malicious intent behind some of the government 's policy.

In 1969 Travis Hirschi published the social control theory (Causes for Delinquency 1969) In a nutshell “Social bonds encouraged conforming behavior and prevented most people from committing crimes.” Hirschi believed that an individual may be able to dodge the pitfalls of criminality by engaging in social mechanisms of control. In my analysis, the social control theory will always yield faulty results because there is no way to account for varying values of an individual belonging to a targeted class of
…show more content…
This says that crime is caused by structural causes rather than individual traits. (Shaw and McKay 1942 Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas) This is better defined as the breakdown of social institutions in a community. Poverty creates excess crime and criminal behaviors. If this is true then a reasonable person could place the blame on certain administration 's politics such as the initial Nixon drug laws and then later Clinton 's mandatory sentencing guidelines. For all of the models used in criminological theory, they never account for racist or elitist tendencies to wield power in favor of like individuals. What would the theories of Shaw and McKay look like if it interpreted data from the perspective of an impoverished underclass? It is in my honest opinion that the theoretical models would not work properly within those parameters without providing a motivation for the constant individual cultivation of extreme wealth. The prison industrial complex has proven to be a social juggernaut, but one may be surprised at what kind of negative effects have been absorbed by the most vulnerable people in our society. According to Christopher Widman in his paper imprisonment and infant mortality Having ever been incarcerated or having an ever-incarcerated partner increases the risk of having infectious or stress-related

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    The Injustices of Mass Incarceration of African Americans Since 1980, the United States has seen an unprecedented rise in incarceration rates. The United States is only 5% of the world population, yet it has 25% of the world’s prisoners. Currently, the US is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.3 million people currently in jail and prisons. That is a 500 percent increase over the last forty years. These incarceration rates, mostly which runs independent of crime rates, are suggested to be the result of policy changes over the last 30 to 35 years.…

    • 1515 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Overcrowding and mass incarceration have been problems in the United States prisons for decades. Overcrowding can be traced back to the late 1970 's with an inmate population increase of 750% from the 70 's to present(Rogan). This increasing number of prisoners has had major negative effects, not only on the inmates themselves, but also on the surrounding communities that these inmates have been taken from and will eventually be released back into. The more mass incarceration that goes on the more these prisons, communities, and future generations will continue to decrease. The well being of the prison inmates was put in such jeopardy, because of overcrowding, that in 2011 the Supreme Court decided with a 5:4 vote that California would have…

    • 1437 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Golden Gulag Analysis

    • 776 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Golden Gulag 1. How does the text circulate? The material analyzed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore circulates in the form of a book that was originally published on December 9, 2006. The author’s intended audience consists of individuals who have been directly or indirectly affected by any form of social racism and in particular those individuals who continue to fight for human rights.…

    • 776 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Therefore, each racial caste system differs from the previous in built structures and justification, but the underlying presence of racist systematic forces does not change. Today, the language used to justify mass incarceration does not rely on race, unlike the language used to justify Jim Crow or slavery. Instead the criminal justice system labels blacks as criminals, thereby justifying the application of discriminatory practices. The effect of sigma also operates differently in the era of mass incarceration. During Jim Crow, racial stigma contributed to racial, but today the sigma of black criminality has created a deep shame in the black community, “destroying networks of support and creating silence about the new caste system among the most affected” (Alexander, pg. ).…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Crime In Prison

    • 1269 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Americans today live in a country overflowing with more prisoners than ever, yet crime has been dropping since the late twentieth century. In fact, from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from about 500,000 to 2.3 million people (Criminal 1). There are several factors contributing to this problem. In recent years, America has taken new approaches to crime, such as the “War On Drugs” and the “Three Strikes” law. These approaches have drastically increased the prison population, to the point that 1 in 31 adults, or 3.2% of the population, will spend some time in prison in their lifetime (ibid).…

    • 1269 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mandatory Minimums

    • 888 Words
    • 4 Pages

    With a total prison population of 2,217,000 people as of 2013, the United States continues to have the highest prison rate in the world (Institute for Criminal Policy Research). In light of these numbers, it is clear to many that the United States is in need of some kind of reform in the way it responds to crime and carries out justice, however, there is much disagreement on what aspects of our criminal policies need to be reformed and in what way. Many factors play a role in the enormous prison rates in the United States, however, some of these factors raise concerns not only about the prison populations, but also bring up questions regarding economics, ethics, and the overall effectiveness of the United State’s current criminal justice policies.…

    • 888 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The last five chapters of the book “The American Prison: Imagining a Different Future” written by Francis Cullen, Mary Stohr and Cheryl Johnson discuss some of the various prison systems that can be found in America, and the issues that surround them. The main focus of discussion for each chapter is the history of the prison, its effectiveness in running, its social context in modern day America, and the authors of the chapter’s personal thoughts on the importance of that specific prison type. The four types of prisons covered in chapters 9-12 are the private prison, the green prison, the small prison, and the accountable prison; chapter thirteen of the book talks about the lessons that should be learned from the book regarding the harm and…

    • 2111 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Weeping in the Playtime of Others In reading Weeping in the Playtime of Others: America’s Incarcerated Children by Kenneth Wooden, I learned about the devastating, heartbreaking truths about how corrupt our juvenile legal system is. I knew there was probably some violence within the facilities, but I didn’t realize the extent of the torture and physical abuse the youth experienced within in the juvenile correctional facilities across America. I was shocked by the amount of youth that weren’t actually what we would consider criminals. These children were incarcerated because they were emotionally disturbed, mentally handicapped or because they ran away from home to escape a bad situation.…

    • 713 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved 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

    Disparities In Prisons

    • 537 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Of course, this astronomical spike in prison populations across the US did not come without a laundry list of implications. Among the most notable, the real problem amongst prison populations and their racial makeup. Critics of the “War on Drugs” staunchly protested the increasingly apparent racial disparities as these in fact were the groups so greatly affected by the agenda. For example, throughout the same time frame, African American women had experienced significant effects of the new legislation given that their number of incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 828 percent—which consequently was double the increase compared to African American men and triple the increase among white females (Hutton, 19). Although remanence of protest pulsated across the US in waves of calls of injustice, the legislation remained widely popular among the majority of…

    • 537 Words
    • 3 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
  • Improved Essays

    (Hatzenbuehler, et al., 2015). Long after the end of segregation many African Americans believe racism is manifested through mass incarceration. What effects of mass incarceration lends credence to the notion that racism still exist? Racism is evident in the discriminatory consequences of mass incarceration in the African American population…

    • 1547 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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…

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    From their perspective, in the 1970’s public officials focused on violent crime as being a problem. They suggested that African Americans were becoming more violent and were a threat to whites. This information was disseminated to the public by the media. The media does not always provide us with the reality of what’s going on but instead puts emphasis on news that’s going to grab our attention. Particularly, violent crime.…

    • 1076 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Americas “fear of crime” has developed an incarceration binge, resulting in a disparity within America’s prisons, largely, affecting the underclass; dishonored groups caught in a symbiosis of the ghetto and prison, meaning, that ghettos have become more like prisons, and so undermined the inmate society, as such, turned prisons more like ghettos; hence, has redefined citizenry via racialized criminal vilification, and therefore, developed a state wherein the criminal justice system is the instrument to control the poor (L. Wacquant, 2010). Largely, because of socioeconomic forces manufactured by powerful elites through purposeful institutional arrangements that are pivotal to the prison disparity. Inevitably, because of societal isolation,…

    • 390 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays