crime and punishment in america by elliott currie

European rates of incarceration are consistently well below 100 per 100,000 population the rate of incarceration of African-American males is close to 4,000 per 100,000. rate of incarceration is six times the global average, seven times that of Europe, 14 times that of Japan, 23 times that of India. There are more prisoners in California alone than in any other country in the world except China and Russia. The United States now has by far the largest prison system on the planet.

And so what may have seemed an astonishing number of inmates back in 1984 is dwarfed by the current prison population of 1.2 million, plus an additional half-a-million people in local jails. Currie's warnings against continuing the binge were of course disregarded. When Currie, who has taught sociology and criminology at Yale and Berkeley, advanced similar arguments in his 1985 volume Confronting Crime, the New York Times reviewer noted that the 'biggest incarceration binge in American history' had increased the nation's prison population from fewer than 200,000 in 1970 to 454,000 by 1984. Even his prose style is anachronistic: earnest, free of jargon, lucid. reason and facts can change social policy. If all this were not antiquated enough, Currie also evidently assumes that rational argument based on scientific knowledge i.e. He even goes so far as to accept the hopelessly outdated idea that widespread poverty is the main cause of violent crime. He clings to the old-fashioned notion that we should concentrate more on the prevention of crime. Elliott Currie does not believe that we need to build more and more prisons, impose longer sentences, make prisons as harsh as possible, eliminate educational opportunities for prisoners, reinstitute chain gangs, treat juvenile offenders as adults, and divert still more funds from social services to penal institutions. First chapter of ' Crime and Punishment in America'

Crime and punishment in america by elliott currie