The Failing Punitive System Of Today 's Society

In, “The Caging of America”, by Adam Gopnik explains the problems in the in the American criminal justice system focusing more on the prison system. Some of the struggles that Gopnik states in his article are mass incarceration, crime rate, and judges giving long inappropriate sentencings to those with minor crimes. He demonstrates that inmates are getting treated poorly than helping them learn from their actions. Using facts and statistics, Gopnik makes his audience realize that there is an urgent need of change in the American prison system. The main idea of Gopnik’s article is that the prison system needs to improve its sentencing laws because prisons are getting over crowed. Gopnik’s argument is valid because there is a problem in the sentencing laws that has caused a malfunction in the prison system as a whole.

The United States is regarded as a country of innovation and progress. However, the prison and disciplinary systems in the U.S. fall short in several aspects. With the highest incarceration rate in the world, one might expect American prisons to be prepared for providing quality care and rehabilitation for inmates. Unfortunately, this is not the reality - with a growing number of privatized prisons, the quality of life for inmates and their families is dissipating. The U.S. prison system is in desperate need of reform; closing down private prisons will help in alleviating monetary pressure, reducing abuse reports, and lowering the rate of reincarceration in individuals. Prison reform should be seen as a priority, as nonviolent offenders are suffering far more than they should, and are purposely conditioned to be reincarcerated after their release. Private prisons are rapidly growing in the U.S. to keep up with a growing number of inmates. With the rising number of prisoners, prisoner abuse levels are also rising exponentially. This is due to the fact that private prisons are a booming industry that exploits prisoners for profits. Private prisons may seem beneficial at a glance; however, they enforce lax regulations and are notorious for overcrowding and “barbaric” conditions. Prisons should rehabilitate nonviolent offenders in

When we think about prisons, jails, and courthouses, our minds are meant to draw a connection to cold, hard, justice and fair punishments for guilty and deserving parties. Yet, in our judicial and prison systems around the world, this idea is nowhere close to reality. From inhumane punishments, to mass incarceration, and “trapping” people in the system based on race or financial status, justice is far from being served.

Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV.   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison.   Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.

The United States currently has the highest number of prisoners in the world. According to Glaze and Herrmann (2013), approximately 6.9 million adults are under some form of correctional supervision in the United States. Crime in the United States is relatively equal to that of any other industrialized nation, so why does the United States house so many inmates irrespective of the fact that the nation cannot successfully manage a budget for the institution as well as manage the inmates? An inmate, Victor Hassine, provides insight as to what prisoners physically and mentally experience during incarceration as well as his ideas on the effects of prisons on inmates in his book, Life without Parole.

There is no objection that should someone commit a crime, they must also pay the subsequent consequences, whether it be a fine, a prison sentence or even both. At times, especially in the prisons, even these punishments are not enough and thus an extra step is taken to ensure the misbehaved party does not repeat their error again. Inmates may be placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of times, ranging from weeks to even decades. With absolutely no human interaction, a holding cell smaller than a horse’s stable, and deprivation of basic human rights and senses, solitary confinement is the wrong way to rehabilitate prisoners since it is ethically wrong, very costly and detrimental to inmate health, both physical and mental.

In the world because some crimes are more severe than others, human beings decided that deprivation of liberty was the best form of punishment. The idea was to make prison a system for corrections, rather than detention alone. These ideas soon manifested in schools of philosophy and criminology were the notion was defended that punishment should be more lenient only at the cost of the greater good and aimed to change the behavior itself. Eventually these ideas gave birth to a new form of incarcerations designed to deter both rise in crime and to reform, based on self-reflection over the prisoner’s choices. Well then why are the incarcerations in the United States so high one might ask? In the United States

Prison’s were established a long time ago to try to put an end to the rapidly increasing crime rate, however over time we are seeing the effectiveness of the most prisons decreasing. As a result of this epidemic, prisons have a higher recidivism rate and over 40 percents are currently operating over maximum capacity (Holder.) Through different types of research, we are finding out that our prison systems are no longer effective and there is a serious need for improvement. The United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate almost ¼ of the worlds prisoners (Holder.)

The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration. It spends more resources on its prison system than any other nation and has the largest prison population in the world. Between 1980 and 2016, the number of inmates in U.S. state and federal prisons increased from 320,000 to more than 1.5 million. This corresponds to a change in the incarceration rate from 139 to 450 prisoners per 100,000 residents. Most lawmakers tend to believe that incarceration is a necessary construct needed to reform criminals to properly incorporate them into society. They insist imprisonment reduces crime rates through incapacitation and deterrence. Thus, it is not surprising that expenditures on corrections increased as states built new prisons,

Within this paper, you will find a comprehensive review of the United States prison system, and why it needs to analyzed to better support and reform the people of this country. I plan to persuade the other side (politicians and society) into seeing that the way the prison system is now, is not ethical nor economical and it must change. We have one of the world’s largest prison population, but also a very high rate of recidivism. Recidivism is when the prisoners continuously return to prison without being reformed. They return for the same things that they were doing before. So, this leads us to ask what exactly are we doing wrong? When this happens, we as a nation must continuously pay to house and feed these inmates. The purpose of a prison needs to be examined so we can decide if we really are reforming our inmates, or just continuing a vicious cycle. What is the true purpose of prison besides just holding them in a cell? There must be more we can do for these hopeless members of society.

The United State’s prison system was initially designed to punish and rehabilitate individuals whom were convicted of a felony or other serious offense. Inmates are sentenced for a certain amount of time, or the entirety of their life based on how serious of a crime that person has committed. The Idea of imprisoning a person as a form of punishment dates back to medieval times however, it wasn’t until right before the American Revolution humane prisons started appearing in this country. Today, prisons are more populated than they have ever been and are functioning not only as a place to reform people’s morals, but also as a highly profitable investment for the wealthy to exploit. The Prison system is so devoted to making

Lastly, a more punitive justice system would cause overcrowding within our justice system, making a more detrimental environment for the offenders to live in. The purpose of prisons should be to rehabilitate offenders and prepare them to reenter society. Rather, what prions are doing is locking inmates away in atrocious environments, making them live with less resources and less space to function. This is not a suitable environment for any human being. Cook & Roesh (2012) contend that, “double-bunking inmates increased because of overcrowding, and there are more segregation-like units which have limited offenders’ access to rehabilitation programs” (p. 220). By limiting offenders rehabilitation programs, prisons are not offering their inmates a chance at improving themselves, when the inmates are released, there is still a chance of recidivism. Furthermore, overcrowding showed signs of poor mental and physical health (Cook & Roesh, 2012, p. 220). If a more punitive justice system were to come into place, mass incarceration would develop putting prisons at a higher risk of overcrowding. Through overcrowding there are health issues pertaining to the inmates and leaves them with a higher risk of recidivism when leaving prison. The job of prisons should be to turn offenders into productive members of society, not subject them to inhumane living conditions. Although offenders are incarcerated as a punishment to their crimes, it does not show progressive results when the

With incarcerations on the rise, the inmate population across the nation is becoming a serious topic of debate in today’s society regarding both political and economic issues. With most prisons working at thirty-nine per cent over capacity, it is becoming not only a hazard for the guards and inmates, but for the reputation of the justice system itself (Bewig). Many see prison incarceration as a way of radically reforming the criminal into a “normal” citizen. Prison is often thought of as a reformatory, a place where those who have wronged society learn the errors of their way, and later rejoin society to become better citizens. While it is a utopic vision, and there are countless examples of prisoners turning their lives around (Bunch). Others feel that the purpose of prison is to ensure the security of the public as well as to penalize lawlessness in a manner that focuses on punishment fitting of the crime. In 1984 Congress changed the ruling that imprisonment could be used on a “faith in rehabilitation” because of a concern that “rehabilitation … had failed.” Some lower courts have interpreted the ruling in different ways, but the overall justification behind this ruling is to implement the guideline that a federal judge cannot consider rehabilitation in determining whether to incarcerate an offender, or how severe the sentencing should be. It is important to keep in mind that this does not indicate that rehabilitation isn’t impossible; hope should always be expressed that

How do you punish a person who is already being punished? This is the problem the penal system faces. On the surface solitary confinement seems like the perfect solution. Put into place to protect prison workers and other inmates from being harmed by dangerous and unruly prisoners, the side effects of solitary confinement can often be far worse and destructive to prison rehabilitation than the benefits of such a system. The abuse and overuse of this form of punishment has had severe repercussions on a social and moral level. Social exclusion, rehabilitation in the form of punishment, and prison workers' lack of control in many maximum security prisons all contribute to the detrimental effects that solitary, as it is colloquially known,

It is common knowledge that the American prison system has grown exponentially in the last few decades. The prison population within the last forty years has risen by two million inmates. Multiple factors such as overcrowding and cost cutting have also decreased the quality of life within prisons by an order of magnitude. With this rising statistic, it becomes increasingly urgent to understand the effect of incarceration on our prisoners and whether the reformation process is actually doing more harm than good.