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The Overcrowding Of Prisons In America

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The overcrowding of prisons in California and the rest of America is the result of “manufactured crime”. These are crimes which have no victim yet are considered felonies and follow the three strike law. Many people do not know that there are more incarcerated people in America than any other country on earth. According to the American Civil Liberties Union “America contains 5% of the world 's human population while also containing 25% of the world’s prison population. Since 1970, our prison population has risen by some 700% - an increase far outpacing rates of population growth and crime1”. The reason America has so many incarcerated people is not because Americans commit more crimes or the police are just better at finding criminals,
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The documentary the “13th” had shocking statistics on how many people are incarcerated in the United States. The 1970’s was the beginning of the “mass incarceration era,” which started with 357,292 people incarcerated. From there, the prison population has continuously increased and reached a population of 2,306,200 in 2014. Many of these people incarcerated are African-Americans because the criminal justice system has always worked against them. African-Americans in the United States account for 6.5% of the population, meanwhile they account for 42% of the prison population.

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Introduction Since the War on drugs began American has had a prison problem. The goal of this era and the tough on crime era that proceeded it the goal was to be tough on crime in order to stop it. This meant mass incarceration and hard time for offenses such as drug use (drug policy: facts). The 1990’s saw the biggest increase of the prison population with federal policies such as three strikes. Today these polices has made America the number incarcerated group in the planet despite having only 5% of the world’s population (ACLU: Prison Facts).

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One of the hardest challenges for the United States, in terms of the criminal justice system, is the overcrowding of prisons. In fact, the problem has become so big that the U.S. has more people in jail than any other country on earth – about 2.2 million people, to be exact. To deal with this growing issue, governments and correctional administrations began to invent creative alternatives and policies to handle the overcrowding and to reduce the cost. One of these alternatives has been the use of private prisons, where the individuals in charge of the ownership, operation, and responsibility shifts from the public sector (the government) to the private sector (a third party contracted by a government agency). In order to make profits, private

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Prisons in the United States of America are housing inmates for profit Prisoners have become a commodity in order to profit from individuals labor instead of rehabilitation. The goal of the private corporations and federal prisons seems as if profit is the underlining aim of the prison industry. Keeping private prisons filled to capacity increases profits for invested parties and contributes to growing of the economy, but the growth of the economy should not be the determining factor of a person’s life and whether they are correctly rehabilitated. Just to reiterate there are three different ways that the privatized prison industry has become successful at the expense of our society’s men ages 18-24; Inmates and the economy with the prison industrial

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Mass Incarceration America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping Cuba, Rwanda, Thailand, Costa Rica and Ukraine. The United States is the world’s leader incarceration. There are currently five-thousand prison facility, which in habit over 2 million prisoner. There has been a 500% increase over the past thirty years. These numbers include, federal and state prison, and local jails. .

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The policy has created a large inequality gap in today’s western society, seen in wealth, race and the mass incarceration of the minority group such as the African-Americans, the Aboriginal and people that have mental health issues. This out-dated policy has allowed racial disadvantage to happen where the government shows little interest in dealing with this injustice due to making them look being soft on crime (3,54). This policy has kept the minorities poor, depress earnings by 30–40%, break up families, make men unattractive marriage partners, and increase social disorder (3,54). The result of this policy is creating mass incarceration where prison are overcrowded with minorities groups and as stated in my introductory assignment where resources are being stretched to the max, where things such as social programs in prison are being canceled to give the basic material for each prison.

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The reasons for prison congestion are not restricted to the furthest reaches of criminal justice, but rather stretch out to different circles of state obligation. Figure 1: This chart was utilized to decide the best alternative chose. Alternatives Effectiveness Equity Political Acceptability Financial Feasibility Building more correctional facilities for rehabilitation Low Medium Medium Low Termination of Mandatory Sentencing for minor crime Medium Medium Low High Expanding Good Time Credits

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In general, the United States has 2.3 million people imprisoned in over 6,000 correctional facilities, with over 1,000,000 drug arrests made every year (Wagner, 2017). Washington state alone has 36,000 people jailed (Wagner, 2017). Although our rate is lower than the national average, there is still progress to be made. I, for one, do not believe that mass incarceration is the way to fix our country. President Nixon

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The war on drugs is increasing the population rate in our prison system, leaving the states to increase government spending and to decrease spending in other areas such as the educational system. But this mass incarceration cannot and will not change if we do not change the inequality of race. Punitive laws and mandatory minimums can no longer be a law of the future, we can no longer afford to keep offenders in prisons for long periods of times for non-violent charges. Better yet we need to take the money we are spending on these offenders and put it to better use such rehabilitation programs, school systems by keeping these children off the streets and by giving these minority communities more opportunity by offering more employment. These

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If crime is decreasing and incarceration is increasing, society is in danger. In other words, incarceration is producing crime and perishing human growth by drawing government interest from promoting education, community ties, and the desire to excel in a working environment. Consequently, considering the history of political influences on the American justice system, high incarceration rates is a larger benefit for public officials who influence crime management in oppose to the needs of society, which indicates the purposeful process of incarceration. Rather than addressing the root of the crime to efficiently prevent crime, public officials have invested in the prison system by falsifying a “tough on crime” image to pleasure the public and glamorize their personal

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What Should Be Done To Reduce Non-Violent Offender Incarceration?” In this essay, we will discuss how prison have long been over crowned with non-violent offenders for decades. The cost of incarceration for non-violent offenders has cost this country nearly two billion dollars a year. In the United States the cost catalyst is estimated at 175 billion dollars spent in prisons on crimes committed by non-violent Offenders. We imprisons 1.3 million in state prison 767,600 in city and county jails, also 205,000 in federal jail (Katel.

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51% of all prisoners released are returned to the prison system and nearly 30% are returned within the first six months of their release (Pinard, 2006). Roughly two-thirds of all prisoners are rearrested within three years (Pinard, 2006). The high rates of incarceration and recidivism have reinvigorated debate about the purpose of the prison. The time is ripe to debate prison reform. "America 's penal system needs a top-to-bottom overhaul - and a movement of people ready to do something about it is taking shape nicely" (McCarthy,

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Prison Overcrowding in America In our country today, we account for roughly five percent of the world’s population, yet we hold over twenty-five percent of the globe’s inmate population. According to John Irwin, we currently imprison more people for lesser crimes than any other country in the world. In 1987 alone, our prison population rested steadily at just 500,000 incarcerated inmates in the U.S. Although in the past twenty-seven years, the American prison population has actually quadruped to almost 2.4 million (Pratt, 2009).

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