Pre-Read Week 13

For me I see a connection between race in crime in terms of location. What I mean is that in low-income neighborhoods there is a higher rate in crime. The reasons for the higher rates of crime can be tied to delinquency, criminals, or it can be traced all the way back to history and oppressing certain races so much, that even when they are given certain rights they are still being restricted in ways.  For instance, there is a larger population of people of color in low-income compared to white people, which may be explained by their restricted ability to move out of these neighborhoods into better school districts or better job opportunities.

Prisons serve as an institution that hold criminals responsible for their crimes. They’re supposed to be “correctional facilities” where they “correct” the wrongs or the people that committed wrongs. They also isolate criminals into a given area away from innocent citizens. The problem is that some prisons fail to uphold standards.

The “industrial” part of the Prison Industrial Complex is that inmates/prisoners are put to work during their sentence. It reminds me of the Industrial Period where people were extensions of machines, they worked in industrial jobs that were bleak and demanding.

I think that crime is defined to impact people of color more in the way that there’s a larger portion of people of color that are criminals compared to whites. I also believe that because people of color are targeted as being criminals or living in a neighborhood with high rates of crime there is less focus on reasons behind their actions. More attention is spent on criminals that are people of color than there are on white criminals. People of color are considered to be more criminal.

I think that there are a few reasons why people of color are over-represented in prisons. One reason is because living in low-income neighborhoods, where crime rates are high cops catch more criminals. The system also works against them in the way they go after people of color more often than they do whites. It may also be because certain criminals have a more difficult time being rehabilitated. 

Prisons can be used as a form of social control because they segregate criminals from innocent citizens, but they fact is that more criminals being convicted are people of color; which may remind us c of racial segregation during and before the civil rights movement. Prisons remove the bad from the good, but the bad is starting to look more like a certain color.

I’m not clear on what ‘life being criminalized’ means. Maybe it means that life is criminalized when people are forced into committing crimes or feeling like some of their choices are either or.

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