Strides for Social Justice: Breaking a World Record for Prison Awareness, Research and Mass Education
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Running 95 Marathons in 95 weeks across the country to raise awareness on the US Prison System.
On Prisons
UCLA's Undergraduate Team of Researchers
A little more on the runner...
"Since 1984 the United States is the #1 country in the world with the largest rate and head count number of prisoners." -Michelle Alexander
Since the Criminalization of Drugs in 1984 the rate of incarceration has increased, also known as the War on Drugs.
This has led to mass incarceration in the United States and has increased the number of incarcerated prisoners across the country. Legislation has also extended the prison time for those who are caught with drugs.
It's effects? People with drug possession are incarcerated for a longer time period than someone who has committed murder crimes. This not only sustains the prison number across the country but also increases the rate as more people get arrested. Women's incarceration rate is not that far behind.
"As students we cannot take our knowledge for granted, we have a responsibility to educate our society in issues that affect them. Lack of mass society educational attainment/background is no excuse"-SFSJ
My name is Areli Rios and I am currently an undergraduate at UCLA. I have been long distance running for seven years now. Awareness on the prison industrial complex system is one that I believe should not go overlooked since history shows that the rate and number of incarceration has never been so high as it is today. As a citizen, creating awareness about the prison system all the while Breaking a World Record is my way of creating awareness on this social justice issue that a large part of our population fall under.
-Thank you so much for your time!
United States Incarceration Data
The United States has the highest rate (in relation to its population) of incarceration. Scholars such as Professor Hanes Garcia, Michelle Alexander's, "The New Jim Crow" have found that the United States has the largest number of incarcerated prisoners than anywhere else in the world.
The Ethnic Studies Professor in the University of Oregon, Hanes Garcia research (to the left) can help us visualize that the United States does indeed outnumber other countries in incarceration rates.
Professor Hames Garcia's graph depicts the growth in incarceration rate from the 1850s to 2011. Showing that the rate of incarceration in between this time period has been the highest in 2011, and continues to grow. Among some of the reasons for the growth in number are partly due to the dramatic shift during the 1980s in the ways that drug possesion are dealt with as a criminal industrial issue.
Though in most countries the possession of drugs has been a public health issue. Possession of drugs in the United States legislation has not only longated the time period in prison, but is also responsible for the maintanence of numbers in prisons. Nonetheless, Hames Garcia and Michelles Alexander agree that crime rates are directly correlated with the growth of incarceration. This is partly due to the fact that crime rates went down during the 90s and 2000's, yet the incarceration rate, as we can see in the graph, has increased since.
Nonetheless, we must be careful to directly correlate the population and races that are in prisoned, for research has proven to show that all races have been found to consume drugs at the
same rate (Alexander).
Works Cited.
Alexander, Michell. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New York Press. 2012. Print.
Garcia, Hames. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. University of California, Los Angeles Lecture. Los Angeles. March 3, 2014.