Prison Overcrowding Paper

Since the tough-on-crime era began in the 1980s, the California prison system and parolee population have grown tenfold. This is in great part due to the three strikes law that passed in 1994. This law made it a requirement for any offender convicted of a felony with two previous felonies to go to prison for a minimum of twenty five years. This law sent many people to prison for longer sentences due to non-violent drug offenses, when in actuality they should have been sentenced to rehab. Prison overcrowding is an important topic that all Americans should care about, since according to The Bureau of Justice Statistics, over ninety-five percent of all prison inmates will be released at some point, with over eighty-five percent of them being placed under parolee supervision. Of this population, sixty-five percent suffer from substance abuse issues and meet the need for treatment for their addiction. Drug and alcohol abuse, specifically drug abuse, and crime are inextricably related. Unfortunately, the majority of those released from prison who suffer from addiction issues are not treated while incarcerated, and as a result end up back in prison.

The United States has the biggest imprisonment rate on the planet, and paying a high cost for it. Detainment strength finished in the mid-1970s when the jail populace expanded from 300,000 to 1.6million detainees, and the imprisonment rate from 100 for each 100,000 to more than 500 for every 100,000. Nonetheless, there is by all accounts little relationship between the wrongdoing rate and the imprisonment rate (Clear et al., 2013).

The proliferation of prison overcrowding has been a rising concern for the U.S. The growing prison population poses considerable health and safety risks to prison staffs and employees, as well as to inmates themselves. The risks will continue to increase if no immediate actions are taken. Whereas fighting proliferation is fundamentally the duty of the U.S. government, prison overcrowding has exposed that the U.S. government will need to take measures to combat the flaws in the prison and criminal justice system. Restructuring the government to combat the danger of prison overcrowding, specifically in California, thus requires reforms that reestablishes the penal codes, increases the state’s budget, and develops

One problem that is faced in the corrections system today is overpopulation in the prisons. Prisons all over the United States are becoming overcrowded and that leads to many other problems such as

In the 1970s and 1980s, a massive amount of inmates began fillin up the United States prison systems. This huge rate of growth in this short amount of time, has greatly contributed to the prison overcrowding that the United States faces today. In fact, the prisons are still filled to the seams. This enormous flood of inmates has made it practically impossible for prison officials to keep up with their facilities and supervise their inmates. One of the main reasons why many prisons have become overcrowded is because of states’ harsh criminal laws and parole practices (Cohen). “One in every 100 American adults is behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the world” (Cohen). The amount of inmates in corrections systems, throughout the

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.

Jail booking personnel do not know from day to day the types of inmates who will be brought to the jail by local, federal, and state law enforcement agencies, be other correctional institutions such as juvenile centers, local jails, out of state jails, or federal or state prisons. The jail booking desk is the main entry point. There are miscellaneous types of offenders who also pass through the booking desk such as the witness who is being held in protective custody. Another type of offender is an inmate from the jail system who violates a rule of work release or home incarceration program, or a criminal statute that dictates that inmate’s removal from such programs pending further criminal action. Jails may hold inmates who are serious security

"The most common rate is 90%, though some prisons are able to snag a 100% promise from their local governments" (Mathews 2). Contracts stating the minimum capacity rate of the prison between the government and private prisons exist for all private prisons, which seems sensible because how else would the company guarantee profits. However the quotas these contracts call for presents a problem because "[w]hile incarceration statistics have skyrocketed, crime rates have increased much more slowly" (Smith 3). A cause for the rise in jailed rates is the quota presented by the private prison industry. Private prisons seek not to reform prisoners, but to increase profits, and so these prisons run like businesses. The largest private prison corporation, Corrections Corporation of America, have uncomprependle

Healthcare is a big topic no matter how you view it, but when looking at it from the point of a person who is in prison, it takes on a whole new view. Those who are in prison have federal and state laws that say that the prisons must provide them with medical facilities for their healthcare needs. This paper will identify a governmental agency that regulates the healthcare that is provided to prisoners in an institution within the United States, along with the foundation of such an agency and who regulates the licenses, accreditation, certifications, and authorization for employment for those who work within one of these

In considering the jails, as well as state and federal prisons, and in modern America, one must understand the historical contexts in which the three institutions were conceptualized and put into practice. Then a discussion of the reasons behind the drastic recent growth off these three ancient institutions must be had. Finally, a review of the security classifications which enable these facilities to carry out the business of incarceration and rehabilitation in a secure and safe manner should be conducted to round out our consideration of these ancient institutions. The role of jails and prisons is a complicated one, made more

In the United States, there’s two types of incarcerations: jail vs prison and federal vs state. The key difference between all prison systems is the size, location, and quantity of inmates and the crime rate in each area. Overpopulation has been an issue for a while mainly because for the safety for the inmates, the Three Strike Law, and also, society feeling that rehabilitation isn’t what they want for convicted felons. In the future, the system of corrections should decrease the overpopulation issue, for the budget plan, and safety of inmates.

The overall belief of the Penitentiary was that most prisoners would benefit from the incarceration experience. The penitentiary concept would remove felony offenders from normal society, and through penitence, pastoral counseling, solitude, and reasonable discipline, antisocial behaviors would be corrected. However, the system became overcrowded; prisoners had to be doubled up in their cells, thus removing the concept of solitude. Allegations of abuse and brutality arose and by the end of the Civil War, the penitentiary’s population had grown to 1,117 prisoners (Siegel & Bartollas, 2011).

Despite all of our efforts, not every problem has a universal solution, according to Solomon Moore in The Prison Overcrowding Fix, especially when that problem affects a whole country. Moore wrote his article in 2009, which is economically known as a the period of unemployment. Taxes were increasing every second, and the economy was still failing. The year 2009 was the year before Obama Care was officially implemented, showing how the health economy was. Funding decreased in prisons, the health issues in prisons were so severe they were causing death, people were dying of preventable illnesses and commiting suicide.

Due to budget crises in states across the United States of America, state governments must cut funding to their punishment facilities causing overcrowding in prisons to increase every day. Overcrowded prisons pose a potential breeding ground for crime as hundreds of inmates are squeezed into small accommodations. Thousands of low-level offenders receive jail sentences each day, these criminals make up about a third of the inmates in the United States. In the words of Republican Governor Mitch Daniels of India, in the conservative National Review magazine, “We are imprisoning, in our most expensive spaces, more people for relatively minor, nonviolent offenses, like low-level property and drug violations. Some of our guests are not with the state corrections system long enough for any rehabilitation, substance-abuse counseling or job training to take place” (Katel). Evidently attention and change to this neglected criminal punishment system need to be addressed. This issue remains a troubling problem in our country, state governments offer the best possible solutions to prison overcrowding such as directing local officials to perform and improve prison construction, rethinking criminal law and responding to budgetary concerns.

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).