News Articles Response
Uploaded by Brainy81 on Feb 09, 2022
News Articles Response
The two artiles I have read are “To End Incarceration, U.S Needs Alternatives to Prison for Violent Crimes” and “Everything You Think You Know About Mass Incarceration is Wrong”. The former was made by USA Today, while the latter was made by The Marshall Project. The first article agrees a lot with the novel “The New Jim Crow” while the second counters many of its points. In summary, I think the second article did change some outlooks, but generally I still believe most of the information in the first article and the book I read previously.
The first article discusses many points that are similarly written to the novel “The New Jim Crow”, which makes sense since there’s only a handful of points that make up the total of the argument. The news article pointed out that political winds currently move in the direction of removing the harshness of the incarceration system. They note that victims want fair justice, leniency, and rehabilitation to ensure such an event never occurs again. Furthermore, it talks about the failure of the prison system to help prisoners, and prevent them from doing the actions that they did.
The second article takes another approach to looking at this same situation. He stated that the War on Drugs wasn’t necessarily the primary driver of larger incarceration, but rather of actually rising crime rates. Especially the violent crimes that make up the larger chunk of the prison system. He continues by saying that private prisons also aren’t the biggest pushers of this, mainly because public prison employees often support more prisoners than the private companies. They do however agree on some points, such as the lack of funding for Defense Counsels as was for prosecutors, and that the federal prisons are still clumped with drug related cases even though it only makes up 10% of the total prison population.
I think that in general, both agree that reforms are necessary, which I agree to. However, both describe different ways to make this occur. On one hand, we have an individual with a strong opinion similar to that given by the story “The New Jim Crow”. Talking about punishment reforms on thousands of drug offenders. On the other hand, the other article says that violent crimes are the issue, and while the concerns brought up are not necessarily wrong, it is misleading to call them the...