Is Our Correctional Facilities Be The Funding Issue?

In today’s society, we often times have many suggestions that we make to help with problems we may not understand. One particular problem that I believe we should be focusing on is our correctional facilities. I believe that the biggest problem when dealing with the correctional facilities is the funding issue. I believe that if we increase our funding to our correctional facilities, you’ll see a better turn around for employees, inmates being rehabilitated, and better quality of life. With low funding to our correctional facilities, we are missing out on tremendous opportunities.

With the downfall of having less money, we are losing many battles that can be fixed, by just funding the facilities. According to a channel 4 news report in Oklahoma, they stated that “with low funding, they have been using 40 year old locks on the prison cells.”(Martin 2012) It’s a problem not only the staff has to deal with, but the community as well. From the same source, Warden Martin said “with the old locks came a serious problem. An offender was able to manipulate his cell door lock and we had a female officer that was working the unit and he did attack her. He had made some devices. The report did say it was a rape kit.” (Martin 2012)

This Warden did also mention that with the low funding to his prison, (Dick Connor) they’re losing quality employees that want to work here because of budget cuts. He said in the interview that "If staffing levels continue to decrease, certainly opportunity for inappropriate offender behavior increases and that would include the attempt to escape. Public safety would be at risk." (Martin 2012) this is just one example of why we should find a way to increase funds to the correctional facilities or prisons.

When...

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...rado’s prisons—to incarcerate an average daily population of 19,958—was therefore $606.2 million, of which 3.5 percent were costs outside the corrections budget.” This is alarming because we citizens of Colorado are paying $606.2 million.

I believe that the solutions are endless when you have all the money. Unfortunately that’s not what I am trying to get at when talking about more funding to the facilities. I believe that if we move budgets around in other programs we can fund more facilities across the nation and lower the population of people being incarcerated. If we fund more things like this, it will also help the national debt go down because we will not be borrowing money from other people. With the savings from the lower population we can then go fund more things like education and healthcare. I believe that this is a particular way we should look into.