The Incarceration Nation Incarceration was established to reform the guilty, making them safer for society. However, this system has faced many obstacles. Over the years the incarcerated population has grown significantly. The United States has become the leading country in incarcerated population, creating the mass incarceration epidemic. Mass incarceration meaning that the United States’ prisons are becoming greatly overcrowded. Many issues have risen from mass incarceration due to the obstacles it creates. When penitentiaries were first established in 1776 by the Pennsylvania Quakers, they had a set plan for how to reform convicts without destroying their name. The basic concept was solitary confinement. When a prisoner was taken to and
Complete silence was required in the prisons. The confinement’s goal was to create a need for work strong enough that the deprivation of labor was worse than the punishment of prison (Lowenstein).The early prisons eliminated other types of punishment like execution. This system became the center for criminal reform in the late 1700s. In these days of the system, it was effective. No discharged convicts returned to the penitentiary, now known as a jail. However, a lot has changed in the past years. The United States currently has the largest number of imprisoned people in the world. The correctional population has grown by 700 percent since the 1700s, creating the epidemic of mass incarceration. This increase is believed to be the result of the required sentences correlated with the increase of crime associated with drugs (Shigekawa). About one-third of the 1.5 million Americans arrested for drugs spend time in prison. It is also believed that the increase of prisoners is caused by the new sentencing guidelines. These guidelines decrease the judge’s influence on if someone should be convicted or not and increased the length of sentences. The three-strikes law causes nonviolent repeat offenders to serve long
Plata revealed, overcrowding in many correctional facilities raises serious health concerns, even more on account of overstretched health services than the potential for infectious disease outbreaks” (Dumont et al.). A majority of the incarcerated comes from low-income communities where the population is predominantly nonwhite. These inmates are more likely to be underserved for medical issues. Due to this, the mental and physical health of inmates is significantly worse than that of the general public. HIV rates are approximately five times higher in prisons than in the general population. Many of the inmates infected with HIV are at risk for hepatitis C due to injection of substances. These prisoners are nine to ten times more likely than non-incarcerated people to get hepatitis C virus (HCV). Many prisoners that are infected with both HIV and HCV are more likely to also have other diseases than people infected solely with HIV. Early syphilis was found to be about 1000 times more prevalent in incarcerated women than women in the general public. Women’s predominance in prostitution also increases their risk for infectious disease transmission. This is due to the fact that many prostitutes are involved in prostitution to support an addiction. Chronic diseases are also spread throughout correctional facilities and possibly at more advanced stages. This is likely to be caused from the aging of the inmates and the rise of
Every civilization in history has had rules, and citizens who break them. To this day governments struggle to figure out the best way to deal with their criminals in ways that help both society and those that commit the crimes. Imprisonment has historically been the popular solution. However, there are many instances in which people are sent to prison that would be better served for community service, rehab, or some other form of punishment. Prison affects more than just the prisoner; the families, friends, employers, and communities of the incarcerated also pay a price. Prison as a punishment has its pros and cons; although it may be necessary for some, it can be harmful for those who would be better suited for alternative means of punishment.
The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for a number of reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. The ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system is caused by mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism.
Starting in 1970s, there has been an upward adjustment to sentencing making punishment more punitive and sentencing guidelines more strict. Martinson's (1974) meta-analyzies reviewed over 200 studies and concluded that nothing works in terms of rehabilitating prisoners. Rehabilitating efforts were discontinued. The War on Drugs campaign in 1970s incarcerated thousands of non-violent drug offenders into the system. In 1865, 34.3% of prison population were imprisoned for drug violation. By 1995, the percentage grew to 59.9% (figure 4.1, 104). Legislation policies like the Third Strikes laws of 1994 have further the severity of sentencing. The shift from rehabilitation to human warehouse marks the end of an era of trying to reform individuals and the beginnings of locking inmates without preparation of their release. Along with the reform in the 1970s, prosecutors are given more discretion at the expense of judges. Prosecutors are often pressure to be tough on crime by the socie...
Prison Reform in The United States of America “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” (Nelson Mandela, 1994). The United States of America has more people behind bars than any other country on the planet. The prisons are at over double capacity. It cost a lot of money to house prisoners each year.
Mass incarceration has put a large eye-sore of a target on the United States’ back. It is hurting our economy and putting us into more debt. It has considerable social consequences on children and ex-felons. Many of these incarcerations can be due to the “War on Drugs”. We should contract the use of incarceration.
The United States of America has the world’s highest incarceration rates, for several reasons. The United States of America doesn’t necessarily possess any unique strict laws in comparison to other countries of the world, yet we still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. More federal level and state level prisons are built in order to control and hold more prisoners because most are reaching its full capacity. The United States of America’s “crime rates” increased about 40 years ago when there became a new focus in the areas of crime. The President of the United States of America at the time Richard Nixon used the term “a war on drugs” in order to shed light on public health due to substance abuse. Initially, these policies created
The Pennsylvania system is a method of imprisonment based on the principle that solitary confinement reforms prisoners. The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, which was mainly made up of Quakers, promoted it. Solitary confinement started in 1829 at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The Eastern State Penitentiary was founded on the Pennsylvania System. The prisoners there were kept in cells 12x7.5x16 feet. They saw nobody, except for institution officers and occasional visitors. The inmates were kept ...
There Are more people in the world locked up here, in the land of the free, in the 1970 we became an era in which has been defined as this term, "Mass Incarceration", The United States now has the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and today we have a prison population of 2.3.
Overcrowding is one of the predominate reasons that Western prisons are viewed as inhumane. Chapman’s article has factual information showing that some prisons have as many as three times the amount of prisoners as allowed by maximum space standards. Prison cells are packed with four to five prisoners in a limited six-foot-by-six-foot space, which then, leads to unsanitary conditions. Prisons with overcrowding are exposed to outbreaks of infectious diseases such as, tuberculosis and hepatitis.
Overcrowding in our state and federal jails today has become a big issue. Back in the 20th century, prison rates in the U.S were fairly low. During the years later due to economic and political factors, that rate began to rise. According to the Bureau of justice statistics, the amount of people in prison went from 139 per 100,000 inmates to 502 per 100,000 inmates from 1980 to 2009. That is nearly 261%. Over 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated and 7.2 million are either incarcerated or under parole. According to these statistics, the U.S has 25% of the world’s prisoners. (Rick Wilson pg.1) Our prison systems simply have too many people. To try and help fix this problem, there needs to be shorter sentences for smaller crimes. Based on the many people in jail at the moment, funding for prison has dropped tremendously.
Drug violators are a major cause of extreme overcrowding in US prisons. In 1992, 59,000 inmates were added to make a record setting 833,600 inmates nationwide (Rosenthal 1996). A high percentage of these prisoners were serving time because of drug related incid...
The most problematic conclusion about Mass Incarceration, whatever the causes or practices, is that currently America has had the highest national prison rates in the world; furthermore, the rates of minorities (particularly African Americans) are extraordinarily disproportionate to the rates of incarcerated Caucasians. Despite the overall rise in incarceration rates since the 1980s, the crime rates have not been reduced as would be expected. Researchers, activists, and politicians alike are now taking a closer look at Mass Incarceration and how it affects society on a larger scale. The purpose of this paper is to examine the anatomy of Mass Incarceration for a better understanding of its importance as a dominant social issue and its ultimate relation to practice of social work. More specifically the populations affected by mass incarceration and the consequences implacable to social justice. The context of historical perspectives on mass incarceration will be analyzed as well as insight to the current social welfare policies on the
America locks up five times more of its' population than any other nation in the world. Due to prison overcrowding, prisoners are currently sleeping on floors, in tents, in converted broom closets and gymnasiums, or even in double or triple bunks in cells, which were designed for one inmate. Why is this happening? The U.S. Judicial System has become so succumbed to the ideal that Imprisonment is the most visibly form of punishment. The current structure of this system is failing terribly. To take people, strip them of their possessions and privacy, expose them to violence on a daily basis, restrict their quality of life to a 5x7ft cell, and deprive them of any meaning to live. This scenario is a standard form of punishment for violent offenders, although not suitable for nonviolent offenders.
Furthermore, it will be looking at whether punishment could be re-imagined, and if so, what would it entail? The use of prison as a form of punishment began to become popular in the early 19th century. This was because transportation to colonies had started to decrease; transportation was the removing of an individual, in this case an offender, from its country to another country; usually for a period of seven to ten years and in some cases for ever. During this time prison was now being used as a means for punishment, this was in response to the declining of transportation to colonies. Thus, instead of transporting offenders to other colonies, they were now being locked away behind high walls of the prison.
The first issue that I would like to address is the overcrowding issues in prisons. In my opinion, overcrowding issues are the biggest issues in our correctional system that concerns every citizen. Running a prison required money, resources and manpower, with overcrowding issues, the government would have no choice but to increase the number of correctional facilities, privatized prisons and increasing manpower. According to (Levitt, 1996), “The incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled in the last two decades. At year-end 1994 the United States prison population exceeded one million. Annual government outlays on prisons are roughly $40 billion per year. The rate of imprisonment in the United States is three to four times greater than most European countries.” (p.1). Overcrowding issues are not only affect prisons but the society as a whole as well. The reason is simply because prison population directly refl...