Examine a Social Issue

Analysis of : 

www.ted.com/talks/alice_goffman_college_or_prison_two_destinies_one_blatant_injustice

Break it down in the Social Sciences: 

Political Sciences:  How is power used? 

Nicole Porter in the piece “Politics of Black Lives Matter”...countries have the policies and prison populations they choose. Between 1965 and 1990, a period during which overall and violent crime rates tripled in Germany, Finland, and the United States, German politicians chose to hold the imprisonment rate flat, Finnish politicians chose to substantially reduce theirs, and American politicians generally enacted policies that sent more people to prison, along with lengthened prison terms.

Sociology- How does this high rate of incarceration affect the well-beings of communities? 

Families and the well being of communities are directly impacted by high and biased rates of arrests. 
Mass imprisonment damages social networks, distorts social norms, and destroys social citizenship. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi article=1582&context=faculty_scholarship 

Economics- How does high incarceration rates affect the production, consumption and distribution of commodities?  

In the early 1980s, the Corrections Corporation of America pioneered the idea of running prisons for a profit. “You just sell it like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers,” one of its founders told Inc. magazine" .
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-americas-private-prison-industry-timeline/

In 1995, the National Institute of Justice released a study that confirmed garment manufacturer Third Generation contracted sewing work in the early ’90s to a prison through a deal with South Carolina Correctional Industries. Victoria’s Secret, along with other companies, wound up buying the apparel through Third Generation — that were actually made by inmates at the Leath Correctional Facility in Greenwood.   Washington Post, June 15, 2017 

Human Geography- How do the neighborhood boundaries create a situation where young people of colour are being arrested at a higher rate and sent to prison?  

Otherwise celebrated for making homeownership accessible to white people by guaranteeing their loans, the FHA explicitly refused to back loans to black people or even other people who lived near black people.  The Atlantic, May 22, 2014 

In 2015, just 5 percent of white applicants were denied a home loan, compared with 18 percent of black mortgage applicants. http://www.wbur.org/

History- What events in history have contributed to this problem?  How has the history of the United States created this injustice of high incarceration?

The historical circumstances following the abolition of slavery provide the necessary context to understand how corporations function in a de facto replacement for slavery. Although the US Constitution's Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, it made an exception - a loophole for "punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", which made prison labour possible. http://www.aljazeera.com/ September 9, 2017 

Psychology- Why are police officers blinded to their bias?  Why are stereotypes perpetuated by politicians and in media? 

Categorization can also trigger stereotypes. When an individual is seen as a member of a social group, perceptions about that group’s characteristics and behavior influence judgments made about them. Stereotyping involves the creation of a mental image of a typical member of a particular category. Huffington Post, October 19, 2014