Argumentative Essay: Get Into Jail Free Card

In any given year now, incarceration rates has tripled with approximately 13 million people introduced to American jails in any given year. This increase in the prison population far outpaced the crime rate and the US population growth. Today, America has around 5% of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prison population.

Mass Incarceration is a predicament in the U.S. because in the land of the free, there are more than two million people in prison. Prisons are homes to the majority of twenty-two percent of the U.S. population. The U.S. has a massive incarceration rate, seven hundred and sixteen per every one hundred thousand. The U.S. makes five percent of the world’s population and the third country in which most people live in but number one incarcerating humans.

After viewing the documentary: America's War on Drugs - The Prison Industrial Complex, it is clear that the Criminal Justice System is in desperate need of reconstruction and repair with policies such as the mandatory minimum sentencing act which has proven to be unsuccessful and unjust in its efforts to deter 'criminals from committing illegal acts' as seen with the increase of incarcerations of the American people and the devastating effect it has had on those in prison and the family members of those incarcerated.

Have you ever been to prison before? Unfortunately it is not uncommon for many people in the United States to end up in prison at any given time in their life. Chances are, if you have not been to prison you know somebody that has been imprisoned, as America has the highest rate of incarceration in the whole world. Although America’s population only accounts for 5% of the world's population, we have the highest prison rate at 25% of the whole world’s incarcerated population (Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2015). Why do we continue to see these prisons overcrowded, and how exactly does this affect the inmates?

Though many Americans are aware that their nation imprisons more of its own citizens than any other country in the world, what much fewer of them are aware of is the increasing number in which those citizens are housed in facilities with little to no government oversight. From 2002 to 2009, the amount of inmates held in private prisons grew thirty-seven percent while the overall number of incarcerated Americans during that same timeframe grew by only fourteen percent (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010), a statistic that reveals a worrying trend; that of a disproportionate amount of citizens being housed in what has come to be known as the prison-industrial complex, a term used not only for the growing

Prison’s were established a long time ago to try to put an end to the rapidly increasing crime rate, however over time we are seeing the effectiveness of the most prisons decreasing. As a result of this epidemic, prisons have a higher recidivism rate and over 40 percents are currently operating over maximum capacity (Holder.) Through different types of research, we are finding out that our prison systems are no longer effective and there is a serious need for improvement. The United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate almost ¼ of the worlds prisoners (Holder.)

The United States has the largest prison population in the world. The U.S.’s path to our over population has been decades in the making. “The United States makes up about 4 percent of the world’s population, and it accounts for 22 percent of the world’s prison population.” (Lopez). Prison over population is a growing concern within our society creating and contributing factors include longer sentences, rising costs, prison gangs, rapes, racism and mental health issues.

Prominent among them is the reduction of the prison sentences for nonviolent and low-level drug crimes. However, this is not enough. “Even if we released everyone imprisoned for drugs tomorrow, the united states would still have 1.7 million people behind bars.” That massive statistic comes as a great shock to readers, as they only now realize the true urgency of the issue. The authors acknowledge that “half the people in state prisons are there for a violent crime.” However, “not all individuals convicted for a violent crime are alike.” They are convicted for different levels of violence: some are mass murderers or serial killers, while others are “battered spouses who struck back at their abusers.” Mauer and Cole also refer to studies that found that longer sentences are not better deterrents, as most serious offenses were committed under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The authors call for acknowledgement that excessively long sentences are merely a waste of money and totally

Once upon a time, Americans could proudly say that America was the land of freedom and opportunity. As the Pledge of Allegiance states, “One nation under God, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” However, under the current criminal justice system, more and more people lose their liberties because of the crimes they have committed. According to Roy Walmsley, a consultant of the United Nations and Associate of the International Center for prison studies, “In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represent about 4.4 percent of the world 's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world 's prisoners.” These people are not only prisoners, but they are also parents, sons, and daughters - the loved ones of families. The number of people that have been incarcerated also represents the number of families that have been shattered.

America has one of the largest prison population and according to the bureau of the justice department. States and federal prisons held 1574700 inmates in December 2013.and it increased by 4300 inmates over the years end. More than two-thirds of prisoners were arrested within the first six months of release. These statistics show that prison as punishment alone do not work and some measures need to be but in place to decrease the population of inmates and recidivism. Prison should be used as both rehabilitation and punishment.

Since the 1970’s the American incarceration rate has increased by a factor of 7. The United States holds the majority of the world’s prisoners. “The land of the free” is home to 5% of the world’s population, but contains 25% of its prisoners. People are also being held in jail for longer. Although most crimes are committed by young men, the number of US prisoners over age of 50 has increased by 330% since 1994.

The criminal justice system has many flaws that many people believe It is broken. The first step of fixing the system is by acknowledging that the system is broken. According to the documentary Fixing the System, the increase of incarceration is due to nonviolent drug offenses. There are more drug offenses than for homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, immigration, sex offenses, etc., combined. The cost for incarceration has dramatically increased as people kept getting incarceration due to the nonviolent drug offenses. President George W. Bush decided that building more prisons and jails was the best way to teach the lesson of war on drugs. Although incarcerating individuals’ due drugs wasn’t helping get rid of the problem because they

The US prison system is famous for its notorious inefficiency. While not being the largest nation in the world, America has the largest prisoner population, surpassing countries such as India, Russia, and China in both inmate population rates and numbers of inmates per 100,000 people. As it stands, there are over 2,100,000 incarcerated prisoners, with over 7 million being supervised as part of their probation period (World Prison Brief, 2015). According to McLaughlin, Pettus-Davis, Brown, Veeh, and Renn (2016), the total burden on the US economy for maintaining the prison system, including the social costs, exceeds 1 trillion dollars a year. US prison population began growing exponentially ever since the adoption of the so-called “War on Drugs” policy, declared by President Nixon in 1971, which was an attempt to curb the flow of drugs flowing into the country through the Mexican border. While this effort proved to be a failure on its own, it also significantly contributed to the increase of prisoner population in the US.

The United States is one of the largest countries in the world so high incarceration rates are expected. However, this rate has drastically increased in the past forty years, surpassing those of countries such as China, which has a population four times larger than the United States

During the mid-1980’s an epidemic of cocaine and crack swept the nation leaving many wondering what could be done to eliminate this problem that reached everywhere from small town middle America to the larger metropolitan areas. It has always been the common acceptance that by putting more offenders in jail, crime statistics will decrease. This belief led congress to enact the anti-drug abuse act of 1986. At first, it was believed that this seemed to work, due to there being a “5% drop in crime in the 1990’s” (Chettiar). While according to various newer statistics that have tracked these changes since the early 1980’s, these mandatory minimums may have no bearing on the decline in crime. In fact, there are many theories on this ranging from the “Abortion filter” to the trendiest: “The lead hypothesis “ (Goldstein). There is no argument about whether or not offenders get punished if you break the law; it has become an argument of how offenders are sentenced. First time nonviolent offenders should be penalized by some means, although it ought to be proportionate to the crime. “Jailing nonviolent offenders as the first option actually is counterproductive in many cases and can lead to more serious crime” (Levin). There are many alternatives to jail or prison for a nonviolent offender, prosecutors must get past their internment ratio, and have more confidence on the other options to jail such as drug rehabilitation, work programs, and