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More handpicked essays just for you.
The effects of the war on drugs on mass incarceration
America's war on drugs and the prison industrial
America's war on drugs and the prison industrial
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Why Does Our Prison Population Continue to Grow in the United States? “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population” (Lee). Why are the numbers so elevated? Compared to other countries, the United States has more prisoners per capita than even Russia or China. “An astonishing number of Americans—nearly one out of every one hundred adults—is behind bars in this country” (Ryan 149). Are there more crimes being committed in the United States? Increase in prison facilities and prison growth is astounding. People are being unrightfully imprisoned and it must be stopped. How far back in history does this problem exist? The …show more content…
Harsher punishments are being put on crimes to keep the body count up in the prisons. The more people private prisons have, the more money they get from the government and the more people they have for free labor. Theory number two is “the war on drugs”. Every drug related violation has aided in the increase of prisoners. Richard Nixon is the president that declared the war on drugs. The war on drugs had an opposite effect and led to mass incarceration. Our government took away the supply without removing demand, so drug prices increased substantially. There was still a demand for drugs no matter the cost. The change in laws prevented big drug producers from being able to sell, but many small dealers took their place. A.L.E.C. is a group that writes laws for legislation and gives them to people in government. These laws favor big business and make it harder for anyone with less money. Legislators have been caught with the A.L.E.C. leader head on their bills. People are not happy with a system that is rigged against them? If a person is rich, they can just pay their way out of any …show more content…
Demands are made for harsher punishments for crimes. Elected officials give promises of making the world a better place by increasing penalties for people who break the law. People who are put in charge of prisoners are designed to break their will in the first week. It would be more productive if there was a bigger focus on rehabilitation to give people a chance when they get out of prison. Legislators are now striving to find positive solutions to overpopulation in prisons. Second-look is one such proposal. “This “second-look sentencing” provision is thought to have a number of positive effects, such as reducing incarceration and consequently decreasing governmental spending on incarceration” (Ryan 150). Other ideas are: more education, job skills training, and safe places similar to a halfway house in between prison and the real world. The halfway house could be a place for them to find somewhere to live, get a job, and be a productive
Many changes are made inside the justice system, but very few have damaged the integrity of the system and the futures of citizens and prisoners. Although the story seems to focus more on lockdown, Hopkins clearly identifies the damaging change from rehabilitation in prisons to a strategy of locking up and containing the prisoners. To the writer, and furthermore the reader, the adjustment represented a failure to value lives. “More than 600,000- about 3 times what it was when I entered prison, sixteen years ago. In the resulting expansion of the nation’s prison systems, authorities have tended to dispense with much of the rehabilitative programming once prevalent in America’s penal institutions” (Hopkins 157). The new blueprint to lock every offender in prison for extended sentencing leads to an influx in incarcerated people. With each new person
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.
There are too many people incarcerated in the United States of America. The U.S. imprisons 724 people per 100,000. In absolute numbers United States has more of its citizens behind bars then do China or Russia combined. (Gallagher 2008). There are about thousand U.S. citizens that become incarcerated in the prison system in any given week.
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.
Over the past several decades, the number of prison inmates has grown exponentially. In 1980, prison population had numbers around half a million inmates. A graph of statistics gathered from the U.S. Bureau of Justice shows that between 1980 and 2010, the prison population grew almost five times, topping out at nearly 2.5 million. According to an article in The New York Times, the average time spent in jail by prisoners released in 2009 increased by 36% compared to prisoners released in 1990. Many people, such as those at Human Rights Watch, believe that the increase of these numbers has been because of tough-on-crime laws, causing prisons to be filled with non-violent offenders. This rise in crime rates, prison population, and recidivism, has led politicians as well as ordinary citizens to call for prison reform.
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
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
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"
Adam Liptak, U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations, retrieved on March 20, 2012 from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?_r=1
Between 1980 and 2014 the number of people incarcerated in the United States has gone up dramatically. Whether this is because of better policing, better law enforcement, more advanced forensic technology, or a more efficient criminal justice system in general, who knows, but this isn 't necessarily a good thing. This level of overcrowding is causing economic difficulties. On average it cost about $30,000 annually to maintain one offender within a facility, and when the prison population of the United States is considered that number is astounding. Also, constitutionally this is a huge violation. There is only so much room in our prisons for inmates and just about every one of them is beyond its capacity. This has caused a lack of space, lack
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.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the year 1980 we had approximately 501,900 persons incarcerated across the United States. By the year 2000, that figure has jumped to over 2,014,000 prisoners. The current level of incarceration represents the continuation of a 25-year escalation of the nation's prison and jail population beginning in 1973. Currently the U.S. rate of 672 per 100,000 is second only to Russia, and represents a level of incarceration that is 6-10 times that of most industrialized nations. The rise in prison population in recent years is particularly remarkable given that crime rates have been falling nationally since 1992. With less crime, one might assume that fewer people would be sentenced to prison. This trend has been overridden by the increasing impact of lengthy mandatory sentencing policies.
America holds approximately five percent of the world’s population, however, we hold about twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. Literally, one-fourth of criminals are in the United States right now, and
“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.
There are several reasons why prisons overcrowd. One reason is because when offenders are released they commit another crime only to become incarcerated again. Inmates may also be sent back to prison for failure to complete community service. Another reason for overcrowding is tougher sentences. Offenders are receiving longer sentences for their crimes. They are facing harsher penalties for certain kinds of crimes, such as drug charges. Many offenders are forced to spend more time in prison after many states had the Truth in Sentencing Act passed, which requires that offenders serve the majority of their time incarcerated. It is becoming rare for offenders to get the option for parole. Overcrowded prisons are also less likely to help the prisoner to reform. Prisoners are having their rights infatuated from them by officials who are not pushing harder for improved prison