Change Your World Week Winter 2021 (Archived)

What is mass incarceration? Mass incarceration as sociologist refer to it is a boom in the prison population along with the racial imbalance of those who are incarcerated and the mechanisms that help account for this discrepancy.

America has the largest number of prisoners per 100,00 people as of June 2020.  below it says USA has 655, El Salvador has 590, and Turkmenistan has 522. Any other first world country are not even on the list.

House of corrections were built in Europe in the 1500's they were built to rehabilitate minor offenders and emphasized strict discipline and hard labor and became the accepted method of punishing criminals. these were some of the first prisons. then in the late 1700's the modern prisons developed.

The prison system in America was started in 1891 when congress passed the three prisons act establishing the federal prison system. This is one of the prisons that were built from the three prisons act.

But the prison populations didn't really start to boom until about the mid-1970s when President Nixon launched the war on drugs. The prison population had actually stayed relatively steady from 1925 all the way up to the 1970s.

A study states that "The number of persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence for a drug offense in prison or jail has increased from about 40,000 in 1980 to 450,000 today."

Some other things that have contributed to the rise of mass incarceration are the three-strike laws that started in California in 1994, from the "Law and Order" politicians and by 2000 twenty-four states had adopted them. Three strike laws or more commonly called Habitual Offender Laws, simply put, if you are convicted of the same crime for the second time the minimum sentence is increased and if you are convicted of that crime for a third time, many times life in prison would be imposed.

Michigan does have these laws. Under Section 333.7413 of the Michigan Public Health Code, for example, if you are convicted of a drug offense for a second time you can be sentenced up to twice as long of a sentence as the original offense allows.

Hispanics and African Americans are arrested at much higher rates than whites. According to FBI statistics, 13 in 100 blacks are arrested annually compared to 5 in 100 whites are arrested.

A federal data release in 2013 showed that blacks are nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though black and whites use drugs at similar rates

Remember information is power, here is a very informational book you could read to become more informed on the subject.

Michigan also has an organization that is a growing effort seeking to bring an end to mass incarceration. It is the Michigan collaborative to end mass incarceration

Click here    https://michigancollaborative.org/    click here

Also, another thing you can do is support legislation for the federal legalization of marijuana. The war against drugs hurts African Americans much more than any other race in our nation.

Many people would say crime and incarceration is one of the biggest issues our nation faces today how serious of a problem do you think they are.

U.S. Prison System Timeline: Chronology of Major Events.” Congressional Digest, vol. 98, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 3–9. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=133713718&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Blumstein, Alfred. “Dealing with Mass Incarceration.” Minnesota Law Review, vol. 104, no. 6, June 2020, pp. 2651–2671. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=143792636&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "War on Drugs". Encyclopedia Britannica, Invalid Date, https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs. Accessed 1 April 2021.

Desmond and Emirbayer, Mathew and Mustafa. Race in America, W.W Norton& Company, INC. 2020

Coyle, Andrew G.. "Prison". Encyclopedia Britannica, Invalid Date, https://www.britannica.com/topic/prison. Accessed 9 April 2021.

“Thinking About Prison and its Impact in the Twenty-First Century”, Marc Mauer, https://www.sentencesproject.org/

                   Date accessed 10 April 2021

Mass Incarcerations: Why Does the U.S. Jail So Many People, YouTube.com, 2015

                Date accessed 1 April 2021 https://www.youtube.com/AJ+

David K. “Habitual Offender Status in Michigan: Charges, Penalties & Defense”, https://www.novilaw.com

                Date accessed 9 April 2021

“Countries with the Largest Number of Prisoners Per 100,000 of the nation population, as of June 2020”, https://www.statista.com.com

                  Date accessed 30 march 2021