How To Avoid Overcrowding In Prisons

Mass incarceration became a public policy issue in the United States in the early 2010s. Now in 2016, there is still much debate over the country’s incarcerated population and incarceration rate. The nation has the highest incarcerated population in the world, with 2,217,947 inmates, in front of China with 1,649,804. America incarcerates 693 inmates per 100,000 residents, only the African island nation Seychelles incarcerates at a higher rate, with 799 for every 100,000 residents. The problem of mass incarceration continues to be assessed in various contexts. Recent analyses are historian Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and criminologist Dr. Elizabeth Brown’s “Toward Refining the Criminology of Mass Incarceration: Group-Based Trajectories of U.S. States, 1977—2010.”

As of 2015, 2.7% of adults in the United States were under correctional control, the lowest rate since 1994, however that is still roughly 6.7 million adults (Kaeble & Glaze, 2016). While the correctional population has declined, correctional facilities in the United States are still grossly overcrowded, with many facilities at or surpassing capacity. A report in 2010 by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation showed that on average, facilities were at 175% capacity (Brown, 2010). However, as of midnight on October 31st, 2017 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported that their facilities, on average, were 132% occupied (Brown, 2017). Not only is prison overcrowding a burden on the facilities themselves, but also on the inmates. Prison overcrowding, that is, housing more inmates than the facility can humanely facilitate (Haney, 2006), places a strain on all resources throughout the correctional facility, including on the healthcare that’s offered, educational programs, and most dramatically on the physical space available to house inmates (Ekland-Olson, 1983).

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.

Prison overcrowding is a major problem in our criminal justice system and it continues to be a hotly debated topic as to how we should address the problem. One of the main reasons our prison systems have a problem with overcrowding is drugs. More specifically, the "war on drugs" started by President Reagan in 1982 brought a dramatic increase to the number of people put behind bars for drug offences. Mandatory minimum sentencing and truth in sentencing are two policies which have sent drug offenders to prison and kept them there for longer periods of time. The continuing crusade against drugs has apprehended hundreds of thousands of suspects who spend millions on drugs but the cost to incarcerate these non-violent offenders exceeds billions of dollars and much of that money is coming from the taxpayers ' pockets. One way to address this problem is to reverse the current trend of putting first time, non-violent drug offenders in prison and instead sentence these offenders to boot camp and counselling combined with family support.

The United States houses the largest prison population of the world at 25 percent and returns the greatest amount of inmates back into society. Currently, there are over two million people incarcerated in the U.S. with approximately the same number of inmates being released each year (Haney, 2015 p. 416). Many people wonder why prison overcrowding has become such a big issue when there is an

Incarceration is immense in the United States. Since the 1980s, the United States has experienced a massive increase in incarceration. The overall rate has increased from 139 prisoners per hundred thousand US

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.

“America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoner” (Bibas, 2015). ​“President Obama insisted that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that

In August 1994, the California Department of Corrections released its annual five-year facilities master plan for new prison construction. This plan, usually submitted to the Legislature earlier in the calendar year, was delayed so that the additional need for new prison beds resulting from the recently enacted Three Strikes and You're Out legislation could be incorporated into the plan. The facilities plan is based on the department's spring 1994 population estimate that estimated a total of 246,000 inmates by June 1999. This projection was recently revised to 211,000, 35,000 fewer inmates. There are several reasons for this reduction, as shown in Figure 1 and discussed below.

The United States is a country of inmates. With over 2.3 million Americans behind bars, it equates to almost one in every 100 Americans (Hunt, 2011). The United States makes up a little more than four percent of the world’s population. However, America has more inmates than the thirty five leading European countries combined. In 2013, the U.S. admitted 9,000 more sentenced prisoners than they released that year. (Carson, 2014). The U.S prison population has more than doubled over the last fifteen years, causing an extreme overpopulation and financial burden without any immediate solutions.

Jails are facilities used to house inmates who have been arrested and being held pending a plea agreement, trail, or sentencing. Inmates who have been convicted of a misdemeanor criminal offense and are serving a sentence of 1 year or less are allowed to fulfill that sentence in a jail, oppose to those who have been convicted of a felony and were sentenced to 1 year or more for their conviction are housed in prisons. The Cook County Jail was established on January 15, 1831, by the Illinois state legislator. Furthermore, the courthouse and jail were not built until 1835.

The Editorial Board utilizes statistics to emphasize that granting pardons to those in prison is necessary to diminish the staggering numbers in the prison population. President Obama collaborates with the Justice Department to reduce those in prison by reviewing cases repeatedly. According to the article, “Mr. Obama has now shortened or ended the sentences of more than 1,000 prisoners.” However, many inmates deserve to be released, and

Over the decades, we have managed to create a much more just and effective prison system than ever before. Despite this, there are still many problems that prisons must deal with that need to overcome in order to function more efficiently. One of the main problems faced by prisons today is the overpopulation of inmates. Ever since the 1980’s, the total number of inmates in the U.S. has skyrocketed, with a census done in 2012 determining that we have over 2,200,000 inmates currently incarcerated. Compared to the roughly 500,000 inmates in 1980, you would have to wonder how this population could have gone up by over 400%. Some recent events that have mostly likely contributed to this increase include the war on drugs greatly increasing the number of drug-related arrests, the increase on “tough on crime” approaches leading to much longer prison sentences than ever before, and the high recidivism rate. This has created many problems, such as overwhelming the court system, worsening conditions in many prisons for inmate necessities such as health care and housing space, an increase in the spread of infectious diseases, and the stress this puts on correction officers and inmates alike. One suggestion I have to decrease prison overpopulation is an increase in alternatives to incarceration, such as probation for low-risk inmates and rehabilitation for those arrested for drug-related crimes. Not only would this help clear out our prisons, but it would also decrease the likelihood of

Whereas Prison Fellowship has undertaken significant efforts to raise public awareness of the “second prison” faced by individuals with a criminal record because of these collateral consequences;

The prison population rises each year. This increasing trend has been directly linked to the reoccurring arrests of released prisoners. Some people believe that there is not an answer to fixing this problem. However, research and studies show that there is an answer to the reoccurring problem. Even with this conclusion, there continues to be many opinions on what should or should not be done to prevent the prison population from continuing to rise on a yearly basis.