"Prison populations have grown mostly through society's locking up ever-increasing numbers of young men, especially black men, largerly from impoverished places. The concentration of imprisonment of young men from disadvantaged places has grown to such a point that it is now a bedrock experience, a force that affects families and children, institutions and businesses, social groups and interpersonal relations. With its isolation of people from poor places, incarceration does more damage than good, including increases in crime. In this way, incarceration has become part of its own dynamic. Imprisonment has grown to the point that it now produces the very social problems on which it feed. It is the perfect storm.
Uninformed public sentiments and practiced politial interests have created a malignant foundation for our crime-prevention policy. Legislative changes lean only in the direction of ever-growing punitiveness, drawing more and more young people – especially black men – into the system’s clutches. The system clutches them; indeed, people who get caught up in the penal system stay there longer, are subjected to more controls, and suffer a greater chance of failure than ever before in history. Faced with this situation, policy makers think only of becoming more strict and more punitive, more damaging, for an ever wider range of misbehaviors, drawing into the storm an ever larger group. As that group grows, the ripple effects of the damage also grow, crossing the social networds of those poorer communities and extending into future generations. Crime goes up, crime goes down; yet in a weirdly disconnected fashion, prison populations increase regardless.
The concentration of imprisonment among young black urban males is so extreme today that many of us simply assume that, when we encounter a young black man, he has a criminal record; and so we take what seems like appropriate precautions. As a matter of cold, hard facts, often these assumptions are correct. ..."
--Todd R. Clear
Uninformed public sentiments and practiced politial interests have created a malignant foundation for our crime-prevention policy. Legislative changes lean only in the direction of ever-growing punitiveness, drawing more and more young people – especially black men – into the system’s clutches. The system clutches them; indeed, people who get caught up in the penal system stay there longer, are subjected to more controls, and suffer a greater chance of failure than ever before in history. Faced with this situation, policy makers think only of becoming more strict and more punitive, more damaging, for an ever wider range of misbehaviors, drawing into the storm an ever larger group. As that group grows, the ripple effects of the damage also grow, crossing the social networds of those poorer communities and extending into future generations. Crime goes up, crime goes down; yet in a weirdly disconnected fashion, prison populations increase regardless.
The concentration of imprisonment among young black urban males is so extreme today that many of us simply assume that, when we encounter a young black man, he has a criminal record; and so we take what seems like appropriate precautions. As a matter of cold, hard facts, often these assumptions are correct. ..."
--Todd R. Clear
These types of topics are what I have been focusing on during my master's program at Temple.
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