DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LAW ENFORCEMENT essays

DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LAW ENFORCEMENT essays DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LAW ENFORCEMENT My first topic will be discussing who is in our jails and prison? How do the people behind bars in America compare with the general population in employment, wealth, and level of education? Statistics show that 46% of inmates in state and federal prisons were black and 40.6% of inmates of jails were black, whereas blacks make up only 32.9% of those arrested for serious (FBI INDEX) crimes. Studies have also shown that in the year 2000, the average sentence for blacks found guilty of violent offenses was 102.7 months, while for whites it was 80 months-nearly two years less. Although blacks do not make up the majority of the inmates in our jails and prisons, they make up a proportion that far outstrips their proportion in the population. The change in social and racial attitudes that began in the 1970s was triggered by the democratic progress triggered by Black protest and the popular protest movements that surged in its wake. Today, prisoner numbers have risen dramatically in all three tiers of the prison system: in the town and county jails, in the central penitentiaries of the fifty states and in the federal penitentiaries. During the 1960s, however, the U.S. prison po pulation was shrinking, so much so that by 1975 it had fallen to 380,000, having declined slowly but consistently (by about 1% a year over a Ten-year period). The talk in this time period was of emptying the prisons, of alternatives to imprisonment and of reserving jail sentences for criminals who posed a serious threat (between 10% and 15% of the prison population). There were even those who ventured to predict that there would soon be no prisons at all. People behind bars in America compare with the general population in employment, wealth and level of education is being studied at various levels, even as Bill Clinton who declared his pride in having put an end to "big govern...