Effects Of Decarceration

Overcrowding has become a detrimental issue, as it becomes more difficult to enforce correct punishment and the criminal justice system ends up denying basic human rights. There can be many initiatives to alleviate the issue of overcrowding which contributes to health and sanitations failures. Building a larger jail will not prevent the issue, due to the fact that the jail will either fill up once again and in a certain amount of years we will have the same issue arise. Decarceration would be the most efficient ways of handling the overcrowding issue as it would provide an easier alternative than building a larger jail. “…conventionally, decarceration simply means a reduction in the number of persons serving jail or prison time” (Paris, 2007,

For example, implicating restorative justice regimes in communities when dealing with petty crimes becomes more useful and does not waste resources. Restorative justice can easily be used in communities where we are trying to reintegrate individuals, by using a restorative justice based intervention instead of incarceration, communities can build and create norms to help keep the peace. With the help of restorative justice, societal transformations can occur, due to funds being used towards communities, we may be able to change on going issues which will help negate violence and deviancy. Once the notion of decarceration commences, Jacobs (2007) talks about how we can slowly release individuals into society, by using alternative sentences and probation (pg. 699). Decarceration also does not contribute to conflict theft, which is when the harms done are mediated by lawyers and courts and take away these harms as their own property, instead it will lap back to the victim and offender so they may take control of the matter at hand (Christie, 1977, pg. 5). By eliminating courts and lawyers regarding criminal deviancy, we can concentrate with dealing with certain harms within the community. For example,

Decarceration ends up contributing to net widening, “‘net-widening' effect: rather than bringing very many people out of the prisons, they may actually bring new people into a wider control system” (Mathiesen, 2006, pg. 164). If decarceration does take place there will be a larger emphasis on supervision in communities, a control system will be in place to watch what is happening in communities. Another pitfall that may occur is absorptio, which is taking ideas from the initial project but not going completely through with it. For example, the criminal justice system will instead only decriminalize certain drugs for example marijuana, but having a lot of conditions that will initially disregard why the legalization of marijuana took place. There may be higher rate of parole, but conditions end up becoming stricter therefore the individuals end up back in prison. Which becomes an ongoing loop and the overcrowding issue is not resolved. Mathiesen (2007) explains how the alternative for incarceration ends up putting individuals back into prison as the prison system adopt to a more controlled system (pg.192). Lastly a potential pitfall that can occur while trying to initiate decarceration as an alternative is post postponement. Although the ideas sound great there will be postponement due to the controversy. For example, how marijuana