The American Dream - Sociology Course Work PDF

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The American Dream

By: Dakota Mullins-Webb

What is the American Dream? According to thebalance.com, the American Dream is the “ideal that the government should protect each person’s opportunity to pursue their own ideas.” This idea in America can be traced back to colonial times with John Locke. According to www.crf-usa.org “Locke wrote that all individuals are equal in the sense that they are born with certain "inalienable" natural rights. That is, rights that are God-given and can never be taken or even given away. Among these fundamental natural rights, Locke said, are "life, liberty, and property." I feel this was the bases for the idea of the “American Dream”. Some may ask what happened when this “American Dream” is not reached? According to Dr.Prigden when people do not have the means to achieve the American Dream, they begin to commit crime and usually fall into the jail system. This begins to make me wonder if this idea of the “American Dream” has any correlation with the number of prisoners that the united states holds compared to other nations. According to the BBC the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of prisoners per 100,000 citizens at am astonishing 724 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, with the next being Russia at a rate of 581 prisoners per 100,000 citizens and third being the Britain with a rate of 145 per 100,000. With this mind-blowing rate it makes me wonder if this rate of prisoners is too due to the ideology behind the American way of thinking or if it is just the cause of our population, or maybe even our prison system itself?...