The United States of America has more people incarcerated than any other country on earth, a whopping 2,220,300 adults are currently locked behind bars. We have 500,000 more citizens locked up than China, a country 5 times our population run by an authoritarian government. From 1990 - 2000 the prison population increased by 1,000,000. The main reason for incarceration as a punishment in this country is rehabilitation, or so we have been told. In recent years an industry has developed that revolves around high incarceration rates and lengthy sentences, needless to say business is booming. The for-profit prison industry now makes millions off the backs of American inmates their families and every American taxpayer. The two largest …show more content…
For-profit prisons benefit from the strict enforcement of laws and lengthy sentences. These corporations are not interested in rehabilitating inmates they are more concerned with keeping their beds full and making a buck off inmates and their families. Anything else could be bad for business. This outlook runs counter to what should be a rehabilitative mission of the nation’s criminal justice system. Instead, private prison contracts often require the government to keep the correctional facilities and immigration detention centers full, forcing communities to continuously funnel people into the prison system, even if actual crime rates are falling. Nearly two-thirds of private prison contracts mandate that state and local governments maintain a certain occupancy rate – usually 90 percent – or require taxpayers to pay for empty beds.
With all the money these corporations bring in much is spent to influence politics with hefty campaign contributions and corporate lobbying in Washington. All of this is business to them, helping individuals that will push their agenda get into high places politically is just the tip of the iceberg. 28 states now have something called the "three strikes or habitual offender laws" These laws make it possible to send anyone to prison for life on their third felony charge regardless of the circumstances. They need to make sure convictions rates stay sky high to keep the commodities coming. CCA inmates had time
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
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?
From the article titled “The Punishment Imperative : The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America” by Todd Clear, and Natasha Frost, it goes into full detail on why the incarceration rate is failing. America incarcerates way more people that far exceeds the rate of our top allies. “With just under ten million people incarcerated in prisons and jails worldwide, America incarcerated more than one-fifth of the world’s total prison population.” (The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America, Page 17) The United States now is in the lead in the world of incarceration, that beats countries like Russia, Rwanda, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Cuba, and the country has four times the rate of European nations. Maintaining the prisons came with a staggering price. In 2006, jurisdictions would spend around $68 billion on correctional supervision. They went from spending from $9 billion in 1982 to an 660 percent increase of $68 billion in 2006. Around the same time period, direct judicial expenditures has increased by 503 percent and the policing expenditures increased by 420 percent. The huge majority of the correctional dollars, with was around 90 percent, went to stabilize mass incarceration. “With a national average annual price tag of almost $29,000 per person per year of incarceration, it cost taxpayers at least ten times more to incarcerate a person than it would have cost to maintain him or her under supervision in the community.” (The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America, Page 21) In general, this is an issue because the taxpayers are forced to pay a lot of money to maintain a person in prison. Locking up a serious violent offender is justified, however, for thousands of lower-level inmates, it costs taxpayers more than preventing
Mass incarceration is a barrier effecting many minorities and communities. The growth in incarceration rates in the United States over the past 40 years is historically reoccurring. According to statistics the war on drugs is the number one drive into our prisons. It took a toll on how diligently police enforcement do their jobs, communities, citizens and our 14th amendment rights which addresses equal protection under the law to all citizens, the amendment also addresses what is called "due process", which prevents citizens from being illegally deprived of life, liberty, or property. Marijuana and Narcotics are the most common drug when it comes to distributing and possession. Drug use and abuse is an expensive problem in the United States, both financially and socially. Another factor that contribute to mass incarnation rates
In the U.S. there has been a rise in incarcerations, the numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago despite the fact that crime is at historic lows. So what are we to make of the leap in time typically served for crimes in America’s society? Either the justice system was too lenient in the past, or the justice system is too strict now. Have we just now realized the real gravity of murder, or are we now overreacting? The United States currently over-incarcerates its citizens, prisoners have become part of the economy, manufacturing and assembling products for major corporations. Based on the research, it would be unethical to continue a trend of mass incarceration when the conditions are unsustainable, inhumane, and the product of unethical polices.
The United States has the highest prison population in the world, with over two million incarcerated (World Prison Brief, 2016), of whom many are juveniles. It is well documented that youths who enter this system are more likely to suffer a host of negative health and lifestyle outcomes, such as alcohol/drug abuse, high school dropout, and mental health problems. Such phenomena occur in stark contrast with the aims of the US juvenile justice system, which supposedly intends to help offending youths re-assimilate back into society as productive citizens. As previously mentioned, incarceration often leads to poor mental health, which when combined with the conditions of confinement significantly raises the rates of suicide and
There are over 2million people incarcerated today in the United States and Statistics show that the rates every
The United States (US) incarcerates its citizens at the highest rate in the world, 707 US citizens per 100,000 are incarcerated, a rate 5 -10 times higher than other western democracies (National Research Council, 2014). From the 1930s to the 1970s the number of incarcerated citizens in the US remained relatively stable, 161 citizens per 100,00 were incarcerated in 1972 (Hindelang, 1977). However since the 1970s the population of America’s prison system has increased by 700% (ACLU, 2011), and there are now currently over 2.2 million incarcerated Americans. Because of this rapid increase to an unprecedented level US incarceration levels have been widely discussed across academic literature. Not only are current US incarceration levels internationally unique and unprecedented, they are unique and unprecedented within the history of the US itself. This makes the US incarceration levels best suited to a single case analysis, as there is a high level of internal historical change to compare across. It is widely accepted that the rise in US incarceration levels are due to ‘the war on drugs’ - tough on crime law enforcement strategies introduced in the 1970s to combat illegal drug activity. However, there are differing theories as to how these historic policies continue to impact incarceration levels today. In this essay I will argue that the war on drugs is one of many mechanisms employed to continually discriminate against the black minority in America. I will analyse
Have you ever questioned about the justice in the United States? Stevenson states that, “Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today” (15). United States is a modern country that doesn’t serve justice to her citizen? 2.3 million prisoners are just embarrassing the whole country. You might want to know how bad the justice system is and how the heck cause 2.3 million prisoners to be in prison. Our system is defined by an error; which serve justice to the rich and injustice to the poor. It’s common to know that poor and color people are more likely to be convicted if they commit a small crime. We created a system like “Three strikes and you’re out” to show how strong we can be, and as the result of that, we have created the mass incarceration that no other countries can’t do. We are no better than a beast. We condemned the poor because we know they are helpless and we condemned the color people because of racial bias. What does justice really stand for? The justice should be changed in order to prevent mass incarceration in the future and focus on a fairness when it comes to trial.
in recent decades, violent crimes in the United States of America have been on a steady decline, however, the number of people in the United States under some form of correctional control is reaching towering heights and reaching record proportions. In the last thirty years, the incarceration rates in the United States has skyrocketed; the numbers roughly quadrupled from around five hundred thousand to more than 2 million people. (NAACP)In a speech on criminal justice at Columbia University, Hillary Clinton notes that, “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.” (washington post) How could this be? Are Americans more prone to criminal activity than the rest of the world? How could they be more prone to criminal activity if crime rates have been dropping? Numbers like that should be cause for concern, because if crime rates are dropping then it is only logical for one to expect the number of incarceration to go down as well; unfortunately, the opposite is true. Shockingly, there seem to be a few people who actually profits from keeping people in jails. The practice of mass incarceration who most see as a major problem in the United States of America is actually beneficial to some. The prison system in the United States who was create to
There are over two million people in the United States behind bars. Incarceration in the US is one of the main forms of punishment that leads nothing after for people when getting out. Every state, city, country, all have laws we citizens obey and go by to do best for our country, but what happens someone violates the law? According to Google’s definition of a felony, it says that felony means, “a crime, typically one involving violence, regarded as more serious than a misdemeanor, and usually punishable by imprisonment for more than one year or by death”. Getting caught by the law, being arrested, doing time in jail makes you automatically a felon once your name is in the system. What’s promised after being in jail is something no one should experience. With this in mind, people’s human rights are being taken away from the minute their hands and arms are behind in cuffs. For this reason, what our human rights mean is, “The basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are considered to be entitled, often held to include the rights to life, liberty, equality, and a fair trial,freedom from slavery and torture, and freedom of thought and expression” ( Houghton Mifflin).
From 1973 to 2000 the imprisonment rate in the U.S has increased by a multiple of four, while the actual crime rate saw no such increase over that period. (Visher and Travis, 2003, p. 89-90) Historically, the prison system in America had always been marred with inadequacies and failures, specifically in rehabilitating prisoners. The significant increase in incarceration rates have put an even greater burden on the already inefficient prison system. In reality, the prison system does not actually function as a means of rehabilitating prisoners, and real purpose of the institute is to basically keep the “deplorables” of society away from the public eye. It serves as a tool to degrade members of society to the bottom of the social ladder and strip them of their most basic rights. For many prisoners, rehabilitation comes in the form of “corrections” which is largely characterized by the humiliation, abuse, and subjugation of inmates by correction officers. This form of rehabilitation is largely malicious and ineffective in its procedures and outcomes. Often times inmates, leave prison more emotionally and physically damaged that they were upon entrance as a consequence of the dismal conditions they were subjugated to. The current high rates of recidivism have testified to the fact that our prisons have failed as a deterrent. As a result, it must be
While sentences may be harsh for drug users, what about drug pushers? One cannot say that people who choose to sell drugs should not be behind bars for extended periods of times. These criminals pray on children and the vulnerable to profit off of the addiction of others. These sentencing laws are a necessary evil, to protect the citizens of the United States. Housing criminals in private prisons is a way to break even, or possibly profit, from their crimes. According to Thierry Godard, writer for Smart Asset, “Private companies, forced to compete with state government prices and one another for contracts, can provide correctional services more efficiently than the government itself can” (Godard). This collaboration between government and corporations allows for an exchange of ideas that would be lost otherwise. The burden of competently and efficiently running prisons does not have to fall solely on the shoulders of the government, these companies are supplying a needed service. Private prisons are bolstering the economy, by supplying labor for the creation of goods. If private companies take over, the amount that the common person pays in taxes will go down, because prisons will be more efficient. Even so, there are people working towards prison reformation, in favor of privatization of parole as another revenue stream, bolstering the economy in similar ways to the privatization of prisons. For example ALEC, the American Legislation Exchange Council, is one of these groups that is trying to pass legislation for the welfare of the people. According to Michael Hough, Maryland senator, “Seventy-seven percent of those convicted of drug offenses are rearrested within five years of their release” (Hough). By allowing these users back on the streets the U.S. is promoting drug trafficking and use. The U.S. should privatize parole, allowing for economic growth
Currently, many prisons are beginning to be run by private corporations. If a company is running a prison then they need prisoners to stay in business. Around 1 in every 107 Americans is currently being housed in a prison. The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population yet 25 percent of its prisoners(ACA, 2008). This is the easiest way to maintain a large prison population is by maintaining the current drug war. The largest private prison company in the United States is Corrections Corp. of America(ACA, 2008). In the last twenty years, CCA has donated nearly $5 million dollars to certain political