Pfaff, John. “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.” Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform | National Council on Crime & Delinquency, 2018, www.nccdglobal.org/blog/locked-true-causes-mass-incarceration-and-how-achieve-real-reform.
The article above is a book analysis done by the author himself, the book is titled “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.” The main argument done by Pfaff is that the United States fails to correctly prioritize the issues within society, thus pushing mass incarceration as a solution. He would use the war on drugs as an example, the war on drugs was a campaign in the early 1970s that was used to stop the illegal drug use and trade within the country. A tactic used to combat this issue was to increase the sentences placed on those who did not comply and were caught. This issue was prioritized heavily, putting people in prison for even ‘low-level non-violent drug crimes’, increasing prison numbers significantly.
This essentially set a precedent of how the country would heavily police small issues as opposed to concentrating on the main issues that should be acknowledged. In comparison to now, this is seen through the amount of convictions for violence, even those who show little risk of re offending are still placed in prison. Though there are reforms to decrease the policing on non-violent crimes, the increase of heavier policing on violent crimes is then applied in order to reduce the idea that they are not taking initiative. Overall, the continuous negligence of issues in society being camouflaged with the longer sentences on low-level crimes does not solve our issues, but contributes to Mass incarceration.
This article is credible to my research because it is an analysis from an individual who published a book on this issue. John Pfaff used statistics to visualize the prison growth over time, and compared it to different time periods. I agree with this source because it includes part of my hypothesis where i questioned the governments benefit to mass incarceration, and the heavy policing on small crimes. The article mentions the Prison privatization which describes the government coming together with private corporations to make more space for prisoners, while also the heavy policing on small crimes counter productively placing more people in jail. The writing style used by the author was very conversational, which engaged me more to his perspective on this issue and even more to look at his book.
Key Quote: “Convinced that prison is driven by long sentences adopted by state legislators, reforms have focused on state-level efforts to cut them back. And again: Our sentences are too long (at least from a public safety perspective). But the decisions by county prosecutors to charge people in the first place has been much more consequential: the decision to send people to prison in the first place, far more than how long to send them there for.”
This is great. A few things to work on as you revise:
1. What is a book analysis? Please clarify. I looked at the link to see if I could help you find a term but it is not working for me. An error message comes up when I copy and paste into the browser.
2. Format and organize the annotation so that each part is its own paragraph. That is the summary should be separate from the evaluation and the quotations its own section as well.
3. Say a bit more about the genre. Who is this written for? That is–who is the audience? For what purpose?