Switching The Focus From Punishment

The incarceration rate within the United States is skyrocketing compared to the global percentage of incarcerated people. The United States alone makes up 25% of the world's incarcerated population ("Incarceration Nation"). In

The incarceration rate in America is high. In fact, the highest in the world (Zuckerman, 2014). But should it be? According to Bibas (2015), “Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.” (para. 1). America, it seems, in its ‘War on Drugs’, has been incarcerating criminals, even non-violent drug offenders, at a high rate. As more offenders are being incarcerated, more stories are being written, including horror stories about what goes on behind prison walls. Considering the nature of some of the crimes committed by inmates, and being mixed in with the violent criminals, non-violent offenders have no place in this hell. Because of overcrowding, abuse of the inmates, and the lack

Mass incarceration became a public policy issue in the United States in the early 2010s. Now in 2016, there is still much debate over the country’s incarcerated population and incarceration rate. The nation has the highest incarcerated population in the world, with 2,217,947 inmates, in front of China with 1,649,804. America incarcerates 693 inmates per 100,000 residents, only the African island nation Seychelles incarcerates at a higher rate, with 799 for every 100,000 residents. The problem of mass incarceration continues to be assessed in various contexts. Recent analyses are historian Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and criminologist Dr. Elizabeth Brown’s “Toward Refining the Criminology of Mass Incarceration: Group-Based Trajectories of U.S. States, 1977—2010.”

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 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).

Mass Incarceration is a predicament in the U.S. because in the land of the free, there are more than two million people in prison. Prisons are homes to the majority of twenty-two percent of the U.S. population. The U.S. has a massive incarceration rate, seven hundred and sixteen per every one hundred thousand. The U.S. makes five percent of the world’s population and the third country in which most people live in but number one incarcerating humans.

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

Mass incarceration is a term that is used to define the “substantial increase in the number of incarcerated people in the United States’ prisons over the past forty years.” (The Atlantic, 2017) Although America contains about 5% of the world’s population, it holds 25% of the world’s prisoners. When compared to America, the prison populations of oppressive countries, like Russia, are basically nothing. The politics of this “land of the free” in the 80s and 90s led to the dramatic increase in incarceration rates and, by the end of 2010, more than two million people were imprisoned. The US seems to focus more on getting people into prison than on keeping them out.

Though many Americans are aware that their nation imprisons more of its own citizens than any other country in the world, what much fewer of them are aware of is the increasing number in which those citizens are housed in facilities with little to no government oversight. From 2002 to 2009, the amount of inmates held in private prisons grew thirty-seven percent while the overall number of incarcerated Americans during that same timeframe grew by only fourteen percent (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010), a statistic that reveals a worrying trend; that of a disproportionate amount of citizens being housed in what has come to be known as the prison-industrial complex, a term used not only for the growing

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 around 22 percent of the world 's prisoners.” These people are not only prisoners, but they are also parents, sons, and daughters - the loved ones of families. The number of people that have been incarcerated also represents the number of families that have been shattered.

The International Prison Studies Centre determined America’s high incarceration rate through the number of people in prison per 100,000 of the population (Western & Muller, 2013). The findings conducted by the International Prison Studies Centre demonstrate the U.S incarceration rate in 2009 was 743 per 100,000 inmates, which means the U.S exceeds Russia by 25 percent (Western & Muller, 2013). The United States prides itself on being a democratic nation, and advertises itself as a country that enforces freedom. A nation demonstrating such substantial incarceration rate, typically is not a characteristic of democracy especially when it is being compared to a less democratic country like Russia (Kearney, 2014). America’s extensive incarceration rate exceeding a non-democratic country is a sign that something is wrong, and makes this so called “democracy” questionable (Western & Muller, 2013). The United States being the global leader in Mass Incarceration has unfortunately led to many countries following them by

“America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoner” (Bibas, 2015). ​“President Obama insisted that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that

The United States is one of the largest countries in the world so high incarceration rates are expected. However, this rate has drastically increased in the past forty years, surpassing those of countries such as China, which has a population four times larger than the United States

Approximately 2,266,800 adults are currently imprisoned in America. In addition to those numbers, more than 4 million citizens are on probation which means they are being monitored by the Government (Blades, J., Norquist, G., 2014). The State of Texas, which sentenced 400 teens to life sentences shows an example of how serious mass incarceration is, and the current conditions in America’s prisons are unconstitutional stating that 70,000 prisoners are raped every year. According to national data from the US Department of Justice, over 7.2 million people are on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole. Furthermore, the US criminal justice system consumes $212 billion a year and employs 2.4 million people, more than Wal-Mart and McDonald 's combined, the nation 's two largest private employers” (Perkinson, 2010). According to the World Prison Brief in 2009, the United States had the highest incarceration rates, with 743 inmates per 100,000 people. In a 2003 report, Roy Walmsley noted that “more than three-fifths of countries (60.5%) have rates below 150 per

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