Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.
Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.
In this now classic work, he describes how a vicious cycle of tainted social information helped create the racial stereotypes that rationalize and sustain discrimination.
Policy discussions of this trend toward prison privatization tend to focus on cost-effectiveness, contract monitoring, and enforcement, but in his Private Prisons in America, Michael A. Hallett reveals that these issues are only part of the ...
BUSH. YEARS. So many of the problems we worry about go back to how we raise our children. We either build our children or we build more jails. Time to stop building jails. —General Colin Powell, Address to the 2000 Republican National ...
Dense with firsthand accounts, Dying Inside is a nimble, far-ranging and unblinking look at the cruelty inherent in our current penal policies.
Loury calls for a fundamental reconsideration of the problem of racial inequality. He rejects the stereotyped liberal-conservative dichotomy as an obstacle to real progress on racial problems which, he says,...
This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.
Through this engaging text, the authors hope to provide insights that encourage readers to examine the collateral effects of policies to address crime and the role of punishment.
Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7, University of Rostock (Institut für Anglistik/ Amerikanistik), course: Prisoners and Prisons in the U.S., ...
Major components in this volume include a focus on current research on the impact of incarceration on minority groups, youth, and the mentally ill; and a focus on research on Michigan’s leadership in the area of reentry.