One of the many ways that scholars determine how well a country is doing, is by how they treat their criminals. These are the people that no country wants. These are the people that make a country look bad. These are the people that drain resources and cause chaos. It is a good metric to how well a country is doing by how well they treat these undesirable people. The United States of America is failing. We are not doing a good job taking care of our undesirable people. We have seen a decrease in crime since the late 1980s but there has been an increase in incarceration rates since that time. Currently, we have over two million people incarcerated (Wagner & Rabury, 2017, para. 2). If you look at how many people come through the jail system each year, that number is …show more content…
The funds are still not enough to properly take care of the prisoners we have. This is leading to many problems. I will discuss issue of overcrowding, problems it has created and ways to fix these issues. Overcrowding in prisons may seem like an easy fix if you fail to fully engross yourself in every aspect of this situation. At first, I was naïve and thought that if you just released people, the problem would fix itself. However, we are far from that being a viable solution. Mass incarceration in the United States has ruined lives. It has ruined the lives of the people who are put into prison and the lives of those around them. There is also a racial component to this. African American men are disproportionately incarcerated above any other racial group. There are also a disproportionate amount of people from low-income urban areas. This has created pockets of areas that are deemed unsafe to walk around as people feel harassed my law enforcement. What does this yield? This has created an unsafe environment within prisons. The people who are put into prisons feel victimized. The people put in prisons feel hatred towards the