Incarceration in the United States

For starters, one must acknowledge that the United States of America owes about $18 trillion dollars of debt to several nations, including China, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, but about sixty-six percent of that, America owes to itself for numerous reasons. Additionally, the United States spends about $50 billion dollars annually on the war on drugs, around “$39 billion dollars on prisoners” (“The Price”) and a “$80 billion price tag for incarceration” (Picchi). According to an article in…

after the 1970’s the rate of incarceration within the United States spiked dramatically. Until recently when trying to explain the cause of racial disparity within the justice system and the effects on rate of incarceration, most viewed the situation as not indicative of just a racial issue but saw it as a problem across the board within the United States. Many became focused on the issue of mass incarceration rather than focusing on the issue of disproportion in incarceration or believed it was…

of two years ago, The United States was home to less than five percent of the population in the world, yet home to approximately one fifth of all prisoners in the world. This has become a problem that has been extensively discussed in recent years. This issue has and will continue to negatively affect the image of the United States, its citizens, and its law enforcement agencies. It seems as though the United States has been overcome by an obsession with prison. Incarceration seems to be the…

In “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” written by Michelle Alexander, she talks about the issue of mass incarceration throughout the United States. She points out the legal discrimination felons are subject to, hence a second class citizen. Alexander sees the problem of the majority of the prison population are African American males. She states that the War On Drugs helped spike this mass incarceration, and had the intent to discriminate against African American…

Society have been questioning if the incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders and the use of the three-strike law is correlated to the rise of prison population. There seems to be several beliefs that those who are drug users are violent individuals or that the use of drugs can lead to questionable behavior due to the effects that it have on the brain. Though all drugs are psychopharmacological agents, not all of them are the same. Drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine,…

What is mass incarceration? Mass incarceration is the increase of people incarcerated in the United States prisons. America has a very high number of people incarcerated compared to other countries. This causes many problems and crime rates are still high. I do not believe John Rawls would agree with mass incarceration because it is not beneficial in some aspects and it goes against the veil of ignorance in certain ways. Although his critique of mass incarceration maybe harsh under several of…

On September 20, Eric Schlosser visited the University of North Dakota Law School to discuss the expanding prison system and the mass incarceration rate in the United States. He explained that the United States encompasses the largest prison system in the world. There are currently 2.2 million people incarcerated throughout the country. Schlosser specified that number of individuals incarcerated is not due to a population increase, but due in part to New York Governor Rockefeller’s harsh drug…

The United States has the highest number of incarcerated citizens compared to any other country on Earth. In the last decade it has come to the media's attention that American corporations have begun to create factories and facilities that are now using prison labor as their main source of production. While prison labor is not a new concept for this country, now people are coming forward and speaking out against it more than ever before. The media has been equating this choice of prison labor to…

The GEO Group is a corporation that specializes in providing correctional, detention and community reentry services. For more than 30 years the GEO Group has profited billions of dollars from federal and state policies that have in concert increased incarceration and detention in the United States; half of the prisoners in the GEO Group’s privatized prisons are non-violent offenders for drug offences, the Geo Group have recently began expansion in immigration detention.…

The crisis of mass incarceration is not felt evenly in the United States, race defines every aspect of the criminal justice system, from police targeting, to crimes charged, and rates of conviction. More Black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began. Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of hiring out prisoners was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. The main priority of…