Pros And Cons Of Overcriminalization

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.

In “Remodeling American Sentencing: A Ten-Step Blueprint for Moving past Mass Incarceration,” the author shows how imprisonment is harsher and tougher in the United States than any other western country. He also mentions how unfair, severe and ineffective they are on reducing crime rates; and mentions changes in the sentences in the future. Tonry states that the United States locks up seven to ten times more of its citizens than other western countries, or that many states spend more on prisons than on education (Tonry 504). So what the country did to the rise of crime rates was it passed harsher laws and built more and larger prisons. However, European countries dealt with this same problem differently. Their governments reduced

“Poverty goes up; Crime goes down; Prison population doubles. It doesn 't fit, unless some sort of alternative explanation comes into play. Maybe all those new nonviolent prisoners fit into some new national policy imperative. Maybe they all broke some new set of unwritten societal rules. But what?” – Matt Taibbi

In society today there are more criminals in the boundaries of the state prison system than there are in the federal prison system. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics (2009) the United States state prison system has 1,405,622 within their jurisdiction; whereas, the United States federal prison system has 208,118 within their jurisdiction. The reason that the federal prison system has only 208,118 within their jurisdiction is that this system only deals with “the body of law consisting

No matter how you look at it, the prison system within the US holds too many people without valid reason. The last decade has seen a lot of states cut down on crime while also cutting down on their prison populations. In the years between 1999 and 2012, for example, both New York and New Jersey cut their prison populations by 30%, and crime rates fell “faster than they did nationally.”

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

From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled-from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people.For decades, the United States had a relatively stable prison population. That changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some factors included a rise in crime from the 1960s to 1980s; rising concerns over crack cocaine and other drugs, resulting in huge increases in drug penalties; a move to mandatory minimum sentences; and the implementation of other tough-on-crime policies, such as "three-strikes" laws and policies to ensure prisoners served at least 85 percent of their sentences. What's more, the movement toward broad, punitive crime control and prison policies wasn't based on any scientific rationale, says Haney, who studies

Despite the large amount of criminals in prison, the crimes: murder, rape, and others has only “accounted for 10.6 percent of the total Crime Index” (Access Integrity Unit). The vast majority of criminals locked up are held on drug addiction or petty theft charges and not more serious offenses such as murder or assault. To put it simply, the cells that were built with taxpayers’ dollars holds 89.4 percent of criminals that are of no real threat to society. While the jail cells continue to fill up with occupants that has no business being behind bars, the general public will not feel any safer until new laws are passed to insure lesser offenders can get the help they so desperately need.

in recent decades, violent crimes in the United States of America have been on a steady decline, however, the number of people in the United States under some form of correctional control is reaching towering heights and reaching record proportions. In the last thirty years, the incarceration rates in the United States has skyrocketed; the numbers roughly quadrupled from around five hundred thousand to more than 2 million people. (NAACP)In a speech on criminal justice at Columbia University, Hillary Clinton notes that, “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.” (washington post) How could this be? Are Americans more prone to criminal activity than the rest of the world? How could they be more prone to criminal activity if crime rates have been dropping? Numbers like that should be cause for concern, because if crime rates are dropping then it is only logical for one to expect the number of incarceration to go down as well; unfortunately, the opposite is true. Shockingly, there seem to be a few people who actually profits from keeping people in jails. The practice of mass incarceration who most see as a major problem in the United States of America is actually beneficial to some. The prison system in the United States who was create to

Predictably, the United Stated states leads the world in number of prisoners, housing around 2.3 million criminals. Individuals are put in prison for several crimes ranging from burglaries to drug use. Additionally, the United States incarcerates prisoners much longer than other countries. Criminologists and legal experts research that America’s high incarceration rate is due to higher levels of violent crime, potentially stemming from the availability of guns, harsher sentencing laws, racial turbulence, enthusiasm for battling illicit drugs, American temper, and minimal public safety. Furthermore, democracy stimulates it, as many elected judges desire harsh justice. This is due to America having a criminal justice system that is highly politicized. Compared to other nations, the United States has harsher prison sentences, keeping criminals in prison longer, adding to the number of inmates in confinement. Though the assault rate in New York City and London are comparable, the murder rate is much higher due to the easy access of firearms. Despite the decline of murder in the United States, it is still about four times higher than most countries in Western

The United States of America is known as a country of independence, liberty, and rights; within the lines of our national anthem the Stars Spangled Banner, it is clear to see how the phrases "the land of the free and home of the brave", symbolize the ideals that have been centralized into the American Society for hundreds of years. Despite being recognized as a world power; for its military structure and the "believed" system of possibilities in terms of self advancement, the United States of America houses a very dark and inhumane secret; a sociological failure that perhaps is called that way, given the as a nation, we neglect, fail to address, and persecute those that because of their inherited skin color, look different than the accepted sociological norm of whiteness. It is shameful, to me at least, that the term "American" is a representation of the world 's largest incarceration rate; it’s even more shameful, how we prosecute, isolate, and declare what President Nixon once believed was the proper measure to take on poor communities; the war on drugs. For hundreds of years, we as a country have idealized with what Mustafa Emirbayer & Matthew Desmond have identified in their book Racial Domination, Racial Progress the Sociology of Race in America, as a mistake; mistake that has cost thousands of minorities their reputations and has impacted not only their tranquility, but their overall success rate in the promised land of opportunities.

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” (Nelson Mandela, 1994). The United States of America has more people behind bars than any other country on the planet. The prisons are at over double capacity. It cost a lot of money to house prisoners each year. A large number of the prisoners are there because of drug related offenses. There are prisoners who have been sent to prison for life for marijuana related drug offenses. Many prisoners have been exonerated after spending many years behind bars due to the corruption in our legal system. 32 States in United States of

Since the 1970's there has been a steady increase in the prison population where statistics now show from the BJS that more than one in every 100 adults are now imprisoned. Statistics from the "PEW" state that one in 30 men between the ages of 20-34 are behind bars; however just because there is an increase in the numbers it does not mean it's due to an increase in crime. To further emphasize just how significant the growth is, the population in 1970 was around 300,000 but now the population in 2008 is over 2.3 million (BJS 2006). However there is not necessarily a parallel increase with crime; instead experts are putting the growth down to popular

The state of California has the third largest prison system in the world and the largest in the United States. To understand how California got to this point in prison reform, you have to go back as far as 1994 when Proposition 184 was approved by voters with a 72% majority vote. Proposition 184 was the strictest "three strikes" sentencing law in the United States, which doubled the penalty for a second felony if the first one was serious or violent and carried a mandatory prison sentence of 25 years to life for a third felony (Greenwood, 1994). California went a step further by being one of the only states where the third felony did not have to be a serious or violent crime to count. The expansion of the three–strikes legislation

Clang! The cell door slams shut. An ominous sound that has been heard by millions of people; more and more every day. In the United States, one in every one hundred forty people is currently incarcerated (Walmsley). Not many people have a concept of this rate. Is this normal? Certainly not. When compared to the rest of the world, the U.S “...has about five percent of the world’s population and houses around 25 percent of its prisoners” (Holland). Truly, it is quite astonishing that one country holds a quarter of the worlds prisoners. It was not always this way, so how did this come to be? The criminal justice system changed drastically around 1970s as the