User:Lfreeman333/Incarceration in the United States

Legend

• Original writing = plain text
• my edits = bold
• my copyedits = italics
• my proposed changes = [bolded, underlined, and in brackets]

Article Draft

"History" Edits

In 1841, Dorothea Dix claimed that prison conditions in the US were, in her opinion, inhumane. Imprisoned people were chained naked and whipped with rods. Others, who were criminally insane, were caged, or placed in cellars or closets. She insisted on changes throughout the rest of her life. While focusing on the insane, her comments also resulted in changes for other inmates. Late in the 1800s, Superintendent Zebulon Brockway also changed the landscape of prison life by introducing institutionalized learning programs to inmates for rehabilitation purposes at the Elmira Reformatory in New York. As Monroe County Penitentiary Superintendent, Brockway implemented a points-based behavior system that identified low risk offenders and allowed them to participate in education programs which was later included industrial/trade schools, moral education, and academia (Gehring, 1982).

Following the Civil War and during the Progressive Era of America, new concepts of the prison system, such as parole, indeterminate sentencing, and probation, were introduced. These concepts were encoded into legislative statutes in efforts to maintain the systems of racial capitalism that were formerly supported by unpaid slave labor. These legal frameworks became mainstream practices resulting in mass incarceration and legal discrimination of African Americans and other marginalized groups in America. At this time, there was an increase in crime, causing officials to handle crime in a more retributive way. Many Sicilian Americans were harshly affected by this. However, as the crime rate declined, the prison system started to focus more on rehabilitation.

Race and ethnicity[edit]

Broader socioeconomic inequality and disparities at each stage of the criminal legal process result in the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color. In 2021, people of color constituted over two-thirds (69%) of the prison population. Nationally, one in 81 African American adults are serving time in America's state prisons. Black Americans are imprisoned at 5 times the rate of white people, and American Indians and Hispanic people are imprisoned at 4 times and 2 times the white rate, respectively. Black and Hispanic people make up 33% of the U.S. population but 56% of the incarcerated population.

Features of the criminal justice system

Prison education

Prison education encompasses any type of educational program offered within a prison, including literacy programs, high school or GED equivalent programs, vocational education, and tertiary education. In the early 1800s, tutors began to enter prisons and the idea of punishment began to shift towards rehabilitation. By the early 1990s, there were over 350 prison education programs nationwide. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law, which barred incarcerated people from receiving Pell Grants. This caused the number of educational programs to quickly decline due to a lack of federal funding.

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 prompted the collection of employment data and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act required collection of data for school funding. However, the true depth of inequality in education was not known despite several significant education policies being enacted because inmates were excluded from federal surveys. Studies in the 1990s by psychologists, social justice advocates, scholars, and researchers showed that inmate exclusion grossly inflates education attainment rates as the prison population grows and the Pell Grant ban severely impacted the reintegration of formerly incarcerated people to reintegrate back into society. This resulted in the restoral of federal Pell Grant funding for Prison Education Programs (PEP) and legislation like California bill SB416 that protects incarcerated students from predatory lending.

Prison education has proven to lower recidivism rates and increase employment for graduates upon release. A 2013 study conducted by the RAND Corporation found that correctional education led to a significant reduction in recidivism rates, and those who participated in prison education programs showed "43% lower odds of recidivating than inmates who did not." That same study showed that individuals who received vocational education and training saw a 28% increase in employment following incarceration, and those who participated in strictly academic educational programs saw an 8% increase in employment.