Mass Incarceration And The Criminal Justice System

To leaders, workers, and interns of CALPRIG, Mass incarceration is defined as a large number of individuals being imprisoned. This definition gives no indication of a certain race, class, or religion being jailed, but we have seen incarceration in America be defined repeatedly by these very topics. Starting in the Nixon era, politicians starting advertising themselves as being, “tough on crime” to win elections and continued to cramp down on all drug related crime. Since this time, we have seen millions of people indicted on drug charges and our prison system is reaching maximum capacity. With multiple new drug laws, it has been made somewhat easy for police to arrest anyone who is involved with drugs and the majority of arrests have come on minority races and people of low class. While the laws were not intended to focus on a certain race or class, the results have showed that this “war on …show more content…
According to,(), the U.S. government saw crack cocaine being used mainly by lower class African Americans and they used their power to punish them although crack cocaine is the same as powder cocaine just in rock form. The punishment for crack cocaine became 100-1 in regards to the sentence for powder. They government also made a mandatory sentence for crack users which caused the incarceration rates to skyrocket. Multiple judges did not agree with these mandatory sentences as they felt they were sending low level offenders away for years although they did not deserve it. The ratio of crack to powder is 18 to 1 today which shows us that the U.S. still will not accept them as equals mainly because that powder cocaine is more used by whites while crack still is more popular with African-Americans. This blindness towards discrimination has led to more African-American in prison systems today then were enslaved in 1850