Does Imprisonment Have an Effect on Crime Rates?

Since the 1790s, prisons in the United States were built with the means of reducing crime rates through the usage of incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. However, while it may seem intuitive to assume that higher incarceration rates yield lower crime rates, it is not regularly the case. Using the 2016 States dataset, I examine the effects of incarceration rates and its influence on crime rates in the United States; I suggest that states with higher incarceration rates will have higher crime rates than states with lower incarceration rates. Therefore, the evidence concludes states with high incarceration rates generate higher rates of violent, murder, property, and burglary crime rates than states with lower incarceration rates. However, the impact is relatively low. Conclusively, while there is a positive relationship between incarceration rates and crimes rates, the correlation is not strong nor consistent enough to make a solid argument; rather, the data suggest other factors, such as the education, per capita income and unemployment rate, are contributors to the rise of crime, thus, further research needs to be taken into consideration because incarceration rates cannot be the sole explanation as to why there is an increase of crime rates throughout the United States

The Prison Paradox: More Incarceration Will Not Make Us Safer

Despite its widespread use, research shows that the effect of incarceration as a deterrent to crime is minimal at best, and has been diminishing for several years. Indeed, increased rates of incarceration have no demonstrated effect on violent crime and in some instances may increase crime. There are more effective ways to respond to crime—evidenced by the 19 states that recently reduced both their incarceration and crime rates. This brief summarizes the weak relationship between incarceration and crime reduction, and highlights proven strategies for improving public safety that are more effective and less expensive than incarceration

Incarceration American-Style

In the United States today, incarceration is more than just a mode of criminal punishment. It is a distinct cultural practice with its own aesthetic and technique, a practice that has emerged in recent decades as a catch-all mechanism for managing social ills. In this essay, I argue that this emergent carceral system has become self-generating—that American-style incarceration, through the conditions it inflicts, produces the very conduct society claims to abhor and thereby guarantees a steady supply of offenders whose incarceration the public will continue to demand. I argue, moreover, that this reproductive process works to create a class of permanently marginalized and degraded noncitizens—disproportionately poor people of color—who are marked out by the fact of their incarceration for perpetual social exclusion and ongoing social control. This essay serves as the Foreword to a symposium in the Harvard Law & Policy Review addressing the costs of mass incarceration

The High Cost of Wisconsin's Dropout Rate

Outlines the scope of the high school dropout problem in Wisconsin and dropouts' risk of unemployment, health problems, and incarceration. Estimates costs to the state through reduced tax revenues, increased Medicaid costs, and high incarceration rates

Human Cattle: Prison Overpopulation and the Political Economy of Mass Incarceration

This paper examines the costs and impacts of prison overpopulation and mass incarceration on individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole. We start with an overview of the American prison system and the costs of maintaining it today, and move on to an account of the historical background of the prison system to provide context for the discussions later in this paper. This paper proceeds to go into more detail about the financial and social costs of mass incarceration, concluding that the costs of the prison system outweigh its benefits. This paper will then discuss the stigma and stereotypes associated with prison inmates that are formed and spread through mass media. The stigma and stereotypes propagated by the media result in a negative social construction of prison inmates, contributing to a culture of incarceration that makes it difficult to end America’s dependence on prisons. The final section of the paper discusses the challenges that come with changing the culture of incarceration, which include the deep entrenchment of said culture and the self-perpetuating nature of many of the problems associated with prison, and offers possible alternatives and solutions to incarceration and the problems associated with it

Ten Economic Facts About Crime and Incarceration in the United States

Crime and high rates of incarceration impose tremendous costs on society, with lasting negative effects on individuals, families, and communities. Rates of crime in the United States have been falling steadily, but still constitute a serious economic and social challenge. At the same time, the incarceration rate in the United States is so high -- more than 700 out of every 100,000 people are incarcerated -- that both crime scholars and policymakers alike question whether, for nonviolent criminals in particular, the social costs of incarceration exceed the social benefits

Parents Behind Bars: What Happens to Their Children?

Children do not often figure in discussions of incarceration, but new research finds more than five million U.S. children have had at least one parent in prison at one time or another -- about three times higher than earlier estimates that included only children with a parent currently incarcerated. This report uses the National Survey of Children's Health to examine both the prevalence of parental incarceration and child outcomes associated with it.Previous research has found connections between parental incarceration and childhood health problems, behavior problems, and grade retention. It has also been linked to poor mental and physical health in adulthood

The New Jim Crow

The mass incarceration of poor people of color represents a new American caste system that is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. The War on Drugs and the "get tough" movement explain the explosion in incarceration in the United States and the emergence of a vast, new racial undercaste in which the overwhelming majority of the increase in imprisonment has been poor people of color, with the most astonishing rates of incarceration found among black men