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Persuasive Essay On Incarceration

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Recommended: Changes in the criminal justice system

American people could be funding the trip to Mars instead of what they are now funding. We are funding the wrong future with mass incarceration. We don't have to have people miss their children's birthday or Christmas if we fix the incarceration system. American taxpayers are wasting valuable resources by investing too much in the prison systems.

Our first order of business, we need to stop the severe overpopulation and overspending of prisons. "...We will spend an additional $9.8 billion to incarcerate our fellow Americans"(Freidman 16). With this absurd sum of money, you could buy a plane skip the private jet, a 747 to yourself. But, what if the government had this extra money? They could add to NASA's annual budget and possibly fast-track the Mars expedition. However, at the pace of annual incarceration, several more taxpayer's dollars will go into the prison system."There is a 1050% change of the amount of inmates in prison from 1970 to 2016"(Sentencing 1). At that rate, we will have an estimated total of 2,683,333 if we do not start the change now. We need to use different methods of imprisonment. We need to possibly use probation more and for more drastic situations we could use the death sentence. …show more content…

"With drug trafficking and possession sentences with probation is 5.29%"(US 1). The other 94.71% goes to jail for possession of drugs. They do not need to go to prison, they just need rehab. Also, I am sure that rehab is cheaper than feeding, clothing, and housing. Another issue is we incarcerate more than other countries."U.S. has the highest incarceration rate out of all of Europe"(Sentencing 17). We do not have to imprison everyone if they do a wrong. Prisons should be a last resort, not a first option. Prison should only hold killers or drug lords, not some person who accidentally got involved with illegal

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Essentially, Stevenson wanted the taxpayers to be worried about where their money is going. The government funding for prisons has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today; as a result, America now have to face the unprecedented economic crisis (Stevenson 16). The money spent on jail is suppose to be used for public services, education, health , and welfare. This is the reason

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We long for solutions, we long for peace, we long for change. But how? For decades, we notice the rate of incarceration increase heavily, as time passes. However, solutions to decrease those rates have been minimum. Adam Gopnik provides very detailed arguments on why the incarceration rates are so high in the United States, the comparison between jail time and crime committed, and also focuses on the importance of working together for smaller solutions to later “fix” problems like incarceration and our criminal justice system.

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There has been an exceedingly high increase in the population in federal prisons. “The Federal prison population has grown by 750 percent since 1980 and our Federal prisons are approximately 30 percent over capacity” (). We are overflowing our prison cells with criminals of all degrees. We need Smarter Sentencing to keep people from have long drawn out sentences and crowding up our cells for people who actually need to be there for that amount of time. Over capacitated cells are actually ridiculous.

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In the 1970s the United States entered the era known as mass incarceration, the byproduct of the drug war. The War on Drugs changed how society handled drug dependency, diverting the problem from public health to criminal justice. Since the Nixon administration, the political stance on being tough on crime has resulted in various laws and policing practices that heavily criminalized drugs to point in which the prison population in the United States increased from 300,000 people in 1972 to 2.3 million today (Barish, DuVernay, Averick & DuVernay, 2016). The epidemic of mass incarceration corresponds to a variety of public health issues such as mental illness, increased violence within society, increased incidence of addictions, and increased incidence of chronic illnesses (Drucker, 2013).

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The money that is spent on prisons and the prisoners could benefit the citizens of America in another way. The amount of money that comes from taxes alone could help build houses for those in need, help pay off student loans or even give money back to the hard working Americans. “The total cost of Colorado’s prisons—to incarcerate an average daily population of 19,958—was therefore $606.2 million, of which 3.5 percent were costs outside the corrections budget” (Vera 1). This money goes to items such as televisions, health care, beds, luxury items, hot meals, coffee, and cigarettes. The list goes on although prisoners were put into jail because they are harmful to society.

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The system is lacking really horribly with incarceration. The reason why reform should happen is because If you give prisoners a certain amount of years and tell that they are assigned to go to a program they would not feel so guilty . This is why the crime rate has increased prisoners are not getting enough time incarcerated. Jail isn’t a vacation it’s a punishment you’re not supposed to make prisoners feel so comfortable that they will still do wrong and end up coming back.

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