Emptier Prison Summary

The case study titled Fighting Crime: The Case for Emptier Prison demonstrates some of the major problems facing the U.S government in controlling prisons and prisoners. The first problem that the text reveals is the amount of money that has been spent on the prisons and criminals in the past years and how it will rise in the future, and the unfair punishment that faces non-violent criminals, which will lead to a growth in the number of prisoners. These issues contributed in the increase of the spending budget on the crime bill and the fact that prisons have become overcrowded.

The primary problem that the text shows is that despite the government spending huge amounts of money in the war against drugs and in prison construction, the statistics illustrate that they failed to decrease the number of criminals in prisons or drug usage. For instance, California spends around $49,000 per prisoner in a year. Michigan spends 22% of its funds on correction. The state prison expenses have risen from $11.7 Billion to $29.5 billion from 1986 to 2001. This money comes from the tax payer, the law abiding citizens and it would be better if spent on education, helping the homeless, building hospitals and parks or preventing teenagers from getting involved

with drugs and violence. A better solution to lower the budget and fight drug use is to treat drug users instead of locking them up, a study showed that 1$ of drug treatment lower consumption as much as 7$ worth of law enforcement does.

The secondary problem that the text displays is that the punishment for criminals changed, and became more aggressive, mainly on the non-violent crimes.

The total number of violent crimes turns out to be lower than the numbers in the past, but non-violent crimes increased. The issue with non-violent crimes is some laws doesn’t distinguish between the level or the type of the crime, as its mentioned in the text the minimum federal sentence for possession a small amount of LSD is ten years, its much more than for kidnapping, rape or attempted murder, this is un fair for non-violent criminal. Locking up the non-violent criminals with the violent criminal usually affect them and change their mentality to become a criminal

person.

In conclusion, U.S government should look for alternative for the war on drug policy and tries to help the drug addict instead of throwing them in prison, this will help for cutting the crime bill and helping the citizen to become a better and predictive person. Also, the case of non-violent criminal they should not be in the same prison with the kidnappers, rapist and murderers or the violent criminal.