Police Deviance
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The view on police and prisons provided by Christian Parenti in Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis is not pretty. In fact, with respect to the U.S. Constitution the view of modern policing and prisons in the U.S. seems downright unconstitutional. America leads the world in per capita police, prisons, prisoners and almost one-third of all prisoners, those on parole, or those awaiting trial are African American men. Beatings and killings by police and prison law enforcement happen routinely with little accountability. Such a strong on crime reality in today’s policing is a product of the backlash against the activism and violence of the 1960s and 1970s according to Parenti. As he argues, “It is from this political and economic crucible that today’s emerging anti-crime police state and prison industrial complex were forged” (Parenti 4).The majority of those in prison currently are there for non-violent, drug-related crimes as a result of the war on drugs manufactured by politicians. However, economics plays a role in today’s police state because capitalism demands poverty but at the same time is threatened by the poor. It is largely the poor, minorities who are targeted by overzealous police officers who frequently beat or kill suspects with little accountability except for the most widely publicized cases. Urban professionals with a surplus of income have created the realities of poverty, but t
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modern policing organizational structures. When organizations fail they manifest sentiments like resentment and cynicism among employees that engenders individual and group acts of deviance. According to Frank Perry, police organizational structures exhibit three failings that manifest deviance among law enforcement individuals and groups:
Little or ineffective discipline and deselection of trainees.
Ignorance of the nature and effects of the goal-gradient phenomenon (the further away individuals remain from their goal, the less the tendency to remain passionately interested in its attainment); and,
Allowance of a double standard in the organization, thereby decreasing moral accountability.
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Such organizational failures and rituals like the Blue Wall of silence encourage lying, violence and corruption among police officers. So, too, there is a basic type of police officer that is aggressive and cynical from seeing so much violence and death on the street. Such experiences can make officers callous, overly zealous in their tactics and can cause them to single out the poor and minorities unfairly. New York and Los Angeles are prime examples of how police routinely beat or kill black men, even those that are unarmed.
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1435
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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