Overcrowding in prisons is a growing problem in our country. The growing rate of the prison population should be a concern in the nation, instead its getting worse. People are being put in prison for cases that shouldn’t be severe enough to be put in jail for or the sentences shouldn’t be as long as they are. Some people were falsely accused of things and still put in prison. There are people that are literally serving time for no reason and taking up unnecessary space.
In the United States of America, a.k.a “greatest country in the world”, there is a problem with the way the system works. In this free country, there is an issue with prison overcrowding. “Over 2.2 million people are in prisons and jails around the country,”(Williams.1) which
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4). There are prisons being built constantly and it’s unnecessary because the amount of prisoners can be cut down and so can the number of prisons. In juvenile halls they have kids in jail because of minor crimes. There are 15,000 kids in jail “because of things people wouldn’t consider a crime.”(Wanger.5) About 12,000 kids are in for things related to probation or parolees, and 3,000 for “status offenses” which are crimes that wouldn’t be considered crimes if they were grown ups. Teens should not be put in jail for offenses like those, they should be helped somehow. Overall the government is running up taxes with all of the prisons around the …show more content…
There is no need to reduce the number of prisoners held in US prisons. Proponents for the prison system to remain the way it is feel they have the solutions for overcrowding and all the problems that come with overcrowding, such as building more private prisons. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) believes that they have the solutions. They partner with the federal corrections agencies to alleviate the overcrowding issues and provide all services needed in corrections management. They design, construct, expand and manage prisons, jails, detention facilities, residential reentry services and inmate transport. Another reason to support private prisons is the number of jobs it creates for people. The CCA has 13,000 employees. CCA believes that they provide multiple benefits to the communities they serve through them paying taxes and providing stable employment and job growth. They also offer various reentry and rehabilitation
One of the biggest issues with jails and prisons is how crowded they are. In jails and prisons, they are way too over populated in the number of inmates that they can hold. Drugs are the main cause of jails and prisons being way overcrowded. I do not agree with how overcrowded the jails and prisons are. Morgan showed the result of overcrowded jails and prisons. Jails and prisons are way to over populated so therefor, inmates have to sleep on floors or find a spot to rest, because there are not enough beds to hold the number of inmates that are committed into the prisons and jails anymore. I also disagree with how their running their disciplinary strategies because if they did a better job, then two of three prisoners would not be back to jail shortly after leaving. What they do on the inside should help to where more inmates will not be back after being released from jail or
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.
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.
In todays society the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This high incarceration rate is due to the growing phenomena known as mass incarceration. This phenomenon has led to massive increase of people being placed in prison and the amount of money being used for these prisons. The book, Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer, focuses on mass incarceration as our default social policy because of the weak welfare state in the U.S. In the book Mauer discusses the causes and the problems with this policy.
The overpopulation in the prison system in America has been an on going problem in the United States for the past two decades. Not only does it effect the American people who are also the tax payers to fund all of the convicts in prisons and jails, but it also effects the prisoners themselves. Family members of the prisoners also come into effect. Overpopulation in prison cause a horrible chain reaction that causes nothing but suffering and problems for a whole bunch people. Yet through all the problems that lye with the overpopulation in prisons, there are some solutions to fix this ongoing huge problem in America.
Harris, H. (2017, March). The Prison Dilemma: Ending America's Incarceration Epidemic. Foreign Affairs, pp. 118-129.
The number of Americans that are in prison has elevated to levels that have never been seen before. Prisons in the US have always been crowded ever since the first prison was invented (Jacobs and Angelos 101). The first prison in the US was the Walnut Street Jail that was built in Philadelphia in 1773, and later closed in the 1830’s due to overcrowding and dirty conditions (Jacobs and Angelos 101). The prison system in modern US history has faced many downfalls due to prison overcrowding. Many private prison owners argue that the more inmates in a prison the more money they could make. In my opinion the argument of making more money from inmates in prisons is completely unconstitutional. If the private prisons are only interested in making
According to Mark Early, president of the Prison Fellowship International, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows that there are 19 states that have prisons operating at 100 percent capacity and another 20 are falling right behind them. There is no wonder why the overcrowding of prisons is being discussed everywhere. Not to mention how serious this predicament is and how serious it can get. Many of the United States citizens don’t understand why this is such a serious matter due to the fact that some of them believe it’s not their problem. Therefore they just don’t care about it. Also, some Americans may say that they don’t care about what could happen to the inmates due to repercussions of overcrowding, because it’s their own fault. In order to cure this growing problem people have to start caring about what’s going on, even if it’s to people who might deserve it.
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
Since crime keeps occurring, more and more prisons need to be built and kept running for the increasing numbers of inmates that are pouring into prisons. Prison may be part of the solution, but there are other alternatives to help criminals. If we were to incorporate facilities like drug rehabilitation and job training into the criminal justice system, then crime would be greatly reduced. Prisoners would commit fewer crimes after the experience of these facilities, therefore reducing the cost of building and maintaining prisons. The end result will be that the American taxpayer's dollars will be available to go to more productive things than prisons.
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.
Overcrowding of prisons due to mass incarceration is among one of the biggest problems in America, mass incarceration has ruined many families and lives over the years.America has the highest prison population rate , over the past forty years from 1984 until 2014 that number has grown by four hundred percent .America has four percent of the world population ,but twenty-five percent of the world population of incarcerated people Forty one percent of American juveniles have been or going to be arrested before the age of 23. America has been experimenting with incarceration as a way of showing that they are tough on crime but it actually it just show that they are tough on criminals. imprisonment was put in place to punish, criminals, protect society and rehabilitate criminals for their return into the society .
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.
Firstly, in order to gain a better understanding of the problems that plague or correctional system we must fully understand the enormous overcrowding problem that exist in the majority of or state and federal prisons. Since 1980 the prison population has quadrupled and only the numb...
A huge issue in America is the growing industry of privatized prisons. Usually referred to as the Prison Industrial Complex, the issue ties together many problems like the connection between the massive rate of imprisonment for nonviolent crimes as well as the growing political influence of the private prison industries and companies that thrive on inmate population. As this problem gets larger and larger, the prisons in the United States fill up continuously, because of a mentality that years of imprisonment can fix pretty much any problem.