Mass Incarceration Increase Crime

Ever since the first prison opened in the United States in 1790, incarceration has been the center of the nations criminal justice system. Over this 200 year period many creative alternatives to incarceration have been tried, and many at a much lower cost than imprisonment. It wasn’t until the late 1980’s when our criminal justice systems across the country began experiencing a problem with overcrowding of facilities. This problem forced lawmakers to develop new options for sentencing criminal offenders.

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

The United States prison population has grown seven-fold over the past forty years, and many Americans today tend to believe that the high levels of incarceration in our country stem from factors such as racism, socioeconomic differences, and drugs. While these factors have contributed to the incarceration rate present in our country today, I argue that the most important reason our country has such a high incarceration rate is the policy changes that have occurred since the 1970s. During this time, the United States has enacted policy changes that have produced an astounding rise in the use of imprisonment for social control. These policy changes were enacted in order to achieve greater consistency, certainty, and severity and include sentencing laws such as determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing, mandatory minimum sentencing, and three strikes laws (National Research Council 2014). Furthermore, I argue that mandatory sentencing has had the most significant effect on the incarceration rate.

The criminal justice system focuses more on criminalization and incarceration than it does on rehabilitation. The United States of America wins the award for the highest incarceration rate in the world with over 2.3 million people in correctional facilities. America itself contains only about five percent of the world population, but accounts for twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners (American Civil Liberties Union). With a longstanding history of mass incarceration and

Prison Overcrowding: Prisons have become warehouses of human beings as opposed to institutions meant to provide a means to engage in restitution by delinquent individuals in society. “One necessary condition for rising incarceration rates has been the massive expansion in prison construction and capacity, without which prison populations could not have grown so dramatically” (Guetzkow & Schoon, 2015). As more prisons are being built, more delinquents are being incarcerated in order to fill them. “Prison facilities are filled 38 percent beyond rated capacity, with overcrowding being particularly acute in higher-security institutions” (Rowland, 2013).

The role of the penal system in America is to uphold the rule of law by imposing punishment such as probation or prison time (depending on the crime) for people who violate the law. Few fail to realize the statistical makeup of the penal system, which includes factors such as race, gender, and criminal offense. After researching data on mass incarceration, it came to my attention that the criminal justice system, we want to protect us, is doing more harm than good. Mass incarceration is a form of racial injustice and economic inequality within America.

The number of prisoners in United States prisons has increased and are still growing day-by-day. The Sentencing Project, an organization that fights for a fair and effective U.S. justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addresses unjust racial disparities and practices in its article “Trends in U.S. Corrections.” They write, “The United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prisons and jails — a 500% increase over the last forty years ”(The Sentencing Project 1). According to The Sentencing Project statistics, the number of prisoners has dramatically increased in the past four decades,

The current crime and incarceration trends have declined since early 1990s, which in part is due to the current reforms that takes place within the criminal justice system, such as early release dates for drug charges and non-violent crimes (Mauer, 2011). The incarceration rates in the United States are “three to four times that of other industrialized nations,” and the punishment scale is viewed as “out of proportion to that of other industrialized nation” (Mauer, 2011).

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

In the last few decades, there has been an increase in the number of individuals who have been incarcerated in both federal and state prisons. Indeed, research has shown that harsher sentencing policies and more punitive laws have resulted in the incarceration of more than 2.3 million people in the varied jails and prisons; thereby making the United States the leader as far as incarceration is concerned. Incarceration and sentencing systems have conventionally been aimed at having varying goals including rehabilitation, incapacitation, punishment and deterrence. Recent decades have seen the enactment of sentencing policy initiatives with the aim of enhancing the criminal justice systems deterrent effect.

In fact, many studies have been conducted to study that issue but none of the studies have been able to yield persistent results. For example, Marvell found in his study that when more people are incarcerated the crime rate decreases (Lim, 2008, p. 3). However, Liedka found in his study that when more people are incarcerated the crime rate increases (Lim, 2008, p. 3). Regardless of the results that these studies have yielded, lawmakers passed laws that created mandatory and longer sentences, thus making punishment more severe for criminals while at the same time creating the beginnings of mass incarceration (Lim, 2008, p. 12).

Modern trends in criminal justice over the past few decades exhibit the need for some criminal penalties amid the extremes of imprisonment and regular probation. Usually, increases in crime have been retorted with increases in imprisonment. This has developed a counterproductive model that often lead to overcrowded prisons and jails, early release of potentially dangerous criminals, and corrections budgets that eat away state funds. In an effort to be hard on crime, many jurisdictions are making their incarceration standards harsher.

Prison populations around the world are continuing to grow every single day.“ The nation 's jail population flows like a torrential river with upwards of 12 million individuals moving in and out of institutions annually” (Lyman, 167). The population is continuing to grow in jails because of the growth in the crime itself. It is debated whether or not nonviolent criminals should be given jail time. There are other punishments that could be given to criminals that have not created violent crimes, for example serving community service, being on house arrest and speaking to a parole officer. Another question that society considers is whether or not in the long run will society itself benefit from nonviolent criminals not receiving jail time. Society would benefit if nonviolent criminals were punished in other ways than jail time. Society would benefit since overcrowding in jails wouldn’t be an issue, tax costs would be reduced, and recidivism would decrease as a result.

Some researchers like Greenwood and Abrahamse (1982) are of the view that selective incapacitation strategy is more efficient way to cap the crime rate. They used self reported data from prison and jail inmates to demonstrate that there is wide variation in individual offense rates and that the factors associated with higher rates of recidivism are also associated with higher rates of offending. The study found that selective incapacitation strategies may lead to significant reduction in crime without increasing the total number of offenders

The United States is known as the country with the highest incarceration rates, which is the main cause of overcrowding in prison. Overcrowding in prison only points the public officials in two directions that are: creations of new additional prisons and early release of non-violent offenders. The creation of new prisons is an idea that will be discussed eventually. Early release has became a lose-lose situation for the community since a huge majority of early release offenders are non-violent and drug users. This becomes a lose-lose situation because about seventy-five percent of those criminals become re-offenders in the future and they eventually turn into violent offenders and hurt or kill an innocent citizen (Trujillo, 2017). However, early release becomes a win-win situation for the prisons since they benefit from new arrests in exchange for profit. Whether overcrowding in prisons is an actual issue that’s almost impossible to resolve or a problem just being pushed to the side due to the constant hunger of the state’s benefit from currency, this must be stopped and resolved.