Crime and prison population
The answer to this question is astounding: the U.S. incarcerates 25% of the world's prison population with only 7% of the world's population. This is a disturbing anamoly in the history of the world. Never before has a country been able to incarcerate so many people at such a high rate, two million and 1 in 127 respectively. These large numbers are incredibly difficult to think about in meaningful terms. But if you can imagine the population of Los Angeles in 1950; and if you then put all of those people in some type of cage, you are close to contemplating the immensity of the U.S. incarcerated population. The incredibly important and disturbing factor is how fast this occurred. Today's level of roughly two million was achieved mainly since 1980 when there was about 500,000 people incarcerated.California illustrates how this growth has occurred over a relatively short period of time. Since 1977, the California Department of Correction's (CDC's) prison population has increased from 17,338 to 160,655, over a seven hundred percent increse. If you add the people in California's federal prisons and county jails, California leads the country with around 258,000 people in prison or jail. When we color these numbers, the proble
This has been partially true in California. While draconian legislation has been driven to a large extent by public fear of violent-crimes, mostly non-violent offenders have felt the impact of these new laws. In 1977, 63% of male prisoners in California were imprisoned for violent crime, and the violent crime rate was at 683 per 100,000; by 1992, however, 45% of male prisoners in California were imprisoned for violent crime, but the violent crime rate had climbed to 1,103 per 100,000. What this means is that as violent crime was rising, the percentage of those serving time for violent crime was decreasing. To a huge extent, this reversal was facilitated by the creation of new laws and newly enforced laws. In others words, the drug war came. In California in 1981, the incarceration rate for drugs was just 6%, and today it is about 28%. Thus, the decrease in the percentage of violent offenders came mostly with the increase of drug offenders, and this process was fueled by a sensationlized fear of drugs, not violent crime. This means that the electorate is not quite as fooled as Zimmring thinks, and that people quite knowingly went about creating a war on drugs and some of the people who use them. So while increased incarceration is not a simple formula for decreased crime, what about the conclusion that the United States is a crime ridden country, and that we therefore are bound to have high incarceration rates, albeit with some
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 975
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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