Conquering a Solid and Wide Prison Reform: Why should the public be informed?

Nixon’s declaration had pushed law makers and politicians across the states to implement more punitive drug laws. Prior to the Nixon’s declaration, New York’s governor Nelson Rockefeller “had backed drug rehabilitation, job training and housing” to combat the city’s drug problems (Mann, Brian. “The Drug Laws That Changed How We Punish”. NPR.). After Nixon declared a national war on drugs however, Rockefeller’s political views shifted. According to Joseph Persico, Rockefeller’s closest aid, Rockefeller turned to Persico and said, “For drug pushing, life sentence, no parole, no probation”. When Rockefeller Launched his campaign, he called for a

Governor Wilma James’ state is facing severe budget cuts due to economic struggles and drops in tax revenues. The Department of Revenue had informed the governor that she must find ways to reduce the budget by $6 billion. There are several areas which the governor acknowledged as fixed and cannot be touched such as, health care and pension payments. Several proposals were brought to the governor’s attention and the one that stands out the most were the prison system. After conversing with the correctional commissioner, the governor decided to order an early release of inmates whose been charged with drug related crimes. Governor James believes that her action will reduce the state’s budget immensely; however, another problem that may transpire, is the rise of drug related criminal activities occurring all across the state. This essay will briefly highlight the contexts of prison labor and work release programs, and how it would be a better alternative as compared to the early releasing of felons incarcerated for drug related crimes.

The incarceration rate in America is high. In fact, the highest in the world (Zuckerman, 2014). But should it be? According to Bibas (2015), “Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.” (para. 1). America, it seems, in its ‘War on Drugs’, has been incarcerating criminals, even non-violent drug offenders, at a high rate. As more offenders are being incarcerated, more stories are being written, including horror stories about what goes on behind prison walls. Considering the nature of some of the crimes committed by inmates, and being mixed in with the violent criminals, non-violent offenders have no place in this hell. Because of overcrowding, abuse of the inmates, and the lack

Mass incarceration has been an issue in the United States since the start of the War on Drugs, because of the political agenda attached to the “tough on crime” regimen thousands of people have suffered as a consequence. The solution to this is one that can only be possibly solved by approaching through several angles. The ten steps presented by Michael Tonry, are an innovative and have merit to some extent. However, mass incarceration results from more than unjust sentencing laws, which is his main focus. If ever we are to resolve the issue, society and the criminal justice system must come together to completely reevaluate what we consider to be “tough on crime” and redefine the purpose of prisons, strictly punishment or rehabilitation. The focus has to shift from harsh sentencing, stigma, racial discrimination to a basic form of rehabilitation and reduction of the prison system in general. The criminal justice system has to do what they are actually meant to do and focus on rehabilitation measures, and when possible completely stop interaction with the prison system all together.

“How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction?”, asks Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker in “The Caging of America”. So how did we get here? What has it done to our society? Gopnik elaborates on these questions and many more as he explicates the history of prisons, the convolution of their systems, and the detrimental consequences that prisoners are left to face. Although Gopnik undeniably articulates, “we need to take more care,” he lacks a concrete solution to the epidemic that is mass-incarceration. But in order for us to unearth this solution, we must first retrace the history of mass incarceration and reevaluate the egregious effects it has on our society.

No matter how you look at it, the prison system within the US holds too many people without valid reason. The last decade has seen a lot of states cut down on crime while also cutting down on their prison populations. In the years between 1999 and 2012, for example, both New York and New Jersey cut their prison populations by 30%, and crime rates fell “faster than they did nationally.”

In recent decades, low-income Americans have been facing the consequences of living in a country whose criminal justice system is greatly influenced by skewed prosecution dynamics, and whose structural discrepancies continue to encourage the mass incarceration phenomenon that affects millions of individuals today. At rates higher than Russia and China, the U.S is incarcerating an entire portion of its population based on irrelevant criteria such as affluence and race. The harsh reality that both, poverty-stricken individuals and prison inmates face today, indicate a dire need for systematic change, and should encourage citizens to become informed members of society. As citizens have come together, and government officials become involved, many reforms have been introduced and passed which are conducive to a more restorative approach to justice.

Despite the large amount of criminals in prison, the crimes: murder, rape, and others has only “accounted for 10.6 percent of the total Crime Index” (Access Integrity Unit). The vast majority of criminals locked up are held on drug addiction or petty theft charges and not more serious offenses such as murder or assault. To put it simply, the cells that were built with taxpayers’ dollars holds 89.4 percent of criminals that are of no real threat to society. While the jail cells continue to fill up with occupants that has no business being behind bars, the general public will not feel any safer until new laws are passed to insure lesser offenders can get the help they so desperately need.

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 a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for a number of reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. The ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system is caused by mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism.

His policies caused the growth of a massive corrections system that currently houses an estimated 2.2 million inmates. Since the 1970’s federal and state correction agencies have consistently struggled to meet the increased demands brought on by the US Department of Justice and strict drug laws; this in turn created the opportunity for Corrections Corporation of America to form, the largest private prison network in the United States (Godard, T 2015). With the precedent it set with the first private detention center, CCA changed the face of US corrections for good. The private sector became the quick fix to the problem of overcrowded and understaffed public prisons.

Mass incarceration has been a huge social problem since the 1980s; it came hand in hand with the war on drugs. Elliott Currie, a professor of criminology and law, suggests that building more prisons, imposing longer sentences, and applying harsh punishments will not lower the incarceration rate. In his chapter on “Assessing the Prison Experiment,” he explained that the increase of crime rate is not the sole reason that mass incarceration occurs, and it was also because courts

The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration. It spends more resources on its prison system than any other nation and has the largest prison population in the world. Between 1980 and 2016, the number of inmates in U.S. state and federal prisons increased from 320,000 to more than 1.5 million. This corresponds to a change in the incarceration rate from 139 to 450 prisoners per 100,000 residents. Most lawmakers tend to believe that incarceration is a necessary construct needed to reform criminals to properly incorporate them into society. They insist imprisonment reduces crime rates through incapacitation and deterrence. Thus, it is not surprising that expenditures on corrections increased as states built new prisons,

When crack cocaine hit the streets in 1985, the media made an effort to sensationalize the emergence of this new drug in inner-city neighborhoods. This media sensationalism effectively made the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor. By the year 2000, the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American

The worsening prison conditions in the United States can be contributed to three things, one the “war on drugs”, government officials wanting to be “taught on crime” and private prisons. The “war on drugs, and the concept of being “taught on crime” has lead to the United States to becoming number one when it comes to the number of incarcerated individuals in America (Mauer M., pg.607). Private prison itself aroused due to the demand that being “taught on crime”, and the “war on drugs” created for more space to imprison people. The conflict between states/federal prisons because of private prisons has made prison condition worse.