Henrichson, C. (2012). The Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers. Federal Sentencing Reporter25.1 , 68-80.
Many years of cumulative custody and mounting corrections are amply documented and are familiar topics to the public and bureaucrats alike. Over the last 4 decades, the US has seen a radical increase in the usage of correctional facilities to combat crime. Accordingly, incarceration rates have climbed, with state prisons population rise steeply by more than 700% since the 1970s. Presently, more than 1% of the general adult population is incarcerated in prison or jail nationally. This upsurge has come at a colossal price to taxpayers. Over the last 2 decades, States’ corrections costs comprising prisons, parole and probation has practically quadrupled, which makes it the quickest growing budget article behind Medicaid. While these numbers are perturbing, what is not clearly understood is that in some cases, expenditure at correctional facilities account for only a small proportion of the monetary commitment a state made when it condemn a delinquent to prison. Exis...
We imprison seven-hundred-fifty prisoners per one hundred-thousand citizens, almost five times the earth average. Around one in every thirty-one grown-ups in the United States is in the penitentiary, in prison or on supervised release. District, state, and national disbursements on corrections expenses total to around seventy billion dollars per year and has raised to forty percent more over the past twenty years. http://www.newsweek.com/ The current corrections specialists have started to support that notion. Even though we comprehend that criminals must take accountability for their actions, we also realize that we can no longer just turn out heads at their disappointments. The individuals that derive out of our penitentiaries, prisons, municipal programs and out from beneath our direction are our creation, and we have to take some responsibility. Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) Hankoff, Leon D. "Current trends in correctional education: theory and practice." International Journal of Offender Therapy & Comparative Criminology Apr. 1985: 91-93. Criminal Justice Collection. Web. 12 June 2016.
Land of the Unfree: Mass Incarceration and Its Unjust Effects on Those Subjected To It and American Taxpayers
Trachtenberg, B. (2009, February). Incarceration policy strikes out: Exploding prison population compromises the U.S. justice system. ABA Journal, 66.
Cohen (1985) supports this sentiment, and suggests that community based punishment alternatives have actually led to a widening and expansion of the retributive criminal justice system, rather than its abolishment. The current criminal justice system is expensive to maintain. In North America, the cost to house one prisoner is upwards of eighty to two hundred dollars a day (Morris, 2000). The bulk of this is devoted to paying guards and security (Morris, 2000).
Private prisons have a negative effect on states and local governments. Unfortunately, the number of private prisons has been increasing since their inception in 1983 causing further problems. For-profit prisons offer no real benefits and are bad investments for states. Furthermore, private prisons beleaguer communities with high turnover rates that hurt local economies. The demands of these institutions put an excessive burden on the local community’s infrastructure. Similarly, private prisons strain the county and city legal systems. More often than not, spin-off industries and economic benefits promised by the for-profit correction industry fail to appear. Additionally, private prisons are allowed to cherry pick the least expensive inmates, leaving the more expensive inmates for the state. A number of studies financed by the private prison industry give the misconception that they save states money. More importantly, the need to make a profit is an incentive for private prison industry officials to engage in nefarious activities.
Roberts, John W. "Work, Education, and Public Safety: A Brief History of Federal Prison Industries." n.d.
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.
Drago, F., Galbiati, R. & Vertova, P. (2011). Prison conditions and recidivism. American law and economics review, 13 (1), pp. 103--130.
The proliferation of prison overcrowding has been a rising concern for the U.S. The growing prison population poses considerable health and safety risks to prison staffs and employees, as well as to inmates themselves. The risks will continue to increase if no immediate actions are taken. Whereas fighting proliferation is fundamentally the duty of the U.S. government, prison overcrowding has exposed that the U.S. government will need to take measures to combat the flaws in the prison and criminal justice system. Restructuring the government to combat the danger of prison overcrowding, specifically in California, thus requires reforms that reestablishes the penal codes, increases the state’s budget, and develops opportunities for paroles to prevent their return to prison. The following context will examine and discuss the different approaches to reduce the population of state prisons in California in order to avoid prison overcrowding.
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
It is undeniable that mass incarceration devastates families, and disproportionately affects those which are poor. When examining the crimes that bring individuals into the prison system, it is clear that there is often a pre-existing pattern of hardship, addiction, or mental illness in offenders’ lives. The children of the incarcerated are then victimized by the removal of those who care for them and a system which plants more obstacles than imaginable on the path to responsible rehabilitation. Sometimes, those returned to the community are “worse off” after a period of confinement than when they entered. For county jails, the problem of cost and recidivism are exacerbated by budgetary constraints and various state mandates. Due to the inability of incarceration to satisfy long-term criminal justice objectives and the very high expenditures associated with the sanction, policy makers at various levels of government have sought to identify appropriate alternatives(Luna-Firebaugh, 2003, p.51-66).
In the essay "Prison "Reform" in America," Roger T. Pray points out the much attention that has been devoted to research to help prevent crimes. Showing criminals the errors of their ways not by brutal punishment, but by locking them up in the attempt to reform them. Robert Pray, who is a prison psychologist, is currently a researcher with the Utah Dept. of Corrections. He has seen what has become of our prison system and easily shows us that there is really no such thing as "Prison Reform"
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.
With the substantial increase in prison population and various changes that plague correctional institutions, government agencies are finding that what was once considered a difficult task to provide educational programs, inmate security and rehabilitation programs are now impossible to accomplish. From state to state, each correctional organization is coupled with financial problems that have depleted the resources to assist in providing the quality of care in which the judicial system demands from these state and federal prisons. Judges, victims, and prosecuting attorneys entrust that once an offender is turned over to the correctional system, that the offender will receive the punishment imposed by the court, be given services that aid in the rehabilitation of those offenders that one day will be released back into society, and to act as a deterrent to other criminals contemplating criminal acts that could result in their incarceration. Has our nation’s correctional system finally reached it’s critical collapse, and as a result placed American citizens in harm’s way to what could result in a plethora of early releases of inmates to reduce the large prison populations in which independent facilities are no longer able to manage? Could these problems ultimately result in a drastic increase in person and property crimes in which even our own law enforcement is ineffective in controlling these colossal increases in crime against society?
Many believed that the US state’s soaring expenditures and special interest politics are pushing states towards record budget deficits, causing a lack of funding towards education, health care, the poor, and even state correction system (Petersilia 2008). It is paramount that out government find ways to utilized government spending wisely towards all the principles mentioned, even towards state correction systems. Our government needs to put individuals in place to analyze prison systems and find ways to resolve the issues with recidivism. From the data collected, the government could learn the best methods of utilizing funding towards innovative programs to help with reform and