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Community Supervision of Law Violators vs. Incarceration Essay

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Community supervision of law violators can achieve similar advantages and prevent the disadvantages of incarceration. There are both advantages and disadvantages to community corrections and incarceration. I support community corrections because I believe it has more positives outcomes and less negative effects than incarceration. Community corrections have more advantages over incarceration and fewer disadvantages. Incarcerating people isn’t working that well and the biggest reason is the overcrowding of prisons. According to a chart in Schmalleger’s book, “prisoners compared vs. capacity” there has been overcrowding of prisons since 1980. We are putting more people in prisons than how much capacity they can actually hold. Not…show more content…
Parolees also support the government through the taxes they pay. Probationers and parolees can also participate in community service. When offenders are incarcerated, they are in a more hostile environment rather than when they get probation or parole. There is also an increase opportunity for rehabilitation. Probation and parole can reward offenders with freedom and give them the chance to correct their behavior. This is usually more difficult to accomplish if they are incarcerated. However probation and parole have increased social costs. “Probation and parole increase the chance that added expenses will accrue to the community in the form of child support, welfare costs, housing expenses, legal aid, indigent health care, and the like.” (Schmalleger pg 368)
While it’s cheap to put someone on probation or parole, it is expensive to incarcerate a person for a year. It costs $45,000 to house and feed an inmate for one year. “There are approximately 1,325 state prisons and 84 federal prisons in operation across the country today”. (Schmalleger pg 390) If you have 2000 inmates in one prison then that will cost roughly $90,000,000 to support those prisoners for just one year and that is only for one prison. From 1991 to 2007, there was a 37% decrease in the national crime rate and a 62% increase in the rate of imprisonment. The Public Safety Performance Project released a report that predicts the nation’s prison population will rise to more than
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