Mass Incarceration: Punitive Laws that Challenge Equal Rights and Opportunities for all Exploring Americans’ attitudes toward punishment

Abstract

Mass Incarceration: Punitive Laws that Challenge Equal Rights and Opportunities for all explores Americans’ attitudes toward punishment. In order to say something about Americans’ attitudes toward punishment, the U.S. criminal justice system is researched. More precisely, a look at changes in U.S. sentencing laws along with statistics, and a comparison of an American prison and a Norwegian prison is explored in order to say something about the growth of the U.S. prison population, its link to punitive laws, and Americans’ view of rehabilitation versus retribution and deterrence. The thesis looks at various views of punishment as a concept, in particular, the sociological perspective of punishment. The sociological approach asserts that punishment cannot distance itself from the significance and range of effects that reach well beyond the population of criminals. This is an important aspect when looking at Americans’ view of punishment because it entails that views of punishment do not contain itself to the individual criminal but looks at it from a broader perspective. The sociological approach urges us to say something about what these perceptions do to a whole society and nation. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimension model is used in this thesis to search for a national culture related to Americans’ dependence on superiors and looks at this from the perspective of power distance, related to the different solutions to the basic problem of human inequality. Inequality occurs in a variety of areas, and it is the distribution of inequality that is interesting to look at because as scholars, Terance D. Miethe and Hong Lu along with other Marxists scholars assert, punishment often functions to maintain power relations in a society and to eliminate threats to the prevailing social order. The United States of America has the largest prison population in the world and is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners. The term, mass incarceration, is used when talking about the U.S. prison population and it is defined by historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of incarceration among the most marginalized. Statistics show an alarming racial disparity in imprisonment rates. The discrimination of marginalized groups, especially African Americans, is emphasized throughout the thesis. The racial aspect is used to show resemblances to prior systems of oppression (e.g., enslavement and Jim Crow laws), furthermore, to suggest that the U.S. criminal justice system is a continuation of social control and discrimination of marginalized groups facilitated to maintain existing power relations.

Mass Incarceration: Punitive Laws that Challenge Equal Rights and Opportunities for all explores Americans’ attitudes toward punishment. In order to say something about Americans’ attitudes toward punishment, the U.S. criminal justice system is researched. More precisely, a look at changes in U.S. sentencing laws along with statistics, and a comparison of an American prison and a Norwegian prison is explored in order to say something about the growth of the U.S. prison population, its link to punitive laws, and Americans’ view of rehabilitation versus retribution and deterrence. The thesis looks at various views of punishment as a concept, in particular, the sociological perspective of punishment. The sociological approach asserts that punishment cannot distance itself from the significance and range of effects that reach well beyond the population of criminals. This is an important aspect when looking at Americans’ view of punishment because it entails that views of punishment do not contain itself to the individual criminal but looks at it from a broader perspective. The sociological approach urges us to say something about what these perceptions do to a whole society and nation. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimension model is used in this thesis to search for a national culture related to Americans’ dependence on superiors and looks at this from the perspective of power distance, related to the different solutions to the basic problem of human inequality. Inequality occurs in a variety of areas, and it is the distribution of inequality that is interesting to look at because as scholars, Terance D. Miethe and Hong Lu along with other Marxists scholars assert, punishment often functions to maintain power relations in a society and to eliminate threats to the prevailing social order. The United States of America has the largest prison population in the world and is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners. The term, mass incarceration, is used when talking about the U.S. prison population and it is defined by historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of incarceration among the most marginalized. Statistics show an alarming racial disparity in imprisonment rates. The discrimination of marginalized groups, especially African Americans, is emphasized throughout the thesis. The racial aspect is used to show resemblances to prior systems of oppression (e.g., enslavement and Jim Crow laws), furthermore, to suggest that the U.S. criminal justice system is a continuation of social control and discrimination of marginalized groups facilitated to maintain existing power relations.