#newpope

via CS Monitor

Earlier this week, the world was hit with big news: the Catholic Church/the Vatican elected a new pope: Pope Francis I. This story was especially unique because he was elected after the previous pope, Pope Benedict XVI, resigned due to unclassified reasons, most likely his old age (age 85) or health problems.

For all of these reasons, the news was very intriguing. In this day and age of technology, anything can be put in multiple forms of Internet-based multimedia with an audience of literally every person on the planet. 

Suddenly for what I think is first in their history, the news of a religious group picking their new leader went not only viral, but incited such a reaction that many news sources reported a website crash due to the number of people trying to access the information at the same time. I was checking www.msn.com for a Chicago Bulls game score, and instead at the top of the site read a flashing red banner: BREAKING NEWS: WHITE SMOKE EMITTED FROM COLLEGE OF CARDINALS. IDENTITY TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON. After what seemed like days of 'black smoke' (a failed consensus to decide the papacy), the world media was literally chomping at the bit to get their story: tv news networks had experts onsite in Rome weighing in, newspaper articles sprouted out of everywhere, bloggers were abuzz, the hashtag '#newpope' had over 12,000 photos uploaded in the span of a couple of hours, and even gamblers in Las Vegas were taking bets on the odds of the new pope's identity.

The truth of the matter is that (at least in America), a lot of news serves solely as a means of entertainment. Stories come and go without much significance because all their after is a constant stream of it. In this particular case, the new pope's identity had not even been released and the horses were out the gates with opinions in their minds and pens in their hands. Just prior to writing this post, I checked the same website, www.msn.com , to see what came up and found no stories about the Vatican or Pope Francis I within the eight headlines or front page. To what extent is all media just entertainment? How will it affect reporting and news in the future?

Prison Industrial Complex

AP Images

Last week, I posted a blog on Prison Incarcerations: By the Numbers. Here is a follow-up on the same theme. In today's Chicago Sun Times, an opinion piece entitled Longer prison time won’t make city safer by John Maki also touched on this issue (to read the article, click the attached blue link above). Maki is the executive director of the John Howard Association,  a 'prison watchdog group'.

The opinion piece dealt with the consistent problem that is gun violence in Chicago and what Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to do to combat it. One of the proposed ideas presented in the piece is the lengthening of prison sentences in hopes of "deter[ing] people from unlawfully carrying guns and using them in shootings," While the author, Maki, completely disagrees with the idea because it is 'unlikely' to succeed, I do not completely disagree with Emanuel's proposed legislation. Maybe the harsher the consequence, the less likely someone is from breaking the law and the more they will be 'deterred' from 'unlawful' actions.

This directly connects to the topics discussed in my previous blog. According to the same article, the increasing of "long-term consequences" would "overwhelm the ever increasing Illinois prison population". The 'ever increasing' prison population is really a testament of a larger idea often referred today as the "Prison Industrial Complex". Taking offenders off the streets for 'a few extra years' really wouldn't make much of a difference because the prisons are already too crowded for their maximum intended capacity. According to Maki, one prison has "49,000 inmates in a system designed for 33,000".  The over-population of this prison presents a larger issue I am trying to get at: Why it is that the prison population keeps going up yet the amount of violence is remaining constant, if not increasing? Emanuel's legislation should attempt to make this connection an inverse, where one goes up and the other goes down and not a direct, where both steadily increase. How do you think Emanuel should combat gun violence and over-crowded prisons?

Prison Incarceration: By the Numbers

Prison populations have been ever rising. Some have called certain time periods a 'prison boom'. The term, "Prison Industrial Complex"  is used because the number of people behind bars has continually increased at an alarming rate.  Could there also be a level of racism in our Judicial system that is contributing to the rise? At first, I didn't want to believe it, but after a quick look at the numbers, it seems plausible. While prisons are definitely necessary, if one looks critically enough, they can see there are certain troublesome trends.

The U.S. Department of Justice's Federal Bureau of Prisons website offers many interesting statistics to the public. Certain statistics include Inmate Breakdown, Sentence Imposed, Types of Offenses and Staff Breakdown. I found the most interesting information to be that of the Inmate Population: when classified by race, 129,682 (59.5 %) of the people behind bars in 2013 are Caucasian, while 80,811 (37.1 %) are African American. This is especially interesting because African Americans only make up about 13.1% of the population according to a 2012 US Census estimate. I wonder why these numbers are so drastically different. Also, when looking at the Staff Breakdown from the same site, it says that 63.7% of the workers are Caucasian. To me, it seems like slavery all over again in a sense: Caucasian people supervising the time of African Americans. While this is not as widespread as it was in the pre-Civil War American South, there is a slight stark comparison.

What do you think about prison incarcerations by the numbers? How do you think the trends of prison populations and staff will differ in the future?