The Prison Industrial Complex and Policing

Running Head: RACE, CLASS, AND INCARCERATION 1 

Race, Class, and Incarceration 

Introduction 

The criminal justice system provides a sense of security by ensuring fairness. However, research and the statistics involving the incarceration of individuals foster a sense of doubt in the system. According to the Sentencing Project (2015), the racial disparities reveal an underlying racial bias with more than sixty percent of people in prison today being those of color. The report equally estimates that black men are nearly six times as likely to be in prison as opposed to Caucasian men. Psychological and sociological evidence provides no justification for any existing predisposing factors that draw a particular race to crime. As Davis (1998) points out, imprisonment is a perceived solution to the social problems present in society. Crime is a term that represents the social problems in society with it having an association with individuals of African American descent. With crime presenting as a social issue, prisons then function as the solution, while in actual sense, they just take away individuals and restrain them. In effect, this reinforces a culture of having caged people in institutions, failing to rehabilitate them adequately, explaining the increase in crime redundancy. Racism and classism play a role in shaping processes in the criminal justice system from prisons, policing, and sentencing. Some of the factors fueling the effect of racism include racial bias, the youth complex, social control and the economization of prisons. 

Racial Bias 

According to Davis (1998), racial prejudice is evident in understanding crime. Policing procedures such as surveillance, raids, and arrests focuses on minorities. The common example resonates to that of an African American owning a firearm, in such case most police officers act with brutality. Today, the brutality of policing is evident through the presence of videos on the various social networking platforms that reveal the hostility. 

With the prison system indicating an increase in the intake of African Americans, there is much to question in the processes of policing, sentencing, and imprisonment. When the number of individuals in prison increases, the prison system expands strengthening what Davis (1998), highlights as the political economy of prisons. The increase in inmates encourages the construction of more prisons and the solicitation of services from privately owned correctional centers that can rehabilitee prisoners. Racial bias has its roots in the policing system with today’s policing being harsh evident with the mistreatment of African Americans by the police. The growth of the black lives matter movement centers on the apparent racial bias in policing through unfair discrimination and brutality. Today, the movement has an active following with the aim of revealing apparent flaws in the criminal justice system. 

According to the American Sociological Association (2007), various scholars explain the racial disparity to be a result of prevailing race-crime perspectives. For instance, high levels of crime including gang related crimes have ties to African Americans and Hispanics. While the perception is that prison will help with the problem of crime, this is not the case as prisons report a struggle with gang conflicts among inmates. Davis (1998) provides an overview of how prisons do not function as the solution to the issue of crime, but rather as catalysts to the idea of social control. This means that when police patrol around neighborhoods, especially low income based, there is a preconceived notion that young adolescents within the neighborhood are gang members, explaining the harsh policing measures. 

Youth Control Complex 

The youth control complex is a form of social control geared towards discouraging deviance among young people, reported to have the highest rates of crime. As pointed out by Rios (2010), in his interview for Dalton Conley’s book, he mentions the youth control complex. It describes a mechanism in which young people especially of African American and Hispanic descent are specific targets for police brutality even when they have committed no crime. The complex characterizes as suffering from harsh policing by encouraging criminalization and stigmatization. It aims to change the nature of punishment by reinforcing social control. By having the word crime, which is a social control metaphor, the young people live in fear anytime they see the police, reinforcing the idea that the police are in charge. The complex takes a drastic turn as Rios (2010), points out that the police target adolescents as young as fourteen years. With such harsh policing in the neighborhood, the adolescents get discouraged from getting positive credentials such as a High school Diploma, with them having negative credentials such as felonies attached to them. The negative credentials because of the negative connotation they carry, drive them into a life of crime, propagating an already existing cycle of crime. 

The treatments of youth from other background such as middle and high-income neighborhoods are different. The assumption is that the socioeconomic status does not warrant them to commit crimes associated with poor neighborhoods. 

The Prison Industrial Complex and Policing 

The prison industrial complex represents a system of the corporization of punishment, (Davis, 1998) where the government works in expanding the prison system, strengthening the growth of the system. The prison system is irreversible in that prisoners encourage capitalism by using prisoners as a cheap source of labor. This strengthens the economic system in an ironical sense with the government capitalizing on building more prisons, in a bid to strengthen the economy as opposed to reduce crime rates. Labor provided by prisons is free from union policies, insurance and prisoners have to work to redeem themselves. 

As explained by Davis (1998), incarceration is not a solution to crime. With the youth being the target for harsh policing and constituting a majority of inmates in prison, it calls to question the state of young people. The youth should be actively involved in their careers and growing the economy as opposed to being targets of police brutality. The bias is not just limited to men, but it also transcends to women with black and Latino women being viewed as promiscuous, accomplices in the drug trade, which is often misleading. The rate of wrongful convictions especially with regard to race is alarming, affecting the dispensation of justice. The solution would then involve increasing the sense of connectedness among ourselves, while refraining from judgment based on race. The police have an obligation to treat everyone with fairness while ensuring that none is above the law. 

References 

American Sociological Association. (2007). Race, Ethnicity, and the Criminal Justice System ASA Series on How Race and Ethnicity Matter Print. 

Davis, Angela. (1998). Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex Color lines Web. Retrieved from http://www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-prison-industrial-complex/ on 22 Oct 2016 

Rios, Victor Conley, Dalton. (2010). Victor Rios and Dalton Conley discuss the youth control complex . YouTube Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv93rjxzGM/ on 22 Oct 2016. 

The Sentencing Project,. (2015). Trends in US Corrections Web Retrieved from http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/trends-in-u-s-corrections/ on 22 Oct 2016