The Increased Prison Population and Improper Punishment System

"Prisons are closed institutions. They are established and funded by governments to hold people against their will", but why punish (Zyl Smit, 2010)? What is the purpose of prison? This fundamental question stirs up a significant amount of debate. The government, citizens, educators, and even prisoners are divided about the right answers. There is disagreement in the US about the purpose of the prison system. On the one hand, the regulations of the prison system may seek deterrence, incapacitation…

Overcrowded prisons and improper punishment systems are enormous social issues for our government. The United States has seen steady growth in its prisons. A projected increment in seen due to “get-tough” policies that locks up offenders for longer sentences (Ohlemacher, 2007, para. 1). The correction system had been through various phases of transformation, and the government had been tough on crime; this approach had resulted in rising prison populations. There are many factors that cause overcrowding…

California prison system was created in response to the increased amount of criminal activity that sparked during the Gold Rush years. Prior to the Gold Rush, California had prided itself on being a land of health, beauty, and opportunity (Bookspan, xviii). However, immigration and population growth surged, especially amongst foreign convicts and “aliens”, resulting in increased crime. At first, it was decided that punishment for small crimes would be a beating by whip while punishment for serious…

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 Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet just occurrences which are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…

DISPARITIES IN PRISON POPULATIONS Although we would like to believe the world is not as racially charged in 2013 as it was in the 1960s, a look in our penal system would show that minorities are still arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate than whites. The United States has experienced a rise in its prison population over the last 40 years and our incarceration rate is nearly 5 times higher than any other country. Even though 13% of the US population are African American males, they make…

Course Project Outline Scenario #4 U.S. Prison System and its Populations: Whites vs. Minorities Kent Johnson SOCS350 Professor: Dr. J. Johnson June 7, 2010 Table of Contents General Statistics 3 Men vs. Women 4 Statistics: The Who and the Why 6 Black Judges vs. White Judges and Their Decisions 8 What is being done to reverse this Trend 10 References 11 Statistics In the prison system today, there has been an explosion of minorities being…

Is keeping inmates by the hundreds in prison cafeterias instead of cells becoming the norm? This is what a documentary, Life In Prison: The Cost of Punishment, asks. It explores the lives of incarcerated peoples in three California state prisons, portraying the dire consequences of prison overcrowding. As of 2013, the total prison population in the United States was 2,217,000. This is nearly five times the total of 1980, 503,586. The United States has the largest number of incarcerated people in…

term, applied in the Criminal Justice System for criminals who despite having been punished for a crime go on to repeat it, only to be returned to a custodial sentence. It is for this particular reason that the penal system need to decide whether the system is effective in doing its job, or reforms are needed to improve the way it conducts itself. What causes Recidivism? Recidivism is caused by criminals who have been through the courts and prison system and still refuse to turn away from crime;…

After decades trying to prevent it, prison population continued to increase. Mandatory minimum sentences and the privatization created more prisoners, rather than cutting down on the amount incarcerations. Since the 1980’s, the prison population has quadrupled and today one in every one hundred adults are in prison (Mandatory Minimums (HBO)). Infact, America leads the world in prisoners with 20% of the earth’s prison population (The Prison Crisis). In a study done by The American Prospect, charts…

The United States prison population has grown tremendously from approximately 500,000 to 2.3 million people in just three decades. We (U.S) spend almost $70 billion annually to place adults in prison and jails, to confine youth in detention centers, and to supervise 7.3 million individuals on probation and parole. California has the largest prison population in the country, with more than 170,000 individuals behind bars. In Los Angeles, more than half of current parolees live in neighborhoods that…