The New Social Distortion

            Sampson talks about a new social distortion which is mass incarceration. He also states how during the 1920’s-1970 the United States has had an average rate of 110 inmates per 100,000 persons. Then by 1990 the rate was at 197 per 100,000. Somehow the rate later escalated to 504 inmates per 100,000 persons. This is a really high rate and unimaginable as he described it. But how do we really compare next to other countries?

            In an article from The New York Times from Adam Liptak Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html) he mentions how the United States has roughly 2.3 million criminals behind bars which is more than any other nation though we have less than 5% of the world’s population. With this we would seem to believe that the larger a country the lager their prison population would be. Yet China with four times the population of the United States they are second to us with 1.6 million people in prison. What is believed to cause is that we incarcerate people for petty crimes as mention in the article which could be writing a bad check to using drugs. I believe this is an issue. It is understandable to send drug dealers to jail/ prison as they are the one distributing the drugs, but drug users should not be sent to prison. Instead of spending tax payer money in the prison system it would be better to send them to rehab or get medical attention so they can stop using drugs as they may fall into more problems in prison as they may have not had a criminal record, but now due to being surrounded by other criminals they may adapt to that environment and once they are released then they could actually become a harm to society.

            We have this issue already of having a huge population in prisons, but it does not end there. The other issue with this is the amount of black males that are incarcerated. As discussed in class Dr.Weffer told us about the issue with cocaine and crack cocaine. How they both have the same active ingredient yet one has a more strict charge which is crack cocaine which also is more commonly used by African Americans of low income as it is cheaper. As stated by Morgan Whitaker in her article Criminal injustice: The percentage of African-Americans in prison (http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/criminal-injustice-the-percentage-african) there was a 700% increase in the U.S. prison population since 1971 when President Nixon declared a war on drugs. Though African Americans only make up about 12% of the nation’s drug users, but they represent about 34% of those arrested for drug offenses and 45% in state prisons for such offenses. This shows me that there is a fault within the criminal justice system as it seems to target mainly minorities, specifically African American males. We can also see how black males are targeted more often with a well-known term “driving while black”. If African Americans tend to get pulled over more often than white males then the chances of pulling people over whom also happen to have drugs in their car also increases, while other white males who may also have drugs in their car get away with it due to them being white and not getting pulled over as often.

 I chose this picture because I believe it shows us just how bad the prison system is and how harsh it is to minorities, specifically African Americans.