Senior Paper

Prisons in the United States Jason M.

3/30/15

A-Block

Imagine a lineup of every single African American baby born after 2013 in the United States. They’re being super cute, crawling around just having a good time. Now imagine every third baby in that lineup crawls into a cage and gets locked in there for five years. That is the essence of the United State’s prison system. In August, 2013 a report was released to the United Nations by the Sentencing Project saying that, “one out of every three black males born today can expect to go to jail at some point during their lives.” (1Report of The Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Committee). This is frightening information. Even more frightening is the fact that this rate is only projected to go up.

Article Summary with Template

https://news.vice.com/article/the-mass-incarceration-problem-in-america

The general argument made by Wyler in her work, "The Mass Incarceration Problems in America" is that the US puts far too many people in jail. More specifically, Wyler argues that the war on drugs is to blame for the rise in prison rates. She writes, "Since 1980, the number of incarcerated citizens in the US has more than quadrupled, an unprecedented rise that can attributed to four decades of tough-on-crime oneupmanship, and a draconian war on drugs." In this passage Wyler is implying that in order to fix our prison problems, we must stop our war on drugs. In conclusion, Wyler's belief is that the US spends too much money and energy on trying to stop people from using drugs, and as a result we are putting more people in prison who shouldn't necessarily be in there.

3 anecodotes, factoids, questions

Anecdotes:

• Experiences of when I went into Suffolk county jail
• Story about person who has had life altered by being in jail
• Anecdote about person rehabiliatated from prison

Factoids:

• three out of every four released inmates go back to jail in 5 years
• Second Highest incarceration rate in the world
• over 50% of prisoners are in for drug charges

Questions:

• What can we do to reduce the amount of people going to jail?
• Should we follow the Scandinavian example and reduce sentence lengths and focus on rehab?
• What is the main purpose of our prison system?

Research Questions

How could the United States improve on its current penal system?

What is the purpose of criminal law?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

Focault's theory is that the penal system developed into a less humanitarian system. He talks about public torture in France, and how it was originally done in order to serve a few purposes. These included showing the public what happened if you were convicted of these crimes, and to punish the person who committed serious crimes. He also says that public punishment and execution served to display the power of the government. The reformists in France then created a more gentle punishment system, where convicts had to perform hard labour in order to help the community and to display the punishment they had to endure publicly. Focault finally claimed that prison was by far the most beneficial to society, claiming that they allowed the incarcerated to perform their duties in things such as government and other work.

This relates to my topic as while a lot of research I did seems to paint prisons as a bad institution and wants to focus on rehabilitation, Focault shows the benefits to having prisons in society.

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/more-subjects/criminal-justice/sentencing/theories-of-punishment

“Let the punishment fit the crime” captures the essence of retribution. Proponents advocate just deserts, which defines justice in terms of fairness and proportionality. Retributivists aim to dispense punishment according to an offender's moral blameworthiness (as measured by the severity of crimes of which the offender was convicted). Ideally, the harshness of punishments should be proportionate to the seriousness of crimes. In reality, it is difficult to match punishments and crimes, since there is no way to objectively calibrate the moral depravity of particular crimes and/or the painfulness of specific punishments. Retribution is a backward‐looking theory of punishment. It looks to the past to determine what to do in the present.

This theory says that punishment should be equal to the crime committed. It focuses on justice for the victims.

This relates to my topic because it describes the purpose of punishment as to be retribution to the victims and society for a person's actions. This is different from what I had researched which focused on the prisoners themselves.


A popular reason for punishment is that it gets criminals off the streets and protects the public. The idea is to remove an offender from society, making it physically impossible (or at least very difficult) for him or her to commit further crimes against the public while serving a sentence. Incapacitation works as long as the offenders remain locked up. There is no question that incapacitation reduces crime rates by some unknown degree. The problem is that it is very expensive. Incapacitation carries high costs not only in terms of building and operating prisons, but also in terms of disrupting families when family members are locked up.

This again relates to my topic as it focuses on viewing criminal as dangerous and that they should be put away for the benefit of society. This contrasts many view I had seen previously calling for rehabilitation.

Introduction

As I sat in the Suffolk county jail lobby I was more bored than anything. In front of me stood Sergeant Manning, a hard nosed guard with a scowl on his face. Manning surveyed the room we stood in and looked at all of the new faces. After a few moments, he gruffly said, "alright let's get started". All of the people in the lobby slowly sauntered though the reinforced iron doors. As I heard the doors shut behind me my boredom turned into nervousness. The realization dawned on me that once you entered this jail there was no leaving. The dark corridors made way into an illuminated cell block, where inmates lounged about in their 6 by 8 foot rooms barred by iron doors and a small plexiglass window being their sole connection to the outside area. I was in jail solely for a class field trip, but I couldn’t stand being in jail for four hours, let alone years. The United States prison system is a mess, and its about time we did something to fix it.

15 Books

1) The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice among the Worst of the Worst Hardcover – November 19, 2013

by Robert Blecker The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards

2) Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law [Kindle Edition]

Nonie Darwish Nonie Darwish lived for thirty years in a majority Muslim nation. Everything about her life―family, sexuality, hygiene, business, banking, contracts, economics, politics, social issues, everything―was dictated by the Islamic law code known as Sharia.

3) Crime And Punishment In American History Paperback – September 9, 1994

by Lawrence Friedman In a panoramic history of our criminal justice system from Colonial times to today, one of our foremost legal thinkers shows how America fashioned a system of crime and punishment in its own image.

4) Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law [Hardcover] Paperback – 2009

by Nonie Darwish Islamic Law is harsh

5) Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America Paperback – April 11, 1996

by Michael Tonry Despite the perennial claims of politicians that our courts are coddling hardened criminals, the fact is that America already sends a higher proportion of its citizens to prison--and for longer terms--than any other western nation

6) States of Violence: War, Capital Punishment, and Letting DiePaperback – Bargain Price, April 27, 2009

by Austin Sarat (Editor), Jennifer L. Culbert (Editor)'

The book brings together scholarship on three different forms of state violence, examining each for what it can tell us about the conditions under which states use violence and the significance of violence to our understanding of states.

7) Corrections: Exploring Crime, Punishment, and Justice in AmericaPaperback – September 28, 2012

by John T. Whitehead  (Author), Kimberly D. Dodson (Author), Bradley D. Edwards (Author)

Corrections: Exploring Crime, Punishment, and Justice in America provides a thorough introduction to the topic of corrections in America.

8) Are Prisons Obsolete? Paperback – August 5, 2003

by Angela Y. Davis  (Author) 

9) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorblindnessPaperback – January 16, 2012

by Michelle Alexander  (Author), Cornel West (Introduction) By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness

10) Crime and Punishment in America Paperback – March 26, 2013

by Elliott Currie  (Author)When Crime and Punishment in America was first published in 1998, the national incarceration rate had doubled in just over a decade, and yet the United States remained—by an overwhelming margin—the most violent industrialized society in the world. 

11) Crime and Punishment (Norton Critical Editions) [Paperback] [1989] (Author) Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Gibian, Jessie Senior Coulson

12) Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration Paperback – October 1, 2007

by Devah Pager  (Author) Nearly every job application asks it: have you ever been convicted of a crime? For the hundreds of thousands of young men leaving American prisons each year, their answer to that question may determine whether they can find work and begin rebuilding their lives.

13) Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America Hardcover – August 5, 2014

by Jonathan Simon (Author) For nearly forty years the United States has been gripped by policies that have placed more than 2.5 million Americans in jails and prisons designed to hold a fraction of that number of inmates.

14) Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration Paperback – October 30, 2014

by Daniel P. (Preston) Mears (Author), Joshua C. (Clifford) Cochran (Author) Prisoner Reentry is an engaging and comprehensive examination of prisoner reentry and how to improve public safety, well-being, and justice in the “era of mass incarceration.

15) The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences Paperback – May 8, 2014

by Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration (Author), After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States more than quadrupled during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons.