Darshan Singh

SINGH 1

Professor Ellis
CJ 1010
12 December 2016
We Have Fallen
While minority groups are falling deeper and deeper into the widening gorge of poverty
whites are continually rising up. There is a reoccurring problem affecting prisons across the
United States and it is slowly creeping into our societal prejudices. Blacks and minorities, in
general, are taking over the prisons because of how many are being arrested. This leads to the
judgement that is not only spread inside but outside of prisons. Everywhere, people have made
decisions on how they view these minorities. Many believe that this is an issue because blacks
are committing a crime but it is quite on the contrary. This is because societal pressures and
opinions have affected the incarceration toll since the 1980s. To reform and supposedly fix
these minority groups some believe incarceration is the ideal tool, but statistics show differently.
Prisons began with segregation between whites and blacks and now the visible barriers of
segregation have been taken down and invisible barriers have been installed. Whether separated
by race or not, prisoners identify with groups of their own kind and create a modern type of
segregation; the racial caste has not disappeared. The book Race Relations and the Prisoner
Subculture says, There were black and white sports teams, different barbers for blacks and
whites, and separate ice buckets for black and white inmates on July 4 (Jacobs, 1979, p 5).
There has always been a separation between the races in prison and it has had a strong effect on
the outside citizen's viewpoints. Between 1963 and 1974 is when they finally starting removing
the segregation within prisons but nowadays social segregation is still there. Blacks and whites
are a part of their own culture and stick to who they know. One may nonchalantly label people
based on race because of this ongoing issue that has changed the way we see people every day.

Darshan Singh

SINGH 2

Professor Ellis
CJ 1010
12 December 2016
Whether knowingly or not it has affected our society in many negative ways and the minority
groups began to wonder how this all happened.
In 1982 President Reagan declared a War on Drugs and this lead to a collapse of the
minority communities across the United States. Crack was not an issue in these neighborhoods
until the announcement by Reagan and then drugs overcame cities everywhere. Yet, to many's
surprise, it was all a publicity game. Reagan began to heavily publicize these communities and
watched as it overtook lives everywhere. In the book The New Jim Crow it says, Almost
overnight, the media was saturated with images of black crack whores, crack dealers, and
crack babies- images that seemed to confirm the worst negative racial stereotypes about
impoverished inner city residents (Alexander, 2013, p 5). The War on Drugs sparked an
everlasting effect on minority groups in America and has forever changed how we view certain
people. This war lead to increasing rates of inmates that our current prison facilities could not
handle.
The United States hit a peak and began building prison after prison because they had to
create enough room for all of the incoming inmates. The book, The Punishment Imperative: The
Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America it states, In the fifteen years since we
achieved that status, the number of people incarcerated across the United States has grown by
more than a million, and we now incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world
(Clear, 2014, p 13). Our prison population is ever increasing and officers continue to arrest and
hope for the best result but what do we see? No positive feedback; we are stuck. Minorities
have been placed in this cycle and cannot escape. Born into poverty-stricken family and

Darshan Singh

SINGH 3

Professor Ellis
CJ 1010
12 December 2016
communities they have the choice to struggle and fight to rise above these issues or continue in
this lifestyle. Most of the prison population is made up of African Americans that have
committed low-level offenses but are then stuck. These prisoners get released and have
absolutely nothing, no job, no money, no education and this leads to repeated offenders. This
creates the minority overpopulation in prisons across America. The Punishment Imperative says,
Co-occurrence of these demographic characteristics concentrates incarceration even further:
incarceration rates for black males are at least five times higher than while males across every
age group (Clear, 2014, p 13). Statistic after statistic shows the overwhelming problem that has
been affecting our system for years now. But it's not just society's fault there are many more to
blame for this occurrence.
While fluctuating, crime rates have more steadily gone up in the past few years. Police
are cracking down and arresting more often than ever before. Presidents of the past have all tried
to create policies to limit crime but have greatly failed or created other issues. In the book
written by Jeffrey Reiman called Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison says, The policies
that led to the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world obviously contributed
something to lowering crime rates. But the contribution was modest at best, and it came at an
enormous financial cost, heightened racial inequality and tensions, and added to a variety of
social problems lie the breakdown of inner-city communities (Reiman, 2015, p 12). Reiman
points out the many faults to policies that have changed over the years. Politician after politician
has ignored the blaring facts of increasing incarceration rates which lead to the demise of
communities in the U.S. A policy implemented by a few presidential candidates was the get

Darshan Singh

SINGH 4

Professor Ellis
CJ 1010
12 December 2016
tough pattern which was mentioned in Jeffrey Reiman's book. It was a policy that implemented
harsher ruling. In Chapter one of his book, it says,More police, harsher sentences, mandatory
minimums, three-strikes-and-you're-out laws (including expanding the number of offenses that
count as strikes), and the increased use of capital punishment (Reiman, 2015, p 12). Politicians
believed arresting and sticking people in prison would solve everything but sadly it did not work
this way. The government increased spending on prisons and built new ones continually trying to
catch up with the thousands of arrests happening across the nation. Spending peaked but so did
crime rates. These policies placed generations of minorities into a cycle of their same
socioeconomic status and lifestyle.
Judgement upon minorities has risen and spread across the nation for years and has
affected who is incarcerated. Since 1965 the government has been trying to reform prisons. The
government began with holding prisons responsible for their actions in the past and present.
Prisons were formally accused of disobeying amendments and policies and then would receive
court orders. Yet, by this time, many had lost faith in the courts and believed they were doing
more harm than good. Malcolm Feeley writer of the book Judicial Policy Making and The
Modern State says, In the five-year period after the Arkansas case was decided, federal courts
declared prisons in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama to be
unconstitutional, in whole or part ( Felley, 2000, p 40). Prisons were out of control and so were
the incarceration levels. Later, his book begins to talk about how religious freedoms were being
taken away from prisoners across the nation. Rights were being stepped on left and right and the

Darshan Singh

SINGH 5

Professor Ellis
CJ 1010
12 December 2016
prisons needed to be reformed. For years government and presidents alike have tried to change
policies but instead, leave a small dent in the ever growing problem.
Racism is not an issue of the past but an issue of the present. It has been in the system
affecting our society for years and the time has come to change. Minorities have been stuck in
these prisons for generation after generation which leads to a cycle of unforgiving sentences. We
are part of this system because of the knowingly discriminative judgements we make of off past
events. Society has changed and become fearful of one another; there is no more trust. In the
book The Punishment Imperative, it says, A decade of rising crime rates fueled public alarm
about safety, and crime also came to stand as a symbol for the disruption of standing patterns of
entitlement and privilege (Clear, 2015, p 2). We have let these societal changes affect us and
now we fear our own kind. Minorities are one of us and we have lowered them and put them in a
box. A box where they can no longer move up in society and where generation after generation is
incarcerated. Minority groups have fallen and whites are still sitting at the top.

References
Feeley, M. and Rubin, E. Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts
Reformed America's Prisons. Cambridge University Press. 2000.

Reiman, J. and Leighton, P. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and
Criminal Justice. Routledge. 2015.

Darshan Singh

SINGH 6

Professor Ellis
CJ 1010
12 December 2016
Alexander, M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New
Press. 2013.

Jacobs, J. Race Relations and the Prisoner Subculture. The University of Chicago Press. 1979.

Clear, T. and Frost, N. The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration
in America. NYU Press. 2015.

Davis, A. Are Prisons Obselete? Seven Stories Press. 2011.