Over Population in the Prison System Costs Billions, and That Affect Us All!

The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate. With five percent of the world's population, our country houses nearly twenty-five percent of the world's reported prisoners. Currently there are approximately two million people in American prisons or jails. Since 1984 the prison population for drug offenders has risen from ten percent to now over thirty percent of the total prison population. Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007; 95,446 for drug offenses. State prisons held a total of 1,296,700 inmates in 2005; 253,300 for drug offenses. Sixty percent of the drug offenders in prisons are nonviolent and were purely in prison because of drug offenses (Drug War Facts). The question then arises,

This journal article discusses how the government has increased “mandatory sentencing” using “aggressive initiatives” for drug related crimes. Additionally, these government implemented sentencing guidelines have made the prison population grow

The War on Drugs is seen by many as an enormous factor of mass incarceration. There were more than 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S. in 2014. More than 80% of them were for possession only (Drug Policy Alliance, 2017). 208,000 people are incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons and 97,000 are incarcerated in federal prisons for the same reason. 1 in 5 incarcerated people are drug offenders (Peter Wagner, Bernadette Rabuy, 2017). According to Politifact, “The state and federal prison population remained fairly stable through the early 1970s, until the war on drugs began. Since then, it has increased sharply every year, particularly when Reagan expanded the policy effort in the 1980s, until about 2010…. In 1980, about 41,000 people were incarcerated for drug crimes, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2014, that number was about 488,400 — a 1,000 percent increase.” Even other factors, like

The War on Drugs is one cause for the mass incarceration that has become apparent within the United States. This refers to a drastic amount of people being imprisoned for mainly non-violent crime (“Mass Incarceration” 2016). In addition to people who are not an immediate threat to society being locked up for a substantial duration of time, the economic consequences are costing states and taxpayers millions of dollars. Specifically, every one in five people incarcerated is in prison due to some

In the documentary ‘Incarcerating US’ they discussed the issue of how the growth of incarceration is becoming extremely ridiculous. It introduced several issues with the system along with a few concepts to resolve the criminal justice system. For the US to be only 5% of the population, but have 25% of the incarceration rate, the US has the largest prison population. Throughout the documentary they allowed inmates to share their personal experiences/stories about what decision they made to make them receive time in prison. In the movie it discussed the war on drugs that was once considered to be the major issue. Instead of going against the issue head on it was decided that it would be better to attack those that are using the drug. There is

The United States incarcerates more people, per capita, than any other nation in the entire world. State and local prisons and jails account for about 80% of incarcerations. Although crime rates have decreased since the 1990s, incarceration rates have soared. According to a recent Prison Policy Initiative publication, approximately 2.3 million people are currently “locked up” in the United States. Of these 2.3 million people, 1 in 5 are locked up for a drug related offense. Statistics show that prisoners and felons imprisoned for drug related crimes are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. The mass incarceration issue in the United States derives from the many arrests associated with these “offenses” regarding drugs and the war on drugs.

Incarceration rates in the United States have exploded due to the convictions for drug offenses. Today there are half a million in prison or jail due to a drug offense, while in 1980 there were only 41,100. They have tripled since 1980. The war on drugs has contributed the most to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color, most of them African-Americans. The drug war is aimed to catch the big-time dealers, but the majority of the people arrested are not charged with serious offenses, and most of the people who are in prison today for drug arrests, have no history of violence or selling activity. The war on drugs is also aimed to catch dangerous drugs, however nearly 80 percent of

One of the largest factors that has contributed to the high numbers of the prison populations and the racial disparities of the criminal justice system has been the “war on drugs”.

Mandatory minimums for controlled substances were first implemented in the 1980s as a countermeasure for the hysteria that surrounded drugs in the era (“A Brief History,” 2014). It was believed that stiff penalties would discourage people from using drugs and enhance public safety (“A Brief History,” 2014). However, that theory has failed and instead of less illegal drug activity, there are more people incarcerated. Over half of federal prisoners currently incarcerated are there on drug charges, a percentage that has risen 116 percent since 1970 (Miles, 2014). Mass incarceration is an ever growing issue in the United States and is the result of policies that support the large scale use of imprisonment on a sustained basis for social, political or economic purposes that have little to do with law enforcement. Drug policies stemming from the War on Drugs are to blame and more specifically, the mandatory minimum sentencing mandates on petty drug charges which have imprisoned millions of non-violent offenders in the last three decades. Since this declaration

We must enact policies that downscale the prison population. The best approach is to shift resources away from the incarceration and punishment of certain inmate categories, such as nonviolent drug offenders, investing instead in their rehabilitation. Though correction systems have historically favored punishment over ‘softer’ rehabilitation, most nonviolent, drug-related offenders would benefit more from rehabilitation than incarceration. Today, in great part as a consequence of the War on Drugs, our prisons house over half a million drug offenders, representing over one-half of the federal inmate population in the United States, an increase of 790 percent since 1980. It is time for new leadership on the War on Drugs which has cost billions of dollars and has caused the endangerment of inmates’ and correctional officers’ lives due to mass incarceration. Do we wish to continue being the most punitive developed country in the world? Instead of implementing mandatory

Critics argue that legalization of certain drugs will not end the drug war and that instead, it will cause more violence and issues for the county’s well being. In the mid-1980’s the cocaine epidemic hit and a large amount of crime, deaths from overdoses and violence came with it. The result of this was laws being placed with minimum punishment for drug trafficking to attempt to control the issue. Throughout the early 1990s crime started to slowly decrease and in 2013 the amount of crime was reduced in half. One viewpoint is that once the title of being non-violent labeled drug traffickers crime started to rise anew. Some crimes included murders of innocent bystanders and more drug flow into the U.S (Cook1). William J. Bennett and John P. Walters, Boston Globe writers, complicate matters further when they write “For 25 years before President Obama, U.S policy confronted drug

The federal prison population has increased dramatically over the past two decades with drug offenders carrying mandatory minimum sentences, playing a significant role attributing to its increase population (Saris, 2013). The twin attack on drug offenses due to the creation of Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 led to the largest and fastest growing category in prison populations. Many of the drug offenders incarcerated were nonviolent offenders with 21 percent admitted in 1991 were reported to not having a single incidence of criminal violence in their background (Murphy, 1997; Webster, 2015). With the lack of discretion judges had in sentencing non-violent drug offenders based off a restricted guideline grid, many across the states began devising an alternative. In 1989, States Attorney of Dade County in Florida, Janet Reno and Judge Stanley Goldstein established the first ever drug court in Dade County in an effort to address the revolving door of reoffending (Murphy, 1997;

Due to mandatory sentencing for minor drug offences, the American prison system is overflowing with inmates. According to E. Ann Carson, a Statistician for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Fifty percent (95,800) of sentenced inmates in federal prison on September 30, 2014 (the most recent date for which federal offense data are available) were serving time for drug offenses. In comparison to the 53% in state prisons, violent offenders represented 7% of the federal prison population (14,000 prisoners)” (Carson 17). Half of the United States’ prison population in both state and federal is incarcerated for drug related crimes. This is huge compared to the seven percent of the population in federal prisons for violent crimes. The United States Federal Registrar says “The average annual cost to confine an inmate in a Community Corrections Center for Fiscal Year 2011 was $26,163” (Prisons Bureau). This cost falls to the tax payers. It would cost taxpayers over two and a half billion dollars to house all the people guilty of minor drug offences in federal prison

Of these offenders, 65% received mandatory minimum sentences (FAMM, 2013). Further, data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Labor Statistic show a continual increase in the number of drug arrests at both the state and federal level over the last decades coupled with an increase in the number of drugs seizures by law enforcement. These drug arrests do not coincide with an increase in targeting of drug trafficking offenders- unlike what creators of the policy intended. In 2016, the FBI Uniform Crime Report estimated that there were 1,186,810 arrests for drug law violations with only 15.3% (182,048) of said arrests being for the manufacturing or sale of drugs. Such a small percentage of drug traffickers arrested, in combination with a decrease in the rate of production, sale, and trafficking arrests from 2010 (18.1% or 296,631 individuals), represents a failure of mandatory minimum policy’s initial goal of targeting high-level offenders (FBI UCR,

The drug war has dramatically affected the number of imprisoned Americans, as well as its prisons. According to DrugSense.Org, 1,576,339 people have been arrested for drug law offenses this year alone. And out of those, 9,261 have been incarcerated. As for marijuana offenses, 747,183 people have been detained. In fact, most of the non-violent offenders sitting in state, local and federal prisons