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Persuasive Essay On Prison Reform

707 Words3 Pages

Something will always need to be fixed in society because society is a reflection of us, and we are not perfect. Recently, there’s been many issues that have caught the attention of people living all across the world. Things such as police brutality, sexual assault in the workplace, and immigration law, just to name a few, but there’s also been an underlying issue that people are becoming more informed about, and that I believe matters - prison reform. Prison reform matters because in many instances, prisoners are treated inhumanely when they are locked up, and aren’t treated as humans when they have served their time. I believe we can bring about change in the prison system by changing the way we punish people who do commit crimes and focusing more on actual rehabilitation. In 1972, former President Richard Nixon made his infamous statements regarding crime and drug abuse. In this speech, he declared a war on crime and drugs and intended to decrease the number of people using drugs and the amount of crimes that were committed. Since this declaration, incarceration rates in the U.S. have gone up by 500%, even though the amount of crime happening has gone down. One of the reasons why I feel our rates have risen, is because sometimes, we put people in jail when they don’t need to be there in the first place. 46.3% of prisoners are in jail …show more content…

There’s a multitude of things that need to be repaired in our system, and prison is one of them. Prison reform is an important issue because we need to take care of everyone and with the way we treat criminals, we do not see them as equal. We need to assess illegal acts correctly instead of trying to put people in jail for the rest of their lives. We also need to work more on how we try to rehabilitate people. Instead of barring convicts off from the rest of us, we need to teach them how to integrate, so they can live better lives than they did

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It's going to be hard because the standard story put the shocking story out which are not essential problems facing prison population. People more likely to gravitate that story rather than the story that could help the country. According to lock in, “in a survey of registered US voters by the Pew Research Center in early 2016, 44 percent of all residents said they believed that “reforming the criminal justice system should be a top priority”; the percentage rose to 73 percent for black respondents and 48 percent for Hispanics" (Pfaff,2017, P5). People have faith in reforming the justice system. This survey was carried to see if people are satisfied with the justice system and have the voter’s responses that they believe it should reform.

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This preconceived notion could not be farther from the truth. In reality, these reform movements are idiotically placing a bandaid over the tremendous issue that the prison system is. An imbalance of reforms between women and men, unrestrained sexual abuse in women’s prisons, and tyrannical gender roles are just three of countless examples of how prison reform movements only create more misfortune and fail to provide any real solution to worsening prison conditions. Perhaps instead of conjuring up additional ideas on how to reform prisons, America’s so-called democratic society should agree upon abolishing prisons as a whole. This being said, it is crucial to identify ongoing issues in today’s society, understand how they contribute to unlawful behavior, and seek a solution.

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There are many problems in the correctional system in the United States. One of the main problem is that prisons are overcrowded. These prisons have been overcrowded for a very long time. Prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. One solution to this problem is placing offenders with minor offenses on house arrest.

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