Serena Hoyte
October 26 , 2013 Every day you leave your house in the morning to worry about getting stop or arrested by cops because of the color of your skin Or worrying that kids not being able to go to school to get an education. They shouldn’t have to worry, but the way our jail system is heading they might have too. Today, our justice system is all messed up. Our justice system is not doing a good job. It had failed in the major areas:prison population, racial unfairness, and spending too much money. There are so much things wrong with the jail system. More blacks and latinos than whites in jails for the same crime, more money being spent on jails than on higher education, and every time you look around the prison population is increasing. We need to take the time out and figure out how to decrease money , population and racial unfairness.
As time went on, prison population kept increasing.. What’s makes us the highest rate of imprisonment in American history? Is that 1 in 99 adults are living behind bars. “The U.S incarcerate more people in absolute numbers and per capita, than any other nation in the world” Prison population made a
127% jump from 1987. In the 80’s there were fewer than two million people in prison , by 2012 the that number had escalated to over seven million people. The population had risen, so the cost also increased. Spending on higher population rose , but the national prison population had tripled”.
As the prison population increase, you see more blacks than whites. “Jails incarcerate young African American at a rate of one in nine, which makes us the highest out of any other group of Americans”. In 1965 congress passed the Voting Rights Act. In spite of that , today about “31% of black men in
Alabama and Florida are permanently disenfranchised”. As a result of felony convictions. Nationwide, 1.4 million black men has lost the rights to vote under these laws. A black man can commit the same crime as a white man , but the white man wouldn’t get as much time as him or end up with no time.
With that being said, “ Black defendants are at least 30% more likely to be

imprisoned than white defendants for the same crime.” If black kids of this generation see that the color of their skin is not treated as fair as white kids , stereotyping and injustice will be