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Prison reforms united states
The Importance of Education for Inmates
The Importance of Education for Inmates
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Throughout history into today, there have been many problems with our prison system. Prisons are overcrowded, underfunded, rape rates are off the charts, and we as Americans have no idea how to fix it. We need to have shorter sentences and try to rehabilitate prisoners back to where they can function in society. Many prisoners barely have a high school education and do not receive further education in jail. Guards need to pay more attention to the well being of the inmates and start to notice signs of abuse and address them. These are just a few of the many problems in our prison systems that need to be addressed.
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.
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...
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...."Los Angeles Times 6 Oct. 2011: 1-2. Print.
Dodd, Vikram. "Why Prison Education?." . Prison Studies Project, Teaching Research Outreach, 16 Jan. 2010. Web. 12 Apr. 2014. .
Wilson, Rick. "The Growing Problems of the Prison System." American Friends Service Committee. American Friends Service Committee, 27 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2014. .
Harris, Dan . "Prison Rape Widely Ignored By Authorities." . abc News, 16 Apr. 2002. Web. 13 Apr. 2014. .
Lozoff, Bo. "Seven Ways to Fix the Criminal Justice System." New Renaissance Magazine: Renaissance Universal. Renaissance Universal Featuring New Renaissance, 21 June 2003. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. .
When envisioning a prison, one often conceptualizes a grisly scene of hardened rapists and murderers wandering aimlessly down the darkened halls of Alcatraz, as opposed to a pleasant facility catering to the needs of troubled souls. Prisons have long been a source of punishment for inmates in America and the debate continues as to whether or not an overhaul of the US prison system should occur. Such an overhaul would readjust the focuses of prison to rehabilitation and incarceration of inmates instead of the current focuses of punishment and incarceration. Altering the goal of the entire state and federal prison system for the purpose of rehabilitation is an unrealistic objective, however. Rehabilitation should not be the main purpose of prison because there are outlying factors that negatively affect the success of rehabilitation programs and such programs would be too costly for prisons currently struggling to accommodate additional inmate needs.
Mauer, Marc. 1999. The Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press National Research Council. 1993.
It is to no surprise that America has a large amount of its people incarcerated for a variety of reasons. One must ask themselves how we can help these individuals get back on track. The answer is America’s most powerful weapon known to man; an education. This is an annotated bibliography for research on the effects of education in the prison system and if these effects are worth taxpayer’s money.
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
The question of how should we reduce the egregious overcrowding in the U.S. state and federal prison systems is very complex. It would most certainly be multifaceted. Some of my ideas on how to reduce the prison population would include but would not be limited to the following.
For county jails, the problem of cost and recidivism is exacerbated by budgetary constraints and various state mandates. Due to the inability of incarceration to satisfy long-term criminal justice objectives and the very high expenditures associated with the sanction, policy makers at various levels of government have sought to identify appropriate alternatives (Luna-Firebaugh, 2003, p.51-66). I. Alternatives to incarceration give courts more options. For example, it’s ridiculous that the majority of the growth in our prison populations in this country is due to people being slamming in jail just because they were caught using drugs. So much of the crime on the streets of our country is drug-related.
Studies have shown that in-prison education curriculums decrease recidivism while refining the eminence of life. However, majority of extra-curricular classes in prison have been eradicated, additional customs of job preparation have reduced, and access to exercise equipment and educational resources such as books is progressively limited. In the past five years the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) has increased the federal budget by 40 per cent to $2.6 billion, majority bei...
Maybe if I saw more reports on how prison has improved our society and the criminals who live among us, I would see why we should work on reforming our prisons. Until then, it does not seem to be working. We trust in the government to provide for our safety, but we must take responsibility among ourselves. To understand that the current system does work and that its intent is not to provide a safe society. History has shown us that. What we have done or continue to do will not make this a safer place to live. The problem is not to reform our prison system, for this won't stop criminals to commit crimes, but to find ways and means to deteriorate them from doing the crime.
It is said that prison should be used for more serious crimes such as rape, assault, homicide and robbery (David, 2006). Because the U.S. Prison is used heavily for punishment and prevention of crime, correctional systems in the U.S. tend to be overcrowded (David, 2006). Even though prisons in the U.S. Are used for privies on of crime it doesn 't work. In a 2002 federal study, 67% of inmates that
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.
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...
2nd ed. of the book. USA: Penguin Books, Ltd. [Accessed 01 January 2014]. The Prison Reform Trust.