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Race Gender And Punishment Summary

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A common theme I discovered amongst most of the reading was imprisonment. Seeing how imprisonment is important especially in a Criminal Analysis class it wasn’t a shock to me. Under the imprisonment theme sprung up a couple more themes that will be discussed which is inequality and racism. In the reading Race, Gender, and Punishment from Colonialism to the War on Terror there was a whole chapter dedicated to what we learned in Lecture Seven. During Lecture Seven we spoke about different theories of punishment such as retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. Retribution is the form of punishment which is, according to the lecture, to punish for “justice.” The goal of this punishment was to regain justice by matching the harm …show more content…
However, as humans we need to base things off of rational choice. Deterrence will help with preventing crime with punishment. Based on the lecture we saw that there are two types of deterrence specific deterrence and general deterrence. Specific deterrence is when you punish individuals for the crimes that they commit in hopes that it will deter them from committing and future crimes. General deterrence is punishing individuals in hope that it will prevent others from committing crimes. In the book we saw that general deterrence is used, but is not effective. This is when race and inequality ties in. “One out of three young black men is in prison or on probation or parole… there are more young black men in prison than in college.” The book also stated that there is a “Widespread overrepresentation of minorities in penal systems that occur… the number of black people incarcerated has surpassed that of white, even though black men and women constitute only around 13 percent of the population.” (Bosworth and Flavin 1). So knowing these facts, either there is racism and inequality or general deterrence is not …show more content…
We know that this was targeting the poor but since the law is not specific there is not a chance that this can be considered discrimination. Also if someone rich was caught the police had the power of discretion and would let them go. In Mississippi the Supreme Court “By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, [the black population] had acquired or accentuated certain particularities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race, from that of the whites,--a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites…” (Bates Lecture 9: Unequal Enforcement). This is a prime example of inequality back in the 1800s. This unfortunately still continues today (i.e. the war on drugs). If you are caught with drugs and spend time in jail you get you rights to vote stripped. We see that black people occupy that majority of prisons with non-violent crimes charged to

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