Pros And Cons Of Incarceration In The American Prison System

The American prison system is one that can be viewed as extremely flawed. Our prisons are overcrowded, and our incarceration rate trumps all other nations in the world. However, crime rates have dropped in the past couple decades. Despite these drops, we still see a great deal of mass incarceration. In our correctional system, we fail to focus on rehabilitation for criminals, and reintegrating them back into society. Instead we often tend to push criminals further away from normal lives with extremely long sentencings, sentence minimums, and even keeping them out of jobs after they have served their terms in prison. Criminals also loose the fundamental right of voting in some states, as well as having a much harder time owning homes, and even

Between 1980 and 2000 the prison population rose 300 percent (Patten, 2016). About three percent of the United States population is found under some sort of penal control, which was the lowest rate since 1996 (Kaeble, Glaze, Tsoutis, Minton, 2015). However, three decades later that is not much progress. Furthermore, with a broken penal system we see an overrepresentation of African American men. Studies show that black men are ten times more likely to be in federal or state prison than there white counterparts (De Giorgi, 2015). Being that African American’s make up a large portion of the lower socioeconomic class, statistics such as that place African American’s in a more disadvantaged position often causing more deviance. The effects of mass incarceration can have everlasting effects on those caught in the criminal justice system and often have the potential to affect their families as well. It can almost become a cycle because of how prisons function. It is hard to solely blame the political shift and war on drugs for the mass incarceration problem, when the high rates are still lingering in the United States. The disadvantaged make up a large concentration of the incarcerated population (Western & Wildeman, 2009). There are plenty of problems with the legal portion of the correctional system, but there are also sociological