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Opportunity Inequality

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According to The Opportunity Agenda’s Opportunity Survey, a study examining public opinion on opportunity, inequality, and social justice issues, most (69%) Americans believe the criminal justice system needs major improvements. 86% of respondents say racial and ethnic profiling by law enforcement should be banned, of which 63% see fit system-wide training programs while the rest prefer retraining of individual officers. Regarding reentry policies, 67% of the public favor increased spending on job training and placement for people who’ve previously been imprisoned, 56% support laws restricting housing discrimination against them, and 55% back tax incentives for employers to hire them.
With recent tragedies like the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray that sparked riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, and criminal justice reform as a key topic for the 2016 presidential election, Americans have become more aware of incarceration trends. In its Criminal Justice Fact Sheet the NAACP notes, “From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled-from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million …show more content…
As published in a 2014 Prison Policy Initiative briefing, the majority (57%) of people incarcerated in the United States are imprisoned in state prisons, 30% are in local jails, and only 10% are in federal correctional facilities. The nation’s high incarceration rate has actually largely been driven by state, not federal, prison growth. Therefore, criminal justice policies for individual states should be the focus of reform efforts. This is especially true for the South, as the region has had consistently higher incarceration rates than other regions in the

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