The Social Cost Prison has tours a family and communitty - Research Proposal Example

e population in 2007 was estimated at 1,321,851,88, which represents approximately one fifth of the world’s total population, and nearly 5 times the population of the United States, has a prison population of only 1.5 million people nearly half the size of the U.S. prison population. This represents roughly one in every one thousand Chinese (Ibid.). China is a communist totalitarian state. The United States prides itself on being the world’s greatest democracy. Go fiqure! Between 1980 and 1992 per capita spending on corrections in the U. S. rose by an amazing 306.

2% (Davey 2). Similar to the present housing crisis, the prison building boom of the 1990’s, has ultimately resulted in the severe overcrowding which is currently bloating the budgets of nearly all 50 states. It has the added effect of totally devastating families and communities throughout this nation (Warren 3). Furthermore, although African Americans make up only 12-13% of the U.S. population, they are currently 49.2% of the nation’s prison population. This is shameful. However, on top this is the neatly contrived bogus media perceptions of African Americans.

Although young Black men actually experience the highest rates of criminal victimization in the country, and White women experience the lowest, the manufactured corporate media image is for the most part, that of young Black men who exist in this society as the overwhelming perpetrators of crime; and White women who are the overwhelming victims (Dorfman 8). You can easily see that the reality does not jive with the illusion. Isn’t that something? The picture is that of a nation drunk with the rule of law; and tinged with an overtly racist cultural worldview.

It is the image of a ‘Criminal’- Justice System that is to often seen by a substantial number of American citizens as a system that is nothing more than perfectly worded. In 2007 an average of nearly one billion dollars per state was spent on ‘corrections’, and the prison