High Incarceration

The incarceration rate within the United States is skyrocketing compared to the global percentage of incarcerated people. The United States alone makes up 25% of the world's incarcerated population ("Incarceration Nation"). In

The U.S prison population rose by 700% from 1970 to 2005. A rate far outpacing that of general population growth and crime rates.

Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission)

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

Current trends show that incarceration numbers continue to grow higher each year. The United States rate of incarceration is the leading nation in rates of incarceration. Other countries have much lower percentages than the U.S. does. There a implications because of inmates reentering the prison system within three years after being released. In 1994 51.8% of inmates that had been released were back in the prison system (U.S. prison populations: Trends and implications, n.d.). Other implications

The vast societal effects from mass incarceration have caused an increasingly alienated population to form in the U.S., which can be broadly classified in the dual areas of lasting effects and impacts to the family unit. First, the lasting effects of high incarceration rates are that they impact the rights of the convict, particularly African Americans. For example, noted civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander posits that the long term effects of mass incarceration operate to deny black Americans the future right to volte, the ability to obtain public benefits, the possibility to sit on juries, and ultimately the opportunity to secure gainful employment (Steiker, 2011), Moreover, professor Alexander argues that this mass incarceration together with the prior Jim Crow laws and the past practice of slaery in the U.S. operate to ensure that black Americans remain s subordinate class of citizens defined primarily by their race (Steiker, 2011).

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.

The United States of America is phrased by many, as being “the land of the free.” Yet, the Unites States currently has the highest per capita prison population than any other country. The United States makes up only 5% of the world’s population and of that 5%, 25% of our overall nation’s population is currently incarcerated. A few factors that attribute to our high rates of incarceration include, sentencing laws: such as mandatory- minimum sentencing, lack of initial deterrence from crime, the war on drugs and the presence of recidivism. With our ever growing incarceration rates and the cost of housing individual offenders averaging $22,000 a criminal justice agenda. Recidivism refers to a person 's relapse into criminal behavior resulting in rearrests, reconviction or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the prisoner 's release (National Institute of Justice.) Many programs have been implemented in our prison system to help reduce the recidivism rates. Programs such as educational/ vocational programming, reentry programs, substance abuse programs and subsidized employment are among many programs in which have been proven effective. Yet, due to costs deficits, the clock is ticking to find evidence based programs to invest in. So, the question currently being sought after is, which method is most effective in reducing recidivism rates?

In “Remodeling American Sentencing: A Ten-Step Blueprint for Moving past Mass Incarceration,” the author shows how imprisonment is harsher and tougher in the United States than any other western country. He also mentions how unfair, severe and ineffective they are on reducing crime rates; and mentions changes in the sentences in the future. Tonry states that the United States locks up seven to ten times more of its citizens than other western countries, or that many states spend more on prisons than on education (Tonry 504). So what the country did to the rise of crime rates was it passed harsher laws and built more and larger prisons. However, European countries dealt with this same problem differently. Their governments reduced

Research Question No. 1 - Did Three Strikes You're Out contribute to the problem of mass incarceration and overcrowded jails and prisons?

What explains the rapid rise in incarceration rates that has occurred throughout the United States during the last two decades? The rapid rise in incarceration rates can be cause by the repeating arrest of offenders. Also, drug possession can be a cause of the rapid rise in incarceration rates in the United States. Many people who are in possession of small amounts of drugs are being sentenced to long prison sentences.

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

Americans were therefore concerned about the number of people in prison and the seemingly exponential growth of crime during this decade. This number has increased over the last 60 years; as of 2015, there are 208,118 people in federal prison and approximately 1.4 million people in state prison. I feel like in some parts of the prison system has changed but at the same time i believe that things are still the case. Now the prisons are a bit more free as they inmates can do activities and have only one person to share the cell with rather than before when inmates had to live with 3 other people in the same sized cell.but at the same time there are some things that are yet to change is that the prison are overcrowded just like before and by that i can infer that more people are being sent to prison, people are still being trapped for small positions of crimes, it's like cops are just waiting to hunt someone and put them in for years and years. Which really concerns me because our fellow people are being sentenced for just self defense or trying to save someone's life, the conditions are still the same just like before. But most

Since the early 1970's, there has been a significant increase in the incarcerating system. Today, study shows that 1 in 100 adult Americans are behind the bars (B.J.S.). On the other hand, the increase in the use of imprisoning system does not mean that there is an increase in crime. From the research of B.J.S., it signifies that in early 1970's population were around 300,000, while the population in 2006 was over 2.3 million. In the United States of America, each state has their diverse policy to deter the crime rate. On the

When it comes to prison overcrowding, many factors cause it to occur. Part of the overcrowding can be attributed both to specific policies. For instance, the “War on Drugs” has enacted harsher penalties for drug violations, directly increasing the number incarcerated. Part of this policy includes mandatory sentences, which indirectly affect the overcrowding. More people are incarcerated for longer periods, leading to conditions so inhumane that in 2011, the Supreme Court declared one prison violated the Eighth Amendment. While policies are partially responsible for overcrowding in prisons, criminal behavior also needs to be taken into account. The USA has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world—within five years of release from state prison, law enforcement rearrests 76.6% of inmates.. Many are arrested for violating parole, and some go on to commit entirely new crimes. Apparently, there is little motivation to staying out of prison, what with the minimal rehabilitation programs and general stigma laid on criminals in the work force. This makes the prison system, in itself, ineffectual, and the attempts to decrease inmate population similarly pointless.