Contemporary Prison Overcrowding Essay

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Pitts, J. M., Griffin, O. H., & Johnson, W. W. (2014). Contemporary prison overcrowding: short-term fixes to a perpetual problem.

In this article the author analyzes prison overcrowding, which started in the 1970s and continues to be a problem in recent years. Courts have issued mandates forcing prisons to reduce their population. Some attempts to reduce prison population includes the construction of new facilities, parole reform, early release, diversion programs, and transferring prisoners to other facilities with space availability. According to the author prison overcrowding is not the fault of the prison or the correctional system; but instead it 's problem is rooted in the court system. When courts give out longer sentences, mandatory …show more content…

Southern states run their prisons like chicken farms. They put as many individuals as possible into one space; this causes some prisoners to be abused by others. Federal laws require prisons to provide prisoners with at least 60 cubic feet of air per prisoner. Prison administrators ignore this requirements. And as temperatures rise prisoners become more irritable and being cramped on top of each other; they can become more violent against each other and even against staff. Personal hygiene is also a problem in the prisons, inmate are only allotted one bar of soap a week. This must be used to clean themselves as well as washed their clothes. WIth the high amount of prisoners, prison administrator cannot afford to provide inmates with more hygiene items, and most prisoners cannot afford these basic care …show more content…

Therefore, they aimed to keep criminals out of prison and sentenced them to probation instead without thinking if the crime they committed should land them in jail. Criminal justice professional allowed all types of criminals to participate in community based correction in order to reduce overcrowding in the prisons. Researchers found those inmates released from prison in order to reduce overcrowding had a higher chance of committing a crime again and returning to prison. This confirms the fact that prison administrator are not concerned about rehabilitation of inmates, rather they are concerned about adhering to policy and reducing overcrowding at all cost.

Specter, D. (2010). Everything Revolves Around Overcrowding: The State of California 's Prisons

California’s correctional system is the largest prison system in the nation, and the third largest in the world. Overcrowding in California’s prison has caused many violations to prisoner’s eighth amendment rights to not be subject to clue and unusual punishment. In many lawsuit prisoners claim to be the victims of cruel and unusual punishment via a broken medical system. A medical system who has fail to provide adequate care for inmates and has an astonishing track record of malpractice. The state’s severe overcrowding issues leaves them unable to fix their medical

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