Essay On Justice System Reform

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Did you know the United States is home to five percent of the world’s population, with twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners and ninety percent of those prisoners being non-violent offenders? According to Us News & World Report the prison population has grown by eight hundred percent since the 1980’s while the country’s population only increased by a third. With this cancerous growth of the incarceration rate in America, the question is how far will this problem go, and how much will the American citizen have to pay before they realize the current justice system is obsolete. With an outdated system of justice and a spiraling incarceration rate, the question on most people’s mind is should the justice system be reformed? The main question on a lot of people’s mind is how the justice system get so jacked up. It all started back in 1986 when the devil known as Ronald Reagan was president, there was crack everywhere and I’m not talking about on the sidewalk or your plumber’s backside. I mean crack cocaine with a steady number of drug addicts growing nationwide, this era was commonly referred to as the crack epidemic of the late eighties. So to combat the growing number of drug addicts, President Reagan and his congress passed a law known as the mandatory minimum. This new law meant that anyone even a person without a previous record would have to serve a mandatory minimum of five years without parole if caught dealing cocaine or crack cocaine and if organized a cocaine ring you would serve twenty. Now what this law has done in the long run about thirty years later it has increased the prison population by almost 800 percent since the 1980’s most of those prisoners being nonviolent offenders and impoverished minorities, the effect of the mandatory minimum has not only left a good number of American citizens feeling that the justice system is unjust to minorities but also a spiraling prison budget. To draw a direct correlation of how a justice system reform could affect a number of different aspects in our society, I have a question for you? What do soldiers and inmates have in common, besides the requirement of wearing a uniform? I’ll tell they are both funded by the tax payers, now I am pretty sure majority of America doesn’t have a problem with paying their soldiers, but during the yearly sequestration (mandatory spending cuts in the federal budget) a good number of them are cut like they were on …show more content…
Otis states,” when we have more prisons we have less crime and when we have less prisons we have more crime” which is accurate because the unjust incarceration of people for petty crimes and sentences that doesn’t match the crime. Otis also goes on to say “that in the sixties and seventies we had less use for prisons and very few mandatory terms with a belief that rehabilitation worked and with the trust of the judge’s decisions, we got ourselves a national crime wave”, Otis is stating an opinionated fact even with the mass incarceration rate America is still faced with an out of control crime wave. So whether it be a few hundred of thousands or millions incarcerated there will always be crime. Otis is just telling a fable by basically saying by increasing the incarceration rate, the crime rate will

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