After the abolition of the slave trade in the United States, strict segregation rules were put in place to control the races. Even though the United States of America has always taken the leading role in promoting democracy in other countries around the world, it has particularly been unable to create democracy among its own citizenry; this has left the world wondering if America really believes in democracy. A significant show of bias was in the 2008 presidential election where basically the African Americans were democrats and the white republicans. Despite the intensive efforts that have been made in trying to deal with past bias in the United States, racism has remained elusive and has always impacted a lot on the policymaking in the country.
The African Americans were accorded a low social status because they got into America as slaves and so their social status was determined by this. The discrimination went on for quite some time but in the 1960s the civil rights movements were able to push for the passing of the anti-discrimination bill. In an attempt to curb the rampant discrimination based on race and class, the United States has been coming up with anti-discriminatory laws and policies to curb the vice. One of these policies, for instance, was affirmative action that was proposed by President J. F. Kennedy to promote the rights of the minority groups in employment and education. This policy has actually been criticized a number of times for discriminating against the whites in favor of blacks – this is called reverse discrimination.
Crime has always been associated with the nonwhites in the U.S. especially the African Americans. The problem with this is that such assumptions never take into consideration the challenges that these people are faced with. A number of the African Americans are living in poor conditions or are homeless; some are either unemployed or doing odd low paying jobs, while most of them have low levels of education, mental sicknesses and addictions to drugs. Such factors that African Americans face tend to make them quite susceptible to criminal activities. In order to curb the increasing crime rate, Americans have continually passed laws that have in turn led to an increase in the number of prisons across the country. The only problem with this school of thought is that imprisonment does not really stop the crime but only leads to the vanishing of individuals from underprivileged and minority communities (Parenti, 2000, 211).
The government has been obliged, therefore, to invest a lot of resources in accommodating the increasing number of prisoners. The only problem with this is that the procedure for handling the prisoners has been mainly left in the hands of private companies. This has generally led to the uprising of trade in weapons and this has not only promoted crimes but continues to widen the gap between the high-class individuals and the middle or low-class ones. This is because as the poor who could have been engaged in an economic activity languish in jails, the rich continue to use this as an investment by supplying weapons and taking advantage of the cheap labor that they provide (Parenti, 2000, 211).
Current studies that have been done seem to suggest that the number of women being imprisoned has generally gone up and that the imprisonments are normally flawed by instances of bigotry, class discrimination and the exploitation of prisoners by industrialists (Huang, 2009, 5). The commercialization of imprisonment has been linked to the increased poverty among the poor since the government’s aid that had earlier on been set aside for funding education for the communities is now channeled towards taking care of prisoners (Evans, Goldberg, 2009, 47).
Moreover, discipline and security in such schools have been given preference over the actual learning activities. Since the poor are unlikely to access education like the other children, they are likely to engage in crime and crime-like activities for them to earn a living. This will consequently increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It generally results in a society that is stratified based on the level of education and the amount of wealth owned. Since it is mostly the blacks that are continuously associated with crime and consequently imprisoned, this, therefore, means that there will be a continuous rise in the gap between the whites and the African Americans.
The privatization of prisons may have been a noble idea aimed at improving the services of the prisoners but it has been criticized for promoting racism since it is mainly the minorities that are targeted for imprisonment. The privatization helped in solving the problems that most of the government prisons were always associated with. This, just as had been noted before, has continued to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. It has also progressively widened the economic gap between different races and stratification of the societies according to the amount of wealth a person has. In California, a survey done showed that more prisons were built over a period of time than the number of educational institutions (Duncan, 2010, 4).
The industrialization of the punishment has promoted race and class bias in the sense that a number of companies who are involved in the prison business now go for the cheap labor from the prisoners; this has turned out to be disadvantageous since some of the prisoners who were initially in unionized jobs end up being rendered jobless or some even retire while imprisoning. This generally will increase poverty in the families the prisoners belongs to hence leading to class and race differences. The prison labor is normally paid for but at a rate way below the least salary, the individual should be earning. This leads to a wastage of public resources that could have been used to promote education, improve living conditions, promote the health care program, exterminate sexual and familial abuse and in establishing rehabilitation centers and as a result, create a lot of jobs for the unemployed population. But since the resources are wastage in providing cheap labor for the private firms this continuously promotes race and class discrimination (Evans, Goldberg, 2009, 47).
Criminality and deviance have been racialized in the United States by associating the blacks the Latinos and the Native Americans with brutality and drug trafficking (Huang, 2009, 3) and the young black and Latino ladies with promiscuity (Huang, 2009, 5). A number of surveys done have actually shown that prison does not really reduce crime but the fact that it has been racialized has prevented this issue from being tackled. The government has laid a lot of focus on crime prevention and provision of security instead of paying attention to the social needs of the society. The policies such as affirmative action and privatization or commercialization of the prisons have led to a diversion of the public resources into the private sector thereby promoting class and race stratification in American societies.
Works Cited
Duncan Fred. “California’s overcrowded prisons.” Fdungan. N.d. 2010. Web.
Evans, Linda and Goldberg, Eve. The Prison-Industrial Complex and the Global Economy. PM Press. 2009.
Huang, Vanessa. “Beyond bars: community-based responses to gender violence.” Colorlines. 2004. Web.
Parenti, Christian. Lockdown America: police and prisons in the age of crisis. NY, Verso. 2000.