5 Chapter 5: Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
When looking at all of the different situations that have happened in history with all different types of groups across the country, I feel that depending on where the situation or event happens can also change the outcome of the punishment the person may endure. Police force training has been a very controversial topic over the last few years. You need a 2 year degree then you need to get a physiological evaluation, they look at your criminal history, and then they do a physical fitness test as well as a medical screening. The jail system is “A place for the confinement and punishment of persons convicted of crimes, especially felonies.” These concepts have been created because people feel that they need more time because if they had more time they feel that they would not have as many issues as they do. They think that it would help prevent some controversy throughout the country.
Race War
Over the course of time the perspective of police has fluctuated to different sides of the spectrum. With the most recent conflicts that have happened in the last few years. These events have caused many police to quit their job because of all the negative backlash that they are receiving.
Since last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, there’s a popular refrain echoing through urban police precincts, rural sheriff’s offices and city halls everywhere in between: Officers are fleeing America’s police forces in big numbers, officials say. And the timing couldn’t be worse, amid a rise in murders and shootings. Many argue cities must hire more police, but against the backdrop of nationwide scrutiny of police killings, morale has dropped to the point that few people want to be officers.According to federal data, those worries are unfounded. Last year, as the overall U.S. economy shed 6% of workers, local police departments lost just under 1% of employees after a decade of steady expansion, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s about 4,000 people out.
People do not want to do these jobs because of the hate and also how dangerous it is today. People are leaving the police force and finding something else to do because they want to make more money and not be hated as much.
As protests surged across the country last year over the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, Officer Lindsay C. Rose in Asheville, N.C., found her world capsized. Various friends and relatives had stopped speaking to her because she was a cop. During a protest in June around Police Headquarters, a demonstrator lobbed an explosive charge that set her pants on fire and scorched her legs. She said she was spit on. She was belittled. Members of the city’s gay community, an inclusive clan that had welcomed her in when she first settled in Asheville, stood near her at one event and chanted, “All gay cops are traitors,” she said. By September, still deeply demoralized despite taking several months off to recuperate, Officer Rose decided that she was done. She quit the Police Department and posted a sometimes bitter, sometimes nostalgic essay online that attracted thousands of readers throughout the city and beyond.
When talking about the Police force it wasn’t that people were just being hated on they were being attacked about their personal life and people did not want to put up with any of that. They are supposed to be helping us keep the world safe but we are just getting rid of all the good ones.
Police Force Training
Police are required to go through training before they are able to be a police officer. These hours consist of firearm training, patrol procedures, defensive tactics, emergency vehicle operation, emergency first aid, and physical fitness training. Police have a total of 48 hours of learning and training before they are qualified, on the other hand a hairstylist has to go through around 1,500 hours of training. Now if you look into that, that doesn’t really seem right, police are saving lifes and risking lifes so they should potentially get more training so that they can understand some other situations.
The US Bureau of Justice Statistics 2013 study found that, on average, police officers across the country receive less than six months of basic training, slightly more than the 20-week average that is legislatively required. For perspective, one college credit equals 37.5 hours of actual time. While our research is ongoing, in 2020 we continued to examine the police training requirements of more than 100 countries. The United States has among the lowest police training requirements by far. (Notable lower training standards include Iraq, Afghanistan, and Papua New Guinea).
You would be better off being a police because you have to barely do any school or do any training. Being a hairstylist requires more and all they use is a scissors and a razor. A police officer on the other hand is required to carry multiple weapons that can seriously hurt someone. This whole situation is confusing and maybe if they had more time in training some of these situations would have maybe been avoided.
The amount of force a Police officer uses in a certain situation also has been a controversial topic. In the past few years George Floyd was killed by an officer in Minneapolis, Mn. A lot of people think that the amount of force they used was way too excessive and the period of time they used it for was way too long aswell. This then caused tons of rioting and protests around the whole country. Rioting innocent peoples businesses wasn’t the correct way to show how angry you are about the situation.
Police training is also problematic. Currently, training focuses too much on firearm skills and omits vital exposure to non-lethal weapons and conflict management. The median time of basic recruit training is 18 weeks, not counting field training. Nationally, police departments spend an average of 60 hours on firearms training and 44 hours on self-defense. Less deadly weapons, like Tasers, can be alternatives to guns. But agencies only provide an average of 8 hours of training for Tasers, which is only 25 percent of the necessary training required according to manufacturers (Gutierrez 5).
People feel that police shouldn’t be allowed to have that much power so they want to defund the police. If you look at the world now though, what is going to happen when someone crazy is in your house and they are threatening your family. You will have no one, I do feel that they should be required to have more training about how to use all of the weapons and in what circumstances they should and shouldn’t use them.
Incarnation
The incarceration rate has dramatically gone up over the past few years. People have come to the sense that they are homeless and have nothing to lose. They will do something and get caught in the act and they will get taken to jail so that they have somewhere to sleep and food to eat. I wish there was a way where people could get some help to get a life started so that we don’t need to have so many people in prison or jail.
The World Prison Brief’s data estimates the U.S. incarceration rate at 639 inmates per 100,000 people as of 2018, or 13% higher than the rate of the next-closest country, El Salvador (564 inmates per 100,000 people) (Gramlich 2).
Men make up 90 percent of the prison and local jail population, and they have an imprisonment rate 14 times higher than the rate for women.2 And these men are overwhelmingly young: Incarceration rates are highest for those in their 20s and early 30s. Prisoners also tend to be less educated: The average state prisoner has a 10th grade education, and about 70 percent have not completed high school.3Incarceration rates are significantly higher for blacks and Latinos than for whites. In 2010, black men were incarcerated at a rate of 3,074 per 100,000 residents; Latinos were incarcerated at 1,258 per 100,000, and white men were incarcerated at 459 per 100,000.4 Since 2007, however, the incarceration rate in the United States has tapered slightly and the 2010 prison population saw a decline—of 0.3 percent—for the first time since 1972, according to the BJS.
The less amount of people that we can have incarcerated will be the best. When we have less people incarcerated the jails and prisons won’t be as full and there won’t be as many prison incidents where some may get hurt. They don’t want innocent people being in jail for no reason and maybe have a way to help those people that are put in those situations.
References
Jail system: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Prison+system
The marshall project: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/09/01/police-say-demoralized-officers-are-quitting-in-droves-labor-data-says-no
New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/us/police-resignations-protests-asheville.html
Police force training:https://www.publicservicedegrees.org/how-to-become/police-officer/
Police force hours:https://iop.harvard.edu/get-involved/harvard-political-review/why-police-training-must-be-reformed
Incarceration: https://www.prb.org/resources/u-s-has-worlds-highest-incarceration-rate/
Fatality due to discrimnation
There have been many incidents involving the police and civilians in which discrimination plays a role. Our criminal justice system is still in need of a reform and through past cases and current events we can pinpoint just where the problems of justice arise. By taking a look at the George Floyd case we can see that some African Americans are being brutally and creatively murdered by police officers. It may have looked like an accident but it is obvious to the bystanders and the television viewers that the police officers had his knee on Floyd’s neck for far too long. From the Washington Post, Democracy Dies In Darkness states that “Despite the unpredictable events that lead to fatal shootings, police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people annually — nearly 1,000 — since The Post began its project.” The website actually offers up the number 926 people killed by the police in the past year. It is instances like George Floyd, and Breonna Taylors deaths occured that the world was even more aware of the corruption and discrimination of the police force was portrayed. In an article from “The Opportunity Agenda” titled “Racial Divide in Attitudes Towards the Police”, it was said that Democrats had gone from 55 percent to 42 percent in confidence in the police.
POC v Caucasian
People of color and caucasions/white americans may have differing views or experiences with the police as well as the criminal justice system. There are actually similar perspectives of the treatment of POC from both races. Drew Desilver from The Pew Research Center says: “Majorities of both black and white Americans say black people are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police and by the criminal justice system as a whole. In a 2019 Center survey, 84% of black adults said that, in dealing with police, blacks are generally treated less fairly than whites; 63% of whites said the same.” (December 2020).
Discrimination Differences By Race
With so much hate and discrimination for select races and ethnic groups in America as well as around the world, it is hard to see the opposing views of discriminaton in the justice system not being out there. From Race Discrimination: An Economic Perspective, “There are clear racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Such discrepancies are particularly salient in policing. One estimate suggests that blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates, but blacks are 3.7 times as likely to be arrested for its use (ACLU 2013). Similarly, black drivers are stopped more frequently than white drivers and are more likely to be subjected to search if stopped (Pierson et al. 2017).” This journal includes information on the economics on discrimination by the labor market, criminal justice system, and discrimination by race. In another scholarly journal titled “Through the lens of justice: Just world beliefs mediate relationships between perceived discrimination and subjective well-being” In this article showing two studies, it was said that there was a relationship between a ethnic members perception of more discrimination which led them to believe that the world was more unjust, which in turn affected their well-being negatively. So whether it is black people or different ethnic groups compared to caucasian people, race matters when it comes to treatment and overall descrimination in the court system.
Innocent/guilty/innocent until proven guilty
Coffin V United States says “Although the court refused to give this charge, it still instructed the jury as follows: “Before you can find any one of the defendants guilty you must be satisfied of his guilt as charged in some of the counts of the indictment beyond a reasonable doubt.” Which means that you should be undoubtedly sure that this person is guilty of one of the charges against them before you say you believe/know that they are guilty.
- Examples of innocent/guilty
In a journal article from JSTOR titled “The Presumption of Innocence in Criminal Cases” it mentions that in the past there used to be a large discrepancy in the trial and verdict process. The specific example took place in England where there used to be no witnesses for felonies and treason cases. There were many examples such as that for how there were gaps in the judicial and court systems allowing the innocent or guilty to be set free. The main reason that presidents, kings, and people in power accepted the past corrupt systems was because it is better to have many free but guilty men than one or a few innocent men unjustly condemned. It is also clarified by this journal article that innocent until proven guilty means that there is no evidence that proves guilt. There have been multiple improvements in the judicial and court systems to lower the amount of people that are set free based on the technicality of no proof, but we still go by this ideology when it comes to how corrupt our justice system is. We can think that this is a fail safe plan, but, with the possibility of destroying, erasing, or creating evidence, that one innocent person can now look like a guilty one based off of fabricated evidence or an erased alibi. There is also the possibility of an unfair trial or unequal/unjust jury.
- Guilty but Innocent
In the case of the innocent and how they may be convicted, showing just how corrupt our justice system is, we can look at a journal article titled “Punishing the Innocent” by Josh Bowers. Since we are examining how corrupt and in need of help our justice: judicial, court system, ect, is, we should take a look at what happens when we do get the verdict wrong and what options there are for our victims. This article highlights when it is best to take a plea bargain, which in the innocent’s case, is when the stakes are low. When the stakes are high, there is too much risk. Once someone is found guilty there is no convincing the prosecutor or judges. The prosecutor’s goal is to make as many convictions and long sentences as possible. So if you’re lucky and the system serves your right regardless of your age, ethnicity or gender, count your blessings, because the system doesn’t always get it right and you might find yourself innocent and behind bars.
References
Thayer, J. B. (1897). The Presumption of Innocence in Criminal Cases. The Yale Law Journal, 6(4), 185–212. https://doi.org/10.2307/780722
Henk van den Belt, Debating the Precautionary Principle: “Guilty until Proven Innocent” or “Innocent until Proven Guilty”?, Plant Physiology, Volume 132, Issue 3, July 2003, Pages 1122–1126, https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.103.023531
Schaafsma, J. (2013). Through the lens of justice: Just world beliefs mediate relationships between perceived discrimination and subjective well-being. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37(4), 450-458. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2013.04.002
Bowers, J. (2008). Punishing the Innocent. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 156(5), 1117–1179. https://doi.org/10.2307/40041404