| Sumario: | This article critically examines competing perspectives on national and state criminal justice systems' policies in terms of how they influence citizens' need for prisons with the private sector's desire for profits and their effects on the incarceration rate of African American males. The essay therefore highlights how race, mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement are employed to influence election outcomes. In addition, it shows how the profit-seeking motive or other forms of economic incentives contribute to racist policy in the criminal justice system. The essay also points out ethically questionable public-private business relationships and other arrangements that contribute to socially-constructed economic policy instruments used to fulfill conservatives and Whites supremacists' objectives for continual white domination. This essay promotes more future research and analysis on how the criminal justice system impacts political, economic and social inequality in the African American community. Due to their considerably diminished capabilities to achieve political and economic equality, one of the recommendations of the study was that streamlining of the voting restoration process is necessary for felony disenfranchised, returning citizens and those others who have lost their voting rights.
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