Essay Outline
Persaud,Mikey
Achievement!: Application Total: ___ Marks
Topic: The American justice system serves the American Dream?
Paragraph 1 (Introductory Paragraph)
Background Information:
The United States has a much higher violent crime rate than many other countries; the crime rate then clashes with the American Dream because of the poor and minorities aren’t fortunate and struggle to live in the American society and end up turning to violence and crime in order to make it.Around 2 million prisons have been known to be in U.S.
Half of these prisoners are black. On any given day, 12% of blackmales in their 20s and early 30s are behind bars. This is three times the rate for Hispanics and almost eight times the white incarceration rate. After 20 years of trying to make death penalty jurisprudence square with constitutional requirements, Justice Harry Blackmun finally gave up, declaring: “From this day forward I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” the number of inmates in American prisons and jails has exceeded 2 million. As of June 30, 2002, there were 1.35 million prisoners in State and Federal prisons and an additional 665, 475 in local jails, according to a new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This represents an increase of nearly 2 percent over the first six months of 2002.
Controversial Question:
Question:Does American justice system actually serve the “American Dream”?Answer: No, the American justice system hasn’t truly been serving the “American
Dream”.
Thesis Statement:
The American justice system does not serve or support the foundation of living the “American Dream”.For the reasons that there is criminological reasoning, the death penalty is iniquitous, and judicial system is discriminative and has flaws.
Sub-Topics:
1) Motivations for criminals to cause the crime due to not living the American Dream.2) The judicial system is and has been known to be discriminative to people of race, status, and/or abilities.
3)The death penalty is not perfectly set up, has its flaws, and contradicts justice & “American Dream” at times.
Paragraph 2 (Opposing View Paragraph to Arg1)
Major Idea: The people who turn to criminology are the ones who can’t be redeemed and have to face the American justice (imprisonment) to become a better person. And live the American Dream.
Evidence:
P.49: Lack of Moral Character Causes Crime, “False Causes”: most criminologists, sociologists and other officials are forced to fight crime at the wrong end of issues. A lot of people decide to blame rising crime on the lack of people, or the easy availability of guns and/or drugs, or on an overburdened and often crippled criminal justice system, or on underemployment, violent entertainment or even poverty. These all do contribute to the crime problem, but they do not deal with the most fundamental causes.P.27: Poverty does not cause crime, instead criminals cause crime; not bad neighborhoods, inadequate parents, televisions, schools, drugs, or unemployment. Rime resides within the minds of human beings and is not caused by social conditions. Once our society recognizes this clear fact, we can take measures much different from current ones. To be sure, we will continue to remedy intolerable social conditions.
P.29 People react differently: poverty does not automatically turn people to crime. Poor people all react differently to their own situations. Many of African Americans that are poor are the hardest working people in the society, and often work 2 or 3 jobs at once.
P.16: One perspective based on criminality is that biological traits are partially responsible. This idea has its scientific roots in the work of nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombrosco. He believed that criminals could be recognized by certain physical features such as crooked noses and handle-shaped ears.
These people with criminality traits cannot escape imprisonment in this case.
Concluding Sentence (refutes opposing arguments and leads to your argument):
Therefore, people either have the option to cause crime or have biological traits that make them turn to criminality. They would have the choice to pay attention to violence on televisions, take drugs, orbe unemployment. In result, they face the American justice system to try to learn from mistakes and be redeemed.
Paragraph 3 (Sub-Topic 1)
Major Idea:The people who turn to criminology are forced by influences and end up experiencing the American justice that doesn’t resolve the causes for their crimes. In the end they don’t live the American Dream.
Evidence:
People also argue that the causes of crime are environmental. Childhood experiences of family abuse and poverty are 2 known reasons often used to explain why people choose to become criminals.P.39: “Criminality is culturally prescribed by the acceptance and practice of exploitive behavior within American society. The diction between criminality and other forms of exploitation, while perhaps qualitatively different, is predominantly one of legal definition which often becomes muddled.”
Poverty and Gangs: the gangs, drugs, and senseless violence are attractive only because some children of the black community- and children of poverty of any race- have been made to feel inferior or like nothing. Therefore the gangs would provide them something to which they can belong to, something that can help give a meaning to existence.Therefore the gangs would provide them something to which they can belong to, something that can help give a meaning to existence.
Biological: looks for physical differences between criminals and non-criminals. This idea was extremely popular in the 1700s and 1800s. But today, many criminologists don’t believe that people are born to become criminals. Although they consider that physical and hereditary factors may influence some criminal behaviour.Social: the society in which the convicts lived, rather than on individual convicts in general, living in places like poverty-stricken Ghettos. These theories consider how factors like poverty, unemployment, poor housing, lack of education, and racism may contribute to causing felonies. Criminologists assume that behaviour is affected by the society in which the people are surrounded by.
Concluding Sentence:
Therefore, biological differences do not mean that the person will become a convict; poverty, gangs, social life, environment/society are ones that influence people into attempting to live the American Dream.The judicial system is what isn’t allowing the American Dream to work for some people because these unmistakable influences are not taken into consideration sometimes.
Paragraph 4 (Opposing View Paragraph to Arg 3)
Major Idea:The judicial system is not discriminative towards different people, flawless, and shouldn’t change, since it is sustaining the “American Dream”. Criminals should be sentence to prison.
Evidence:
P.13: We punish offenders who commit crimes to achieve one or more of the following purposes: To rehabilitate them, to make them pay for their wrongdoings, to keep other people from committing crimes, and to incapacitate them by making it impossible for them to commit other crimes.P.17: The view of prison as a place to bring about the moral reform of prisoners later gave way to a more comprehensive goal: Prison should rehabilitated convicts!
P.83: imprisonment works because City College of New York sociologist Robert Martinson tracked 400,000 criminals who went through special rehabilitation programs over a 25-year period.
P.65: Philosopher Plato stated that a just punishment made clear, must always hold out to the offender the prospect of moral education and, hence, personal reform. He says that a person subjected to punishment should emerge “a better man, or failing that, less of a wretch.”
Concluding Sentence:
Therefore, the judicial system rehabilitates convicts into law-abiding citizens, a just punishment for all criminals, and gives them a chance to live the “American Dream”.Imprisonment is absolutely the preeminent alternative to dealing with all convicts.
Paragraph 5 (Sub-Topic 3)
Major Idea:Evidence: The judicial system is discriminative towards different people, has flaws to it, and hasn’t been supporting the “American Dream”.
P.217: The end of July 2003 marked the execution of 300 African American since judicial killing was authorized in 1976. Of these, over 6 of every 10 (62%) had been found guilty of just killing white victims. Although African Americans make up 12% of the American population, they account for more than 40% of those condemned to death.P.217: More African American males are currently incarnated in America-4,834 per 100,000-than were incarcerated in South Africa at the height of apartheid-851 per 100,000.
the number of inmates in American prisons and jails has exceeded 2 million
P.43: State and local governments were confronted with negative facts: the cost of building a maximum-security prison averages out to about $80,000 per inmate. And the construction costs involved in creating additional prison space are only the beginning; the cost of maintaining an offender in a state prison rounds out to be about $16,000 for each year.
Concluding Sentence (refutes opposing arguments and leads to your argument):
Therefore, the cold, hard, grim realities are inescapable: Prisons are not the absolute answer or even the ultimate solution. It is perilous to avoid, not only the necessity of additional prison space, but the urgency of providing that additional prison space now. The prisons of U.S. are overcrowding and the spending on prisons is too much.The blacks have been discriminated throughout history and haven’t really experienced the American Dream due to the American injustice system and effect of the society on them.
Paragraph 5 (Opposing View Paragraph to Arg 6)
Major Idea:The death penalty is iniquitous to people-minorities and the less fortunate in particular- and should be taken gravely since there are disadvantages in the use of it.
Evidence:
P.225: In 2001, the amount of executions began to drop: from a peak of 98 executions in 1999, down to 66 in 2001, 71 in 2002, and 65 in 2003. Also the number of death sentences began to drop from a peak of 320 death sentences in 1996 to 231 in 2000, 163 in 2001, 159 in 2002, and 143 in 2003.P.217: But not every death penalty decision handed down by the Supreme Court under Rehnquist has been bad. In recent years, several positive developments have emerged. For Example, in 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Court finally exempted the mentally retarded from the death penalty, reversing its previous position from 1989 because the justices found that a national consensus had formed against such executions. In that very year, the Ring v. Arizona, the Court gave broader powers to juries in determining death sentences.
In order to protect and discontinue the violence and crime that the convict commits and won’t stop wanting to commit them, must be redeemed only through execution for the good of the people. This was as thought through out history of punishment.
Concluding Sentence (refutes opposing arguments and leads to your argument):
Therefore,Paragraph 6 (Sub-Topic 2)
Major Idea: The death penalty is iniquitous to people-minorities and the less fortunate in particular- and should be taken gravely since there are disadvantages in the use of it.
Evidence:
The possibility for error in the justice system is really too great to allow the death penalty stand as our crucial punishment.P.198: “It is too expensive”- A North Carolina study from 10 years ago found that the cost of a death penalty case was $2.16 million more per execution than per life sentence. In Texas, 1 death penalty case costs $2.3 million more than a non-death case. 10% of death penalty cases actually end in execution.
P.198: “The death penalty is unfair to the poor and minorities”-A total of 3,859 persons have been executed since 1930, of which 1,751 were white and 2,066 were black. 3,334 were for execution due to murder; 1,664 of the executed murderers were white and 1,630 blacks; 455 persons, including 48 whites and 405 blacks, were all executed for rape.
P.200: “It is usually the poor, the illiterate, the underprivileged, the member of the minority group-the man who, because he is without means, and is defended by a court-appointed attorney-who becomes society’s sacrificial lamb…”by Justice Thurgood Marshall.
P.199: “It is unfairly applied among the states”- On this argument, Justice Stewart wrote in Furman, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual…I simply conclude that the eighth and fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed.” The Furman decision was in 1972, but the reasoning also applies for today.
Concluding Sentence:
Therefore, the death sentence isn’t rightand demoralizes the American dream. “Laws which are intended to moderate the ferocity of mankind should not increase it by examples of more barbarity.” (Writing by Cesar Beccaria). The death penalty shouldn’t be the alternative for dealing with mostConvicts because it is unfair to the poor and minorities, too expensive, and unfairly set among the states of America.
Conclusion
Summary of Sub-Topics:
In conclusion, criminology is caused only because of influences like one’s social life, environment, poverty, and gang violence; The judicial system is discriminative towards different people, has flaws to it, and hasn’t been encouraging the “American Dream”; the American death penalty: “It is too expensive”, “The death penalty is unfair to the poor and minorities”, and “It is unfairly applied among the states”. The death penalty shouldn’t be the major alternative to dealing with convicts.Restate the Thesis:
Therefore, the American justice system does not serve or support the foundation of living the “American Dream”.For the reasons that there is criminological reasoning, the death penalty is iniquitous, and judicial
system is discriminative and has flaws.
Positive, moral, lesson learned sentence:
The American justice system isn’t encouraging some people to live the American Dream because somepeople don’t get that type of option because of their environment (society) and basic role in the society.
Instead of sending all the convicts into imprisonment there should be alternatives that can resolve it in an enhanced way.
Working Bibliography: (please attach)
Cohn, Ellen G. “Crime and Criminology.”The New Book of Knowledge. 20006. Grolier Online.
Smiley, Tavis. Commentary: Black men make disproportionate number of prison populations.News paper resource: Copyright (c) 2003 National Public Radio (r). All rights reserved.
Davis, Bertha. Instead of Prison. New YorkLondonTorontoSydney: an impact book 1986.
Prejean, Sister Helen. The Death of Innocents: “An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions”. Published in the U.S. by Random House, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Kurtis, Bill. The Death penalty on trial “Crisis in American justice”. Copyright 2004 by Bill Kurtis and published in the United States by PublicAffairs TM.