Abstract:
In 2020, there were 1.8 million incarcerated people in the United States. This means that the United States has the highest prisoner rate in the world. This is a civil rights issue. Wicked individuals with ill intentions are not responsible for this phenomenon. In the first part of my thesis, the reasons behind the mentioned high incarceration rates will be explained, and it will be argued that these people, especially people of color, are being imprisoned as a result of a highly unjust process. To understand the reasons behind the high incarceration rates in the United States is important to find ways of lowering these rates. In the second part of the thesis, restorative justice programs, which is one possible way of lowering these rates, will be defined, it will be argued that restorative justice programs will fail unless other significant structural changes take place and that restorative justice programs can be beneficial to victims, offenders, and communities only if it is applied together with other structural changes in the case of United States. In the last part of my thesis, it will be argued that imprisoning poor people of color plays two important functions, for the neoliberal governments of the United States, legitimizing their political power and relocating those poor people, who do not have a place in modern, liquid societies, to outside of the society and that important structural changes cannot be applied without understanding this relationship between neoliberalism and current high incarceration rates.
