Pre- Reading Week Fourteen

The way in which our justice system is structure is unfair to citizens. The system is suppose to protect those who have been accused of a crime and control crime from community to community, yet the system does not do these two simple things. The laws are structured in a way for a criminal to follow a cycle; meaning once they are in the system it is hard for them to get out the system. The three strikes law in my opinion is unjustified because if a teenager committed a crime at a young age he or she will be followed by that record of the rest of their life’s which makes it hard for them to move on. Which causes them to commit another crime in order to be stable and manage to stay alive. Even though it is unmorally wrong to discriminate against a person race and gender the justice system discriminates against a person with a record. In my opinion the justice system does not serve justice to everyone. We use the prison institution to throw massive amount of people to supposedly control crime in our streets but in reality the prion industry enslaves prisoners, takes their freedom, and the government “owns” you. Our nation claims we do not discriminate against an individual’s race yet we have set laws that are meant for certain races to break. It seems the government knows what laws to make in order to incarcerate as many people as possible; this is segregation because we do not see laws that white people will break.  I find it a huge problem to base laws on races. Another issue in our system is how crime is identified we incarcerate victims that have survived an abusive relationship or person. Rather than looking how the abuser harmed the survivor we criminalize him or her for self-defense. Also, not everyone in the criminal system has committed a serious crime. There are young teenagers in prison for sentence for many years just because of they were in passion of drugs. They should not be served with the similar sentence as a drug dealer just for have an ounce of weed. Another problem with the justice system is drug dealers convicted of cocaine will have a less sentence than people convicted with marijuana.

Word Count: 405