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Victim and offender rarely interact each other after the offender is arrested. They are often not given the chance to work things out. The first words an offender hears upon arrest are "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law." This essentially does not allow the offender to apologize out of fear of jeopardizing their case.

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How restorative justice could end mass incarceration | Shannon Sliva | TEDxMileHigh

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Our prison systems are a point where it is extremely difficult, impossible even, to question mass incarceration because of how heavily it has been monetized by the government and private companies.

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The prison system appears to target black/Latino males who are poor. Many of the people sitting in jail/prison are there only for one reason being that they simply are too poor to get out. At some point, the prison system began treating the rich + guilty better than the poor + innocent. The saying that no one is above or below the law is just simply false.

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The prison system seems to geared more towards punishment than actual rehabilitation. For example, about 97% of those who are locked up had a plea bargain instead of going on trial. If every individual went to trial, the system would simply shut down. In a desperate attempt to prevent this, the government has established mandatory minimum sentences according to crimes that are not in the control of the judge or jury. Out of fear of these minimum mandatory sentences, many would choose a plea bargain as long as it guaranteed them less time in prison, regardless of whether or not they even committed the crime.

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In the past, instead of making drug abuse a mental health issue, society instead chose to make it a criminal issue. Perhaps this is how we should be treating a lot of the crimes today, providing convicted individuals with actual rehabilitation instead of punishment.

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Society has a problem of labeling those with a criminal conviction with their own crime. "We make them their own crime" essentially. We refer to these people as rapists, killers, drug dealers, and so on. By doing this, we have already begun dehumanizing them. Furthermore, by making a person their crime, we make it much easier for them to believe that their crime is the only thing that defines them. Once people start believing something about themselves, they will act accordingly.

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These individuals may be denied things such as jobs, loans, finances, and even the right to vote for the rest of their life due to a criminal conviction. Regardless of whether or not this individual was proven to be guilty, a criminal conviction still follows a person around for the rest of their life.

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Humans were not meant to be locked up or put in cages. If we don't treat our pets the way we would treat inmates at a prison, why would we treat a fellow human being like that? Those imprisoned receive little to no rehabilitation for reentering civil society. And once they do get released, these individuals continued to be shunned by the rest of society.

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Many argue that the reason for overcrowding can be solved by putting prisoners in house arrest with tracking devices on their wrists or ankles provided by private companies that would also manage to benefit off of mass incarceration. However, the issue with this is that American society has refused to acknowledge the wrongdoings that brought them to this point of overcrowded prisons. Rather than fix the problem at its root (the reason as to why the incarceration rates keep growing), American society has chosen to deal with the issues that stem from this problem.

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In the U.S. funding for prisons prioritizes quantity over quality. In other words, at the expense of poorly designed, inhumane living conditions, prisons are able to hold a larger capacity. In 1994, the Federal Crime Bill was passed, using $30 billion to expand the prison system. Rather than using this money to try and lower the rate of incarceration, the government chose to make more room for the growing incarceration rates. The reason behind this is quite simple. Private companies and the economy make money off of prisoners. (Prison labor accounts for a large amount of products we may encounter in our daily lives.)

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With the rise of crack cocaine, the inherent discrimination against black people would become clearer and clearer. Crack offenses, which affected the inner-city, would receive harsher punishments than cocaine offenses which were issues primarily in suburban areas. This naturally, made blacks and Latinos a bigger target for these harsh punishments.

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1970: 357,292
1980: 513,900
1990: 1,179,200
2000: 2,015,300
(878,400 of which were black)
2014: 2,300,000
Lifetime Likelihood of Imprisonment: 1 out of 17 are white men

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As civil rights movements continued to grow, so did crime rates, making it just that much easier for politicians to link these two things despite it being a spurious correlation. Presidents such as Nixon or Reagan began ordering a "war on crime" which was essentially a war on black political movements, women's rights movements, and gay rights movements. Because of this, mass incarceration began occurring in the 1970's.

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As seen in many cases, the more you dehumanize a person, the likelier they are to act in such a manner that fits your view of them. I was watching a show and I feel like it did a really good job of depicting this concept. In a specific scene, when an victim of crime is treated and dehumanized in the way a criminal would be, she begins to show signs of harboring ill intent. However, when one of the officers begins treating her kindly without the threat of a weapon, her level of ill intent goes down. This just goes to show how the way we treat criminals really does shape how they act.

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Believing in humanity and order, policewoman Akane Tsunemori obeys the ruling, computerized, precognitive Sibyl System. But when she faces a criminal mastermind who can elude this "perfect" system, she questions both Sibyl and herself.

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Created by Tow Ubukata. With Kana Hanazawa, Miyuki Sawashiro, Noriko Hidaka, Shizuka Itô. Believing in humanity and order, policewoman Akane Tsunemori obeys the ruling, computerized, precognitive Sibyl System. But when she faces a criminal mastermind who can elude this "perfect" system, she questions both Sibyl and herself.

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The creation of the 13th Amendment loophole was something that people began turning to as way to make money. The 13th Amendment made it unconstitutional to be held as a slave "except as a punishment for crime". Naturally, politicians and the government began exploiting this loophole, distorting the American perception of black people to be nothing more than criminals. Utilizing the people's fear of crime, governments continued to criminalize black people, associating them with criminality and menace.

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Ever since the creation of the nation, the system has inherently been against black people. After the post-Civil War abolition of slavery, governments began scrambling to find ways to assist the declining economy.

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Although design can play a factor in creating a humane prison, so do the interactions between the guards and inmates themselves. With this design, guards are forced to observe/interact with inmates face to face rather than from a distance.

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As stated by Cooley's looking glass self theory, the way individuals view themselves is determined/shaped by their interactions with society alongside other's perspective on them.

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The Role of Social Media

The rise of social media makes the process of the looking-glass self infinitely more complex. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and the like make it possible to connect with others in ways never before imagined. However, this exposure has led to an ever-increasing number of "mirrors," thus proposing new questions about the development of self.

Social media has brought with it the concept of the "cyber" self, Mary Aiken explains. The cyber self is the version of him or herself a person chooses to present on a digital platform. As in real life, the cyber self may interact with other individuals, receive social feedback, and align to social conformities. However, the differences between the cyber self and actual self are profound.

A person may possess many versions of the cyber self, for example. He or she may present a professional self on LinkedIn, a casual self on Twitter, or an artistic self on Pinterest. The cyber self also continues to exist in social spaces even when people are not interacting with those environments in real time. In this way, social media users are never fully removed from exposure to judgment and criticism. And unlike the actual self, the cyber self is far more malleable when it comes to being shaped, updated, and perfected.

These unique qualities of the cyber self raise a host of psychological issues and concerns, Aiken explains. Individuals may experience a greater sense of urgency to return to or remain in digital spaces. They may be increasingly involved in the curation of their online identities, possibly at the cost of developing their real-world selves. The host of digital platforms involved also brings into question whether one's identity may become splintered, or whether developmental problems will result. All these consequences are more severe when digital users are young or in their teens.

However, changes to the social self via digital platforms are not always steeped in such negative implications. A study published in the Journal of Social Media and Society, for example, describes a host of positive outcomes that arise from the digital looking-glass self. When YouTube video producers were interviewed about their content-creation practices and its influence on their sense of self, they offered a range of positive responses. Results included:

A sense of gained confidence

Enhanced creativity

Overcoming of major social hurdles

Increased sense of self-worth

A strengthened professional image

Feelings of altruism and "helping others" through their content

Interacting in a positive social space

Whether digital platforms are ultimately a help or a hindrance to self-identity remains to be seen. The human mind is still very much a frontier of modern science. For individuals who wish to ask the psychological questions essential for modern times, however, the right career begins with the right degree.
Additional sources: Human Nature and the Social Order
A Modern Career in Psychology

At Lesley University, the online Bachelor of Science in Psychology degree program prepares students to succeed in this ever-evolving field. Lesley's well-rounded curriculum trains students in a variety of subject areas, including cognition, abnormal behavior, development, and more. Required laboratory and internship work means students gain valuable hands-on experience that provides a competitive edge after graduation. Because Lesley's program is offered fully online, students have ultimate flexibility when earning their degrees.

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Perception Is Reality: The Looking-Glass Self

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The rise of social media makes the process of the looking-glass self infinitely more complex. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and the like make it possible to connect with others in ways never before imagined. However, this exposure has led to an ever-increasing number of "mirrors," thus proposing new questions about the development of self.

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Norway has been designing prisons in a fashion that allows for those being incarcerated to be treated in a more humane way. In 2013, Norway had a prisoner population of 72 out of 100,000 compared to the U.S. with 716 out of 100,000. U.S. prisons appear to value cost-saving more than the actual design of these prisons.

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How Norway designed a more humane prison

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Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment shows us exactly how oftentimes, the criminal and the victim are not as different as we would like to think. If we are able to view the world in such a manner, perhaps it is possible to lower the incarceration rates in the U.S.

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At the age of 28, Fyodor Dostoevsky, sentenced to death for revolutionary activities, stood before a firing squad. The young writer and agitator kissed a cross that was passed around among the prisoners. The Tsar's soldiers raised their guns. Then a rider rushed into the square and announced a pardon: the condemned men, including Dostoevsky, were to be sent to hard labour in Siberia instead.

Very few of us will ever have a terrifying, unreal moment like Dostoevsky's: convinced he was about to die, then spared at the last minute. When Dostoevsky returned from Siberia and wrote his great novels, his near-death echoed through his work. He felt compelled to imagine killers and their victims in the most graphic, even sickening ways.

Being alone with Dostoevsky and his perverse, troubled characters can be an appalling experience. But still we read on, unable to tear ourselves away from a world so miserable and so alien to our hopes. Dostoevsky shows us what subjecting ourselves to a book whose vision is extreme and uncomfortable can do for us: broaden our knowledge of others.

Increasingly, psychologists and neuroscientists have been focusing on empathy as a crucial part of what makes us human. Moral life is unimaginable without the ability to identify with other people, to feel their experiences. But what about people whose inner lives we can't bear to think about: the torturers and killers we condemn as evil, even inhuman? Every day we gulp down headlines and lurid, tabloid stories about such bad people, but this is voyeurism, not an entry into another world. Dostoevsky actually portrays bad people in unrivalled depth, and over hundreds of pages: the terrorists, the murderers, the scoundrels. Lately, psychological studies have suggested that reading serious fiction increases empathy, enabling us to stand in the shoes of others. This is especially valuable when we read about those who seem completely unlike us: not just people from a different nation, race or religion, but those who are morally different, who are, to use the inescapable word, evil.

Dostoevsky is not alone among the great realists in his ability to depict evil. When I read Tolstoy's War and Peace, I am always most intrigued by the novel's chilling portrait of Napoleon. In Tolstoy's hands, the Emperor resembles an overgrown child, but he knows only cold satisfaction, instead of a child's joy. Yet Tolstoy's Napoleon, who is capable of sending thousands of men to their deaths without hesitation, remains part of the spectrum of humanity. He's not a monster, but one of us.

When you read a novel seriously, you're alone with the author's characters, listening and feeling as carefully as you can. Sometimes, as with Dostoevsky, the reader enters a world that may seem foreign and even repulsive, but that also fascinates. We feel exhilarated but uneasy as we find ourselves trapped with the people we usually turn away from, life's villains. At times a television series like Breaking Bad is able, like a realist novel, to make us sympathise with a hero whom we also want to condemn. But novels, because they demand that we immerse ourselves in the lives of others more slowly and thoroughly than television or movies, give us a fuller portrait of the dark side.

Reading a novel forces us to experience the lives of characters who are radically different from us, something we can't get from other art forms. Only by spending a long time inside the head of a character can we know something of the full range of human life. The more we can do that, the better for how we see the world, because we've spent serious time with otherness during our reading.

Novels deliver the unlike, the alien, as an antidote to our comforts and our day-to-day prejudices. Increasingly, we are snugly wrapped in our worldviews. Conservatives see everything in blue, progressives in red. The internet seems designed to back up our opinions, because when we're online we make a habit of seeking out the like-minded. We gang up on those we disagree with, rather than listening carefully to contrary opinions. When the web shows us the horrors of war and domestic violence, we take a quick look and move on. Distracted by snapshots of horror, we think we are following terrible events. But we're not, because we don't commit ourselves to finding out about the human actors behind them. Reading a novel means committing yourself, to the author and the characters. Glancing at evil and tragedy, as the internet encourages us to do, lets us avoid the hard questions about motivation and human personality that novels make us confront.

Because the internet molds itself to our whims, letting us go where we want, when we want, it prevents us from really experiencing otherness in the way that a novel, the longest of long forms, can offer. A novel has a structure, while the web doesn't; a novel pushes back, and demands that we stay involved. Sinking into a book and subjecting ourselves to the author is the shock treatment we need to break out of our habit of online distractions, which can numb our capacity to see how human beings develop over time. Without that capacity, we lose the power to identify with the people around us, especially those we find morally troubling.

When we read Crime and Punishment, we sympathise against our will with the murderer Raskolnikov. But Dostoevsky, remembering his own near-execution, also makes us watch a murder from the point of view of the victim. Dostoevsky imagines what it's really like to kill someone in a way that movies and television and online games almost never do. Raskolnikov first kills an old woman pawnbroker, and then her sister Lizaveta, who arrives unexpectedly on the scene. As Raskolnikov lifts his axe, the author shows us Lizaveta paralysed with fear. We suddenly see the murder through the eyes of the victim, after having experienced the inner life of the murderer through so many gripping pages.

In ordinary life we tend to choose sides. We wouldn't want to think about a murderer and his victim at once. But Dostoevsky makes us identify with both. We can't push either of them away; our moral judgments get put on hold so that we can really see into the lives of other people. We've spent so much time with the murderer, in our slow, captivated reading of the book, that we can't just reject him now. But we also know that, when he scorns the sacredness of human life, he has done the unforgivable.

We are moral creatures, and so we must divide humanity into innocent and guilty, victim and evil predator. But there is something about such distinctions that cuts us off from further knowledge. When we're prevented from picking sides, as happens when we read a novelist like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, we've learned something essential: that we need to move beyond comforting moral judgments, if we really care about understanding the world.

A few hours after his reprieve from death, Dostoevsky wrote in a letter to his brother, "Life, life is everywhere, life is inside us... There will be people beside me, and to be a man among people is to remain a man forever..." These words suggest that Dostoevsky knew his uncanny strength, from that moment on, would be his ability to imagine other people, and to help us imagine other people too.

David Mikics is the author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (Harvard/Belknap). He lives in Brooklyn and Houston, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston

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What Crime and Punishment can teach you that the internet can't

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At the age of 28, Fyodor Dostoevsky, sentenced to death for revolutionary activities, stood before a firing squad. The young writer and agitator kissed a cross that was passed around among the prisoners. The Tsar's soldiers raised their guns.

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On the topic of how society treats criminals, we often appear to view them as monsters as a way of setting ourselves apart from these individuals. When we take a closer look however, these individuals are fundamentally humans, just like the rest of us. What sets them apart is the fact that they have violated a moral norm/law.

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Some suggest that more enlightened approaches to criminal punishment may help with recidivism rates (approximately 3/4 of prisoners return to prison within 5 years of release).

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Many argue that harsher punishments make it less likely for prisoners to rehabilitate, accounting for the constantly increasing rates of incarceration. Aside from legal punishments, these individuals often have to endure being treated like outcasts by the rest of society.

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Incarceration rates in the U.S. have been increasing ever since the 1970s. 150 out of 100,000 were prisoners in 1980 while in 2010, 525 out of 100,000 were prisoners.

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Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society - Username

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Welcome to Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society