The Pros And Cons Of Prison Overcrowding

The scenario was also facing an overcrowding prison issue, in which led to the unsafe and unhealthy conditions of the prison facility. The state supreme court ruled the released of 5,000 inmates in order to reduce the overcrowding problem. This type of planning will required a long-range goal to evaluate whether releasing 5,000 inmates will be beneficial for the community, the inmates and the correctional facility as well.

The data from the study demonstrated that therapeutic community theory substance abuse treatment in a correctional facility was, “Effective in reducing the recidivism and that the time spent in treatment was positively related to greater periods between re-arrest and to a greater probability of positive outcomes. (Wexler, and Williams, 1986, Wexler, Falkin, and Lipton, 1990)

With California jails and prisons still struggling with finding a reform for non-violent drug offenders the states recidivism rates continue to reach unprecedented numbers. Between 1983 and 1998, drug admissions to state and federal prisons increased sixteen-fold, from over 10,000 drug admissions in 1983 to almost 167,000 new prison entries for drug offenses in 1998 (Worrall et al, 2009). This has been a direct result of our legal system incarcerating offenders who have substance abuse related issues instead of providing a way for treatment or rehabilitation outside of incarceration. Through public policies regarding criminal justice interventions that address drug use and crime, an initiative was created to provide treatment services

Prison overcrowding has been seen as a small issue in the eyes of big news organization however the problem may be breaking through your door soon enough. Many citizens have pushed several proposals on how to solve this problem but the state and federal government have denied all of these responses and have instead either freed criminals or have kept them as they were. Those who try and tackle problems like these often give up due to the fact that even more time and money may be needed to solve their wasteful solutions. Incentive programs such as work release and community service have only blinded law abiding citizens from the truth, that the government will not due what is necessary to de-escalate overcrowding in prisons.

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.

The number of people incarcerated in America has steeply risen since the beginning of the War on Drugs. In 1980, about 300,000 individuals were in jail. (Alexander, 2010) In 2000, the number rose to over one million, and at the start of 2008, there were 2.3 million adults in prison in America (Pew Center on the States, 2008). These increases in the rate of incarceration are traceable to the War on Drugs (Nunn, 2001). “Convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration in the United States (Alexander, 2010).” Drug offenses account for two thirds of the rise in the federal prison population between 1985 and 2000 (Nunn, 2001).

In this article, the information is pulled from a study of inmate self-report surveys from 2002 and 2004 to examine characteristics of the prison and jail populations in the United States and assess why so many drug-involved offenders are incarcerated. After the U.S “war on drugs” in the 1980s, a large number of drug-using offenders were sent to prison and jail for long periods of time. As with this influx of addicted offenders, interests also grew in community-based drug treatment with justice system oversight as an alternative to incarceration. Overall, drug courts were implemented on a national scale and operate in a wide area of the U.S. Empirical research conducted over the past two decades indicates that, on balance, drug courts are more effective than conventional correction options at reducing the drug use and criminal activity of drug-involved offenders.

Available research in the Critical criminal justice issues: Task force reports, shows that the crime associated with drugs has not diminished despite increasingly punitive local, State, and Federal Government interventions and social control (1996). On the contrary, these social issues have shown an increase in the midst of an increasing and costly “war on drugs”. It is obvious that the current correctional system is not correcting anything. The rising number of incarcerated and recidivism does not show that incarceration alone lowers the crime rate. Many of those in jail doing terms could have been handled in other methods over incarceration. A large portion of the population imprisoned is there because they had committed a low-level crime. How can the seriousness of drug abuse warrant a reliance on incarceration as a solution knowing the social significance of incarceration? This paper will address offenders who are convicted of low-level crimes connected to drug abuse, the social implications of the social problem, research data showing the individual and social implications, how society has responded; and the outcome from those responses, a discussion of alternative responses to the problem, and the effectiveness of those alternatives.

The article of “The Justice Policy Institute of 2008 on Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety” emphasized the beneficial effects of treatment for the drug abuser in the criminal justice system (Jama, 2009). These interventions include therapeutic alternatives to incarceration, treatment merged with judicial oversight in drug courts, prison- and jail-based treatments, and reentry programs intended to help offenders transition from incarceration back into the community. Through monitoring, supervision, and threat of legal sanctions, the justice system can provide leverage to encourage drug abusers to enter and remain in treatment.

A man stands in front of the parole board and explains his life story to the judges who will decide if he will be let out of prison early or stay the full term. The man has a lower chance of getting out of prison being that he is a black man, but this is what the prison system claims not to be a factor of releasing people from prison. However, one in four White men is more likely to be released in the first six months of prison, than a Black or Hispanic man (Winerip). According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics the United States had 1.53 million people in federal and state prisons in the year of 2015 (“Prisoners in 2015”). Now that prison systems are on the rise in the United States, it takes away from funds that are actually valuable to

Understaffed prisons are a major safety concern that has now become a controversial nationwide issue. Low pay, long commute, undesirable hours, and dangerous work conditions all play a huge role in the high turnover rate that the prison system finds itself in. Unfortunately, the problem is mainly attributed to the fact that facilities are low on government funding, which doesn’t allow corrections officers to have decent pay for the dangers they regularly face; therefore, creating low staffing levels and a plummeting number of job applications. It is important to keep in mind that “Sacrificing safety and security to save a dollar should never be a choice. Remember, corrections should not be considered a profit oriented business” (Gangi). A failing corrections system puts countless people in extreme danger, and until these issues are addressed, the consequences will create an unsafe environment for anyone involved with the judicial system including the community at large.

Today, in America, some prisoners are living worse than some third world countries are for little crimes such as thief. Overcrowded prisons can literally be defined as placing more prisoners in a prison facility than the prison was built to maintain. Every prison has a recommended capacity for which they are to hold prisoners, since there is such an increase in offenders going to prison, these capacities are being ignored and the population of these prisons are significantly increased, making them overcrowded. Too many prisoners and not enough room. This country needs to spend more money to build new prisons. New prisons cost too much to build. There are more prisoners than the guards can control safely. Because of overcrowding some state prisons are sends their inmates down to local prisons. Some prison inmates are sleeping in hallways, storage rooms and even lavatories. Due to overcrowding some prisons are producing conditions so unhealthy it is against the constitution. Because the new prisons won’t be built for a while some prisons are doing the only thing they can, freeing inmates early. Another reason for overcrowding is that more people are going to jail for smaller, less offensive crimes. Because the number of people in prison, the educational programs are limited. Before the inmate was placed near his or her program but now they are placed where ever there is a bed. Some prisons are placing inmate wherever there can. Some prisoners need special education that is not

On any given day when the news come in, there is an individual who is been handcuffed to be shipped off to jail or prison. This paper is meant to unfold budgeting, safety (overcrowding), rehabilitation programs, recidivism and gender related issues the prison systems in America faces. One might ask “Why the prisons systems are become so overcrowded, why recidivism rate so high and what are the prison system officials is doing to help those who are incarcerated?” Due to prisons been under staff, overcrowding is taking a drastic toll on the prison systems. Since inmates killed a correctional officer during a riot at Delaware’s largest prison in February, more than 100 guards have quit or retired early, leaving staffing levels at James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna dangerously low (Galvin, 2017). Correctional officers have to be on edge when at work, due to the unknown of when prisoners will strike. Within five years of release, about three-quarters (76.6 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested. Of those prisoners who were rearrested, more than half (56.7 percent) were arrested by the end of the first year. Property offenders were the most likely to be rearrested, with 82.1 percent of released property offenders arrested for a new crime (Recidivism, n.d.). It is evident that the prison system is in turmoil. Recidivism is getting worst, and with the little staffing that the prison system has, they are doing the best they can. The criminal justice

My paper will discuss the problems and a few of the effects that prison overcrowding causes towards the inmates and the guards. I will first address the issue of violence that prison overcrowding causes. My next point will be the health of the inmates discussing both their physical and mental while in overcrowded prisons. Lastly I will discuss the physical and mental health of the correctional officers and how the job could lead to correctional officers having issues in their private life.

It is common knowledge that America has the world’s largest population of prisoners, and in 2008, a study was completed by the Pew Charitable Trusts which indicated that half of the inmates in jail and prison are serving time for nonviolent drug charges (http://www.pewstates.org/news-room/press-releases/new-pew-study-finds-36-percent-increase-in-prison-time-served-85899394970). Since the “War on Drugs” approach about forty years ago, the criminalization of the addict has done very little to address the problem of substance abuse in society. While there is no one clear cause of substance abuse, there have been patterns identified in substance abusers, that may be the underlying factors that lead to the addiction. Some of these factors include mental health and biology.