The Failure Of The American Prison System

In “How to Lock up Fewer People,” Marc Mauer and David Cole argue that the prison system in the US needs to be improved. America’s incarceration rate is far too high, and it must be reduced. To make their argument, they use many facts and shocking statistics. The authors state the problem at hand, recognize the obstacles, and push for reform.

Before we began researching this topic, I thought that the American incarceration system was working well. However, I had some previous knowledge, from news articles saying that many of our prisons were overcrowded and many have poor living conditions. Additionally, I did see the occasional new story on a prisoner bringing to the press the poor conditions they went through while in prison. So when we decided to look into this topic, I was interested in learning about

The U.S. prison system is one of many great controversies when compared to other correctional systems. America’s prison population has increased by 700% (2.4 million current inmates) since the start of the war on drugs in 1971. As a result of this “war”, people that fall into the racial minority have suffered as a direct consequence of unjust legislation. Our prison system is known for its overrepresentation of minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics. This unfortunately gives these groups of people a perennial negative stigma as a result. I argue that the U.S. prison industrial-complex emphatically displays signs of prejudice and racism and disproportionately incarcerates people of color at a rate higher than whites. Yes, there are skeptics who think “the left’s prison-complex” is wrong about their theory of mass incarceration but the statistical data and concrete facts in support of my argument are very compelling.

“Beginning in the 1970s, the prison population began swelling, climbing steadily through 2009. Now, this nation imprisons more of its residents, 2.2 million, than any other.The United States jails a quarter of the world 's prisoners, although it contains only 5 percent of the world 's population. The statistics are sobering for a republic that celebrates justice, fairness and equality as the granite pillars of its democracy. (Walsh, 2016).” The underlying foundations of America 's mass-imprisonment arrangements are tangled ever, legislative issues, social clash and imbalance. It 's a pretzel-rationale maze, and to fathom it or even disentangle it, investigators say, will require clearing, head-on changes. However, those early endeavors in the long run exploded backward, Hinton said, throwing “ "low-income youth — whose families are on welfare, who live in public housing projects, who attend urban public schools, and who have family members with arrest records — as potentially delinquent." ( Walsh, 2016). With regards to the criminal equity framework, examiners say that lessening imbalance essentially would require an update of the country 's sentencing framework, better preoccupation and avoidance programs, jail changes, more successful policing arrangements and preparing, and complete support for previous detainees attempting to shape stable lives. The prison system is unfair because of the mass incarceration of blacks, the war on drugs, the population and the prison

The base of the U.S judicial system is founded on justice and truth, yet there are flaws in the legal and prison systems. People go to prison for crimes they commit then released. They often come out angry and likely to repeat a crime again. To avoid a repeated offense, U.S prison system should implement an assimilation program, to ease convicts into society. So that assimilation is even more successful prisons should offer vocational education programs to inmates, to obtain working skills, benefiting them for the future once they are released.

If there is one thing that makes the world run efficiently, it’s money. Having money and adequate funds, leads to power and peace, no matter the business you’re in. This is no different in the correction industry, one of the least funded areas in the American government system. For as long as America has been founded, there have been a prison system. Granted early systems were horrendous and treated criminals as less than human beings, the modern prison system isn’t perfect either. Even after hundreds of years, the American prison system is flawed. Corrections industries do not communicate with each other causing disparity in the way places are run and which programs are truly helpful in getting people back into society successfully.

The United States incarceration system is a structural foundation of punishment in which is formed by robust authoritarian power. The United States criminal justice system is not an institution to be underestimated, as it represents the highest incarceration rate of all world nations at a staggering 700 inmates per 100 thousand citizens (Krisberg, 7). Based on the social and political structure of democracy in the United States, it is argued that incarceration systems should follow the same roots of equality and freedom; however, the current format demonstrates otherwise. Currently, the United States criminal justice system faces issues of inhumane treatment due to the sheer overcrowding, which restrict inmates from just treatment within penitentiaries. This lack of equality standards was argued in the 2011 court case, Brown v. Plata, which California prison systems were forced to decrease prisons overcapacity rate from 175% to 137.5% due to the overwhelming amount of inmate mistreatment (Koehler, 3). In the decision of Brown v. Plata (2011), supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy argued dignity should be an organizing principle in the United States justice system and demonstrated in all correctional facilities. Anthony Kennedy, along with guest lecturer, Jonathan Simon characterize dignity as a fundamental piece to the incarceration system, and without it, inmates are victimized to cruel and inhumane treatment. Dignity does not consist of domination and unequal treatment of

The idea of prison reform is somewhat interwoven with the idea of criminal recidivism. In the case of violent crime, the prison reform agenda often meets resistance in the form of public opinion, and because of this both those incarcerated and their victims continue to suffer. Lack of reform within America’s prisons is thought by some to perpetuate a cycle of crime, harming both the perpetuators and their victims.

Have you ever been to prison before? Unfortunately it is not uncommon for many people in the United States to end up in prison at any given time in their life. Chances are, if you have not been to prison you know somebody that has been imprisoned, as America has the highest rate of incarceration in the whole world. Although America’s population only accounts for 5% of the world's population, we have the highest prison rate at 25% of the whole world’s incarcerated population (Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2015). Why do we continue to see these prisons overcrowded, and how exactly does this affect the inmates?

Indeed, once upon a time the incarceration system was set in place with two firm duties: retribution and rehabilitation. When did these institutions, once considered virtuous and just, become the hallmark of inequality? On September 27th, 2015, Pope Francis remarked on a visit to a Philadelphia jail “It is painful when we see prison systems, which are not concerned to care for wounds, to soothe pain, to offer new possibilities,” a moving sentiment that would soon resonate with the American population. Unbeknownst to many listening to his gripping words, ⅓ of the world 's female prison population is incarcerated in the United States. And if the magnitude of that figure does not astound you, maybe the fact that every 1 in 15 American prisoners are black, while only 1 in 106 prisoners are white, will. These statistics reported by Harper’s Index embody the blatant corruption of the American incarceration system and the innate institutionalized racism the U.S has sustained throughout history.

Today in the United States a land that claims to be the freest nation on the face of the Earth more people will wake up inside of a federal/state prison or a county jail cell than in any other country on the planet. As of 2012 this figure was a staggering 2,228,400 (jail 744,500; prison 1,483,900) add in to this the additional sum of just over 5 million people on parole (851,200) and probation (3,942,800) giving us a grand total of over 7 million citizens under some level of Federal or State supervision (Glaze and Herberman). This is up from only 1,840,421 in 1980 a percentage increase of 281.56% (Glaze and Herberman). As of 2012 over half of the inmates in the federal prison system (50.6%) were incarcerated for drug charges (Caron and Golinelli) while according to 2011 statistics just under 17% of state prisoners were locked away for offenses related to illegal substances (Carson and Sabol). The cost of maintaining this level of incarceration is in all honesty a tremendous burden upon both our justice system and our tax base. If you were to go to the website www.drugsense.org you would see their drug war clock which increases by $500 every second based upon the National Drug Control Policy’s 2010 statistics (Drugsense.org). The country needs to make serious changes in order to alleviate this Promethean like burden that has been placed on our tax payers and our infrastructure. Our system desperately needs reform in order to rescue society from these metaphorical

Nowadays, when criminals are being convicted for acts like murder and other high terror threats, courts and jurors usually try to figure out if there’s a mental problem or disorder that contributes to the criminal’s reasoning. The history and transformation of American prisons since the eighteenth century has widely shaped the conception that an inmate’s sanity and their wellbeing should be taken into account with prison placement. The first prisons, realizations and shifts in the system throughout time, as well as the shift in thought have all contributed to this idea. Although, not all criminal’s mental health has a direct correlation to their crimes, the two go hand and hand when thinking about the incarcerated as a whole.

Other than the major issues of overcrowding, there are other issues throughout the inner workings of the system, of which includes treatment towards prisoners, budget assessments and limited rehabilitation programs to improve re-entry of former prisoners back into the system. Within the confines of various Federal Correctional Complexes, located throughout the nation, many of the country’s most heinous criminals are harbored, waiting for an imminent death in solitary confinement. It is here that lethal injection, one of the extreme forms of punishment is administered upon these indicted felons. There is even a chamber specifically created to accommodate for this act of destruction on true evil. Aside from federal orders of execution, any criminal that is put into custody under the walls of the Federal Bureau of Prisons is fully under the jurisdiction of the BOP rather than the judicial court. This further implies the tremendous amount of trust that the state puts into the BOP. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, also known as the BOP, has been a chief and vital agency in establishing a solid administration towards the care of prison inmates. The BOP is also accredited as being an irreplaceable overseer towards prison services. Established in 1930, it has proven time and time again that it is the “big dog” when it comes to the declining crime rates all across the United States; this is clearly shown through the fact that a whopping amount of 82% of inmates are being held in the

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.

Yolanda Valentin a 21-year-old prisoner, born as Daniel Valentine, looks and sounds much like a woman if it wasn’t for her sex assignment. After being placed in a cell with two male inmates, Valentin was repeatedly abused. She informed correctional officers of the continued, brutal sexual violence her cellmate was putting her through. The prison system did not respond to her. After all, from their point of view Valentin should have opted for solitary confinement to protect herself from the general population of male inmates. In solitary she would have sat quietly, by herself, for 24 hours in a cell made explicitly for violent prisoners. Valentin, a transsexual inmate in transition, asks herself constantly: “A lot of times I wake up, and I look around at my surroundings, and I see all these men. I think, ‘What am I doing here?’”(Baus).