The Louisiana incarceration rate has changed from the 1950’s to 2017. Incarceration is the act of placing someone in prison. Louisiana has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, with 816 people in prison for every 100,000 residents
Incarceration costs a great deal of money from the Louisiana Criminal Justice Department. This year Louisiana is going to spend 625,000,000 dollars on adult corrections. Compared to other states Louisiana has a very high incarceration rate. “Louisiana is one of only five states with an incarceration rate exceeding 600 people per 100,000 and the only state exceeding 700 people per 100,000 residents.” The Louisiana prison inmate rate has grown tremendously over the years. Each inmate is worth approximately $24.39 a say in state money. “The amount of prisoners has grown 30 times faster than the state’s population since the late 1970’s.” According to the Associated Press.
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Keeping non-violent offenders out of jail could lower the rate. Eighty-one percent (81%) of Louisiana’s prison admissions in 2015 were for non-violent crimes. Louisiana puts more non-violent offender in jail than the nation’s average. Lowering the incarceration rate will cost Louisiana an excessive amount of money, approximately seventy-eight million over the next decade. Lowering the incarceration rate also means reforming the criminal justice system.
People serving life without parole can affect the rate, especially those who are serving life for non-violent crimes. Nearly 35,700 people are incarcerated today. “13.4% of all of Louisiana’s prisoners are now serving life without parole.” Bryn Stole, The Advocate. Nearly 5,000 men and women in Louisiana are serving life without parole.” Compared to other states, Louisiana has more than six times as many people serving life without
What is about to lead us into another boom in crime and thus population in prison is the economic downturn. Crime rate rises in areas of high joblessness and poverty. It’s fair to say those that will commit crimes will regardless
Prison overpopulation puts a strain on the environment of our legal system. According to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) the United States is currently incarcerating 1 in 100 American Adults. ALEC also claims that
There are too many people incarcerated in the United States of America. The U.S. imprisons 724 people per 100,000. In absolute numbers United States has more of its citizens behind bars then do China or Russia combined. (Gallagher 2008). There are about thousand U.S. citizens that become incarcerated in the prison system in any given week.
Throughout the history of the United States and including the western world. Corrections have served the country by convicting and sentencing offenders depending on the seriousness of the crime. Along with that today, offenders are either placed in probation, incarcerated or taken to community-based corrections. Even though, corrections have always tried to find ways to deter crime by correcting criminals, the poor economy in our country has been the cause for struggles in the correctional system. Some of the causes of economic issues are the cut of budget, over crowing, lack of programs for people with mental illnesses, and lack of innovation.
Throughout the years that prisons have been in operations we have seen many issues arise when it comes to maintaining prisons on a budget. According to the Cheat Sheet article the cost of housing inmates varies from state to state. The average cost per inmate was $31,286 a year in order to take care of them (The Cheat Sheet). New York is at the top of the list when it comes to cost per inmate which is on average $60,076 per prisoner (The Cheat Sheet). In my opinion, these numbers are very alarming, especially when it comes to taxpayer dollars being spent on inmates. According to the Cheat Sheet article the annual price to taxpayers was over 39 billion dollars. Even though these numbers are at an all-time high, state policymakers have taken into account the cost of housing each inmate. The state imprisonment rate declined, this is in part due to the fact that state lawmakers researched driven policy changes to control prison growth, reduce recidivism,
Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad
On 4/3/2016, I was assigned as the Dock officer at the Lower Buckeye Jail, located at the above address.
One alternative to the death penalty is rehabilitation. Prisons in Louisiana should not be viewed solely as confinement for inmates, but as a last resort for those looking to make serious life changes, even if they are condemned to life in prison. Since prisons are rapidly reaching maximum capacity, the government should really be looking to reform its current statutes to provide a rehabilitation center for criminals and provide a safer environment for all involved in the prison system. Prisons that have implemented rehabilitation programs such as The Second Chance Program have documented a 10% decrease in criminal recidivism. In turn, fewer prisoners are coming through the judicial system. Prisoners that desire to once again become contributing members of society should be urged to do so, and should be given the necessary materials in order to achieve this. Rehabilitation can also include things like job training and education. Statistics show that well educated criminals are less likely to relapse into a life of crime and are more likely to continue using their learned skills, even if they have been granted life without parole.
I stated earlier that our prison system is operating at 200 percent, or nearly double its capacity, but in order for you to get a grasp of how staggering these numbers really are you need to understand how our prison system has grown over the years. Between 1852 and 1984 California built twelve prisons; only twelve prisons in a span of 132 years compared to sixteen new prisons built in an eleven year period between the years 1985 and 1996 (Dungan). In a 23 year period California built one ...
Prisons require an abundance of money to be run properly and effectively. By using taxes to pay for prisons, the American public pays to support the lives of inmates and all of their needs. Prisoners require food, drink, beds, supplies for doing other activities and all of the overlooked things in normal life that go along with these necessities. Inmates have special needs, like all of us do. Inmates require medical care, for example, some have AIDS or other diseases that require medicine which cumulate large bills over time.
Many observers have drawn a simple correlation between these two trends. Putting more offenders in prison caused the reduction in crime. The Sentencing project has just completed a study that examines this issue in great detail and concludes that any such correlation is ambiguous at best. In examining the relationship between incarceration and crime in the 1990s the picture is complicated by the seven year period just prior to this, 1984-91. In this period, incarceration also rose substantially, at a rate of 65%. Yet crime rates increased during this time as well, by 17% nationally. Thus we see a continuous rise in incarceration for fourteen years, during which crime rose for seven years, then declined for seven years. This does not suggest that incarceration had no impact on crime, but any such connection is clearly influenced by other factors. A comparison with other nations is instructive in this rega...
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the year 1980 we had approximately 501,900 persons incarcerated across the United States. By the year 2000, that figure has jumped to over 2,014,000 prisoners. The current level of incarceration represents the continuation of a 25-year escalation of the nation's prison and jail population beginning in 1973. Currently the U.S. rate of 672 per 100,000 is second only to Russia, and represents a level of incarceration that is 6-10 times that of most industrialized nations. The rise in prison population in recent years is particularly remarkable given that crime rates have been falling nationally since 1992. With less crime, one might assume that fewer people would be sentenced to prison. This trend has been overridden by the increasing impact of lengthy mandatory sentencing policies.
The National Association of State Budget Officers expenditure report from the fiscal year 2009 states that 5% of state spending, about $48 billion annually, supports corrections (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2011). The federal government is spending 1.8% of our tax dollars on prisons (Frugal Dad, 2011), which amounts to about $45 billion (Williams, 2009). So, it seems that the states and federal government are sharing the burde...
Today, almost 70% of all prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses. U.S. States are spending an average of $100 million per year on new prisons and all U.S. taxpayers front the bill for a system that is not working (Carson). Why should we force taxpayers to pay to keep nonviolent criminals sitting in prison cells where they become bitter, aggressive, and more likely to repeat their offenses when released? The answer is we shouldn’t, there are more reliable forms of punishment available, and rehabilitation and restitution are two alternatives I firmly believe are most effective than incarceration.
Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission)