Justice And Its Impact On Public Safety

The United States spends nearly $81 billion per year on corrections, but where is this money coming from, where is it going, and is it actually reducing crime rates? Crime rates in the United States have fallen since 1991 and murder rates have also fallen by half in last 25 years, however the prison population has increased by 500% in the last 40 years. Increase in the number of incarcerated citizens also lead to an increase in new prisons around the country and also the crippling of the american justice system. As the author of Wages of Rebellion describes, the prison-industrial-system as the most

Today, more than 2 million Americans are incarcerated in either a state facility, federal correctional facility or a local installation (Batey,2002). Due to longer sentences, incorporating harsh sentencing guidelines, and mandatory minimum punishments (NeSmith,2015). With each inmate costing taxpayers an average of $30,000 annually. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 were increased sentences for a broad range of offenses, as well as establishing federal penalties for most murders and a large number of other crimes already subject to state law (Batey,2002). In addition to reducing the discretion of state judicial systems; as well as 85 percent of sentence satisfaction and establishing a mandatory life sentence for those convicted of three serious violent crimes or drug offenses (NeSmith,2015). .

There are over two million offenders incarcerated in the United States creating a strain on correctional institutions (Williams, 2014). The costs of incarcerating the full seven million offenders alone would deplete budget allowances into the red. The annual costs for one incarcerated offender is over thirty thousand dollars. The math is incomprehensible, housing over seven million offenders annually would require a budget of over two hundred billion dollars just for incarceration. In some cases, the costs are even higher, as noted from the text, in a maximum-security prison the costs could exceed one hound thousand dollars a year (Latessa & Smith, 2011).

This unfair legislature depletes law enforcement resources, that instead could be utilized for other serious crimes. In federal prisons, it costs $29, 000 on average to maintain a single inmate, taking possession of 25% of the budget distributed to the Department of Justice. As written in the a Washington Post Article, US District Attorney Judge Mark Bennett stated that “he couldn’t forget was the total, more than 1,100 nonviolent offenders and counting to whom he had given mandatory minimum sentences he often considered unjust. That meant more than $200 million in taxpayer money he thought had been misspent.” . Apart from the financial aspect, mandatory minimum sentencing simply fills to reduce crime in society. Over the years, the amount of people arrested for drug offenses

Each day in the United States, the correctional system supervises over six million of its residents. Approximately two million people are in prison or jail, while four million are on probation or parole. Thus, making the United States having the largest prison population in the world. In 1972, 161 U.S. residents were incarcerated in prisons and jails per 100,000. By 2012 that number had nearly quintupled to 707 per 100,000. The jail and prison population had grown to about 2.23 million people, yielding a rate of incarceration that was by far the highest in the world. We have determined as a society and as a country that the incarceration, supervision and the specific fines for a particular crime are that person’s debt to society. Most people

The United States of America has the highest prison population in the world. Despite the fact that the United States holds only 5% of the world’s population, it accounts for about 25% of the world’s prison population (Deady, 2014, p. 1). Statistics also show that the United States has a recidivism rate of over 75% (Cooper, Durose, & Snyder, 2014, p. 1). Because of this, billions of tax dollar are spent on state and federal prison incarceration every

Confinement has been the weapon of mass destruction in fighting crime in America. Since the early 1970s, prisons have paved the way to incarceration. The nation’s prison population increased by 705 percent, between 1973 and 2009, resulting in more than one in every 100 adults behind bars. This rapid growth came at a healthy cost that stripped the annual state and federal budget on corrections by 305 percent during the past two decades, to $52 billion. In the same period, corrections spending doubled as a share of state funding. In the United States, one in every fifty-two adults is on probation or parole. According to the National Bureau of Justice Statics, in the United States between the year of 2013 and 2014, an estimated 4.7 million adults were under

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.

Overcrowding prisons can be toxic not only for the inmates but also the corrections officers who are constantly working. There are better ways to protect our communities than mass incarceration. In the United States, incarceration defers punishment based on the severity and kind of the crime and. For example, allow drug offenders to serve a shorter sentence, release more elderly prisoners, give prisoners a full year off their sentences for participating in drug rehabilitation, and send more foreign inmates to their home countries. In the article Prison Overcrowding Threatens Public Safety and State Budgets, the author informs “From the collected data, the Initiative found that the incarceration system in this country “hold[s] more than 2.4 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails” (Williams 1). This was published in 2014,

Recidivism can be better understood through the flaws of the United States’ prison industrial complex. The U.S. spends $6 towards correctional facilities for every $10 we spend on higher education (Pew Center on the States, 2008). Research from 2014 demonstrates that we house 2.4 million people into correctional facilities including: local jails, federal prisons, state prisons, juvenile detention centers, immigrant detention

Imprisonment is a rising social issue in America. To put in a numerical perspective, America at only 4% of the world’s population of 7.1 billion is surprisingly the world’s largest jailer at an overwhelming 22 % of the global prison population (Lee 2015). Currently the prison system costs American’s nearly 70 billion dollars (Borowski 2015). With this amount of federal funds going towards housing and feeding inmates, questions begin forming about the effectiveness of the correctional system. Do the punishments fit the crimes, and if so, is it economically beneficial? This paper discusses the benefits and problems of the correctional system in the United States, and

Of the nearly nine million people incarcerated worldwide, the United States houses over two million inmates in its federal, state, and local facilities. While the goal of the judicial system is to enforce the law and protect the people, it comes at a price to taxpaying citizens at approximately thirty-nine billion dollars annually. The purpose of this research is to clearly define the required expenditures of the prison system, identify anomalies in court sentencing at the federal, state and local levels, and pinpoint cost-savings to reduce the financial burden to tax-paying citizens.

Bohn & Hanley (2011) expresses a clear dramatic increase in the number of people incarcerated in the United States since the early 1970’s, mostly because of drugs (pg. 365). Another notable fact reveals the increase of confinement is the rising charge in price per day to house prisoners; as well, keep jails and prison overcrowded to make more profit (Bohn & Hanley, 2011, pg.369). Although efforts to provide alternatives methods to long-term incarceration exists, the fact still remains that private sectors that own prisons and jails still depend on a high rate of imprisonment (Bohm & Hanley, 2011, pg. 370). Noticeably, the strategic approach taken is to build larger facilities to house more offenders, make more profit from their crimes and

Faced with a glaring deficit and terrifying examples of ineffective spending around the globe, lawmakers looking for cost-saving measures would do well to turn to prisons. Prison reform must attain the lowest economic costs, lowering actual taxpayer dollars spent without giving up the benefits of attaining important social goals, which represent another form of cost when lost. Undoubtedly, the current prison system is doing little to separate the US from its international counterparts in minimizing such cost, yet prison privatization has yielded hopeful results, as private correctional facilities seem to have a striking advantage over public ones in reducing both short-term costs in terms of prison operations, and long-terms costs, in

In America’s tough economic society, over population has become an exceedingly hot topic issue. However, overcrowding in America’s prison system has been a severe problem since the 1970's. The majority of the changes have come from different policies on what demographic to imprison and for what reason. The perspective of locking up criminals because they are "evil" is what spawned this (Allen, 2008). Because of this perspective the prison system in America is in need of serious reorganization. Since 1980, most states have one or more of their prisons or the entire system under orders from the federal courts to maintain minimum constitutional standards (Stewart, 2006).