It is hard for us to imagine America being great again when a large amount of our population is in prison. The prison system in America is an increasing problem. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics 2,220,300 adults were incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails in 2013 – about 0.91% of adults (1 in 110) in the U.S. resident population. Additionally, 4,751,400 adults in 2013 (1 in 51) were on probation or on parole(BOP.gov). America is harboring thousands of people for extended periods of time and paying tax dollars to fund prisons, their staff, and the prisoner.
Prison reform is a hot topic and ongoing issue that is making its way through the Senate and Legislation. America’s prisons are one of the most overcrowded
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The Vera Institute of Justice released a study in 2012 that found the aggregate cost of prisons in 2010 in the 40 states that participated was $39 billion, with the state of New York being the most expensive averaging 60,000 dollars per inmate (Santora, 2013). These troubling numbers show a major need of concern regarding prison reform, the damage of mass incarceration, and how it affects the economy and taxpayer’s pockets. Correspondingly, 39 billion dollars of taxpayer’s money could be used to increase teachers’ pay, rebuild infrastructures, provide better healthcare, housing, and fix poverty-stricken school districts/ areas. You would think this would be the focus of the “Make America great again” Campaign instead their focus is a …show more content…
In the Book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander she introduced the apparent injustices of the prison system of people of color. African Americans make up 2.3 million incarcerated and Hispanics are 3 times likely than white men to be incarcerated (Leher, 2013). Also, nonviolent offenders are being overcharged with sentences that are damaging and debilitating. In some instances, nonviolent offenders may be charged for 10 years with a minimum of 3 years in jail and 8 years left on probation which puts them at risk of reoffending again. Because American jails are so compact they lack proper rehabilitation programs to help prisoners prepare to effectively face life outside of prison. Many inmates are released from prison with hopes of being a productive citizen only to realize there are roadblocks in place that will keep them from integrating back into society successfully and being a productive citizen. These roadblocks include finding job placement, voting, adequate housing, obtaining food stamps, or government
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.
In recent decades, violent crimes in the United States of America have been on a steady decline, however, the number of people in the United States under some form of correctional control is reaching towering heights and reaching record proportions. In the last thirty years, the incarceration rates in the United States has skyrocketed; the numbers roughly quadrupled from around five hundred thousand to more than 2 million people. (NAACP)In a speech on criminal justice at Columbia University, Hillary Clinton notes that, “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. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40
Prison Reform in The United States of America “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” (Nelson Mandela, 1994). The United States of America has more people behind bars than any other country on the planet. The prisons are at over double capacity. It cost a lot of money to house prisoners each year.
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.
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.
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
Today the US now imprisons more people than any other country in the entire world. The US has approximately “1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails.” ¹ The inmate population in America has grown so big that it is hard to even comprehend it. Think about the combined populations of some of the largest cities in the nation – Atlanta, Miami, ECT. – the inmate population exceeds that. Marc Mauer in his book The Race to Incarcerate says, "No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control… We have embarked on a great social experiment"
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001. In theory if this trend continues it is estimated that about 1 in 3 black males being born can be expected to spend time in prison and some point in his life. One in nine African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 are currently incarcerated. Although the rate of imprisonment for women is considerably lower than males African American women are incarc...
In the United States, the rate of incarceration has increased shockingly over the past few years. In 2008, it was said that one in 100 U.S. adults were behind bars, meaning more than 2.3 million people. Even more surprising than this high rate is the fact that African Americans have been disproportionately incarcerated, especially low-income and lowly educated blacks. This is racialized mass incarceration. There are a few reasons why racialized mass incarceration occurs and how it negatively affects poor black communities.
The United States of America has the world’s highest incarceration rates, for several reasons. The United States of America doesn’t necessarily possess any unique strict laws in comparison to other countries of the world, yet we still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. More federal level and state level prisons are built in order to control and hold more prisoners because most are reaching its full capacity. The United States of America’s “crime rates” increased about 40 years ago when there became a new focus in the areas of crime. The President of the United States of America at the time Richard Nixon used the term “a war on drugs” in order to shed light on public health due to substance abuse. Initially, these policies created
Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and societal management. It is the process by which individuals jailed for the criminal structure. Marked culprits and criminals are put in jail for a long time and after that are discharged into a permanent second-class status in which they are stripped of essential civil and human rights. It is a framework that works to control individuals, frequently at early ages, and all parts of their lives after they have been seen as suspects in some wrongdoing. Alexander discusses the three stages in the cycle of mass incarceration. Those three stages include roundup, the period of formal control, and period of invisible.
With prisons growing at the rate they are now, there must be more funding. 1 out of every 131 U.S citizens is incarcerated. The rest of the citizens have to pay for this person to have a place to sleep, eat, and exercise out of their taxes. These taxes can and should be used for more important issues. I...
Most people know very little about America’s correction system. What little most people do know is often misconstrued by what they see in movies or what they hear on the news. When Americans think about the correction system, images from Alcatraz or a long row of iron bars and concrete with men in black and white striped suits flood their minds. There are problems with America’s correctional system. There isn’t enough space or enough money to go around. After the terror attack on the world trade centers in 2001, money was taken from the corrections budget and given to homeland security. Two of the ways corrections deals with the problem of the lack of funds is probation and parole.
The first issue that I would like to address is the overcrowding issues in prisons. In my opinion, overcrowding issues are the biggest issues in our correctional system that concerns every citizen. Running a prison required money, resources and manpower, with overcrowding issues, the government would have no choice but to increase the number of correctional facilities, privatized prisons and increasing manpower. According to (Levitt, 1996), “The incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled in the last two decades. At year-end 1994 the United States prison population exceeded one million. Annual government outlays on prisons are roughly $40 billion per year. The rate of imprisonment in the United States is three to four times greater than most European countries.” (p.1). Overcrowding issues are not only affect prisons but the society as a whole as well. The reason is simply because prison population directly refl...
Between 1970 and 2005 the US' prison population grew by a massive 700% (Kirkham), far outpacing both population growth and crime rates. Today it's got to the point where America is home to 5% of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners (The PEW). And not only does America have the highest imprisonment rates of any country in the entire world, it also has the highest rate of kids incarceration.