Minorities in America’s Prisons Renita Redding ENG 122 Instructor: Sharon Linne November 23, 2014 Since the 18th century imprisonment has been the method of punishing crime in America. Today there are about two million people incarcerated in federal and state prison institutions in the United States (Page, Whetstone, 2014). The most alarming statistic associated with America’s prison population is the disproportionate number of minorities that are represented. According to Page and Whetstone, “the United States’ unprecedented expansion of imprisonment since the late 1970’s has disproportionately affected African Americans, intensifying inequality and transferring the way some people look at race issues”. Even though, there is an array
I’m sure this was the case in hundreds of “white v. black” trials in America. Tom ended up being shot and killed before he got a chance to get an appeal and the majority of the nine black men were put to death for rape. A study showed that in the 1940s to the 1970s there was a 38% higher rate of death penalties for blacks than any other race. This study makes you wonder whether if it is prejudice or just a coincidence. 2(b).
Another example would be that the United States gives an average burglary sentence around sixteen months, but Canada gives a sentence of five months, and in England people get about seven months. This is a rather large difference, and can explain why the United States as of 2009 holds the highest incarceration rate throughout the world at 754 inmates per 100,000 people. The war on drugs in the United States has seriously impacted the criminal justice system. There have been a lot more people arrested and sentenced for non violent crimes. This has also had a big part in the current overcrowding of the United States prisons.
Determinate sentences involve sentences that have a fixed or flat time (Jirard, 2009). Determinate sentences play a large part in the increasing number of individuals in prison, which, as you can imagine, puts more strain on prisons financially. In the past two decades, we have become increasingly “tough on crime” which has helped to decrease crime to a certain extent. According to an article in the New York Times (2008), the US has fewer than five percent of the entire world’s population, but almost twenty five percent of the world’s prisoners (Liptak & , 2008). The author of the article goes on to say that people in the US are sentenced to do time for crimes that would not produce such a sentence in other countries.
Baltimore has one of the highest rates of murdering and crimes. It was ranked one of the top 25 most dangerous cities in the country. With the support and help from their families, with just one year in Africa, it completely changed the boys from their behaviors to their grades. According to the film, “in Baltimore, 61% of African-American boys do not graduate from high school”. One of the film methods Ewing and Grady used to achieve a purpose in the documentary was they put statistics and facts about Baltimore in black backgrounds to demonstrate how serious the problem in Baltimore was.
Stereotypes Three stereotypes that I have encountered in my life have had to do with African Americans. I myself am an African American male. One of the most common stereotypes that I have encounter was African American males are violent. African American males are commonly associated with crime, even though it is proven by the FBI that the majority of crimes in the United States are caused by Caucasians and Hispanics. According to the FBI, in 2008 there were a total of 10,662,206 arrests in the United States, 69.2% of the people arrested were Caucasians, 28.3 % African Americans, 1.3% American Indians or Alaskan Natives and 1.1% Asian or Pacific Islanders.
Research Paper Final: “A Washington, DC-based think-tank that advocates for alternatives to prison, has found that after two decades of harsh criminal justice policies, there are more black men in jail or prison than in college. At the end of 2000, 791,600 black men were behind bars and 603,032 were enrolled in colleges or universities” ("Black men in jail"). This has become an ongoing problem in America. Black males tend to have a lack of education; when people think of blacks, they usually have negative thoughts about them, which includes performance rates in the classroom, crime rates, the lack of family involvement, and the negative media. “Today's "black" problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination.
Seven times more black people are put into jails compared to white people. Earlier, he pointed out the money that spent on building jail is six times higher than money on education. Gopnik concludes that the mass incarceration benefits some businesses and companies through building more prisons. From Brecht’s literature, people are left in misery due to capitalist’s profit. It helps to reveal that the importance of profits is more valuable than humans.
In November 1994, to get tough on crime, Oregonians passed Ballot Measure 11, which requires long, mandatory prison sentences for specified crimes (robbery, assault, homicide, and sex offenses) and treats juveniles who commit these crimes the same as adults. That measure carries a high price tag. With Ballot Measure 11, we turned, like many other states, to more prisons, the most costly option for dealing with criminals. In July 1996, Oregon had 8,509 criminals in its prisons. By July 2006, according to the official (April 1997) forecast, Oregon will have 14,976 people in its prisons.
There are, however, some very important factors that help to influence the numbers. Consider those and a strong case for a much different view unfolds. Since 62% of persons admitted to Federal prison and 31.1% of those admitted to State prison for the first time were sentenced because of drug offenses, let us first take a look at the racial disparity in the war on drugs: The National Institute of Drug Abuse estimated that while 12 percent of drug users are black, they make up nearly 50 percent of all drug possession arrests in the U.S. (The Black and White of Justice, Freedom Magazine, Volume 128) According to the National Drug Strategy Network, although African Americans make up less than one-third of the population in Georgia, the black arrest rate for drugs is five times greater than the white arrest rate. In addition, since 1990, African Americans have accounted for more than 75% of persons incarcerated for drug offenses in Georgia and make up 97.7% of the people in that state who are given life sentences for drug