The Overcrowding Of Prisons

Research Question No. 1 - Did Three Strikes You're Out contribute to the problem of mass incarceration and overcrowded jails and prisons?

The Unites States of America’s prison system is a flawed mess. To open the eyes of our government we must first take a stand against unlawful government decisions, and show support for the greater good of society. What are our own tax-dollars paying for, what are the flaws in the justice/prison system, why is overcrowding in prisons causing tension, and what are ways our society and government can rebuild the system that has been destroyed over the years? Most criminals in prisons are not a danger to our society because they commit crimes just to use jail as a shelter, causing the overcrowding of prisons and wasting away of what we really should be paying for.

In the United States, the prison institutions, and county jail’s population numbers are growing rapidly. Offenders are receiving lesser sentencing and more federal funding disbursed to reentry and reintegration programs to reduce the cost of incarceration and to reduce recidivism. A recent Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) study of 40 states found that in 2011 the average annual total cost per inmate was $31,286, and the number of incarcerated people have quadrupled reaching 1.4 million in 2010 (Center on Sentencing and Corrections, Vera Institute of Justice, 2013, p.128). The criminal justice system has found alternative ways to deal with the overcrowding and cost of incarceration. I believe that community based programs benefit the government,

Due to the “war on drugs”, prison overcrowding is becoming more and more of an issue, putting a strain on not just the law enforcement but our society as well. America has been implementing a “war on drugs” policy since the early nineteen – seventies. Since the creating of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973 under Richard Nixon, then the Office of National Drug Control Policy under Ronald Reagan in 1988, the United States has found themselves in an endless war and in constant debt huge amounts of money.

As of 2015, 2.7% of adults in the United States were under correctional control, the lowest rate since 1994, however that is still roughly 6.7 million adults (Kaeble & Glaze, 2016). While the correctional population has declined, correctional facilities in the United States are still grossly overcrowded, with many facilities at or surpassing capacity. A report in 2010 by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation showed that on average, facilities were at 175% capacity (Brown, 2010). However, as of midnight on October 31st, 2017 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported that their facilities, on average, were 132% occupied (Brown, 2017). Not only is prison overcrowding a burden on the facilities themselves, but also on the inmates. Prison overcrowding, that is, housing more inmates than the facility can humanely facilitate (Haney, 2006), places a strain on all resources throughout the correctional facility, including on the healthcare that’s offered, educational programs, and most dramatically on the physical space available to house inmates (Ekland-Olson, 1983).

Evidence shows that overcrowded prison conditions increase crime in these confines, such as inmates attacking guards. Instances like this happen in these unprincipled institutions daily across the United States, making overcrowded prisons dangerous to

After exploring options of which states had the most overcrowding in prisons, the best option to go with was California because states like Alabama and Massachusetts did not have current statistics. If anything, their statistics were from 2016 or 2013, making data harder to collect. Therefore, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website, the most recent report they have of the total population is as of midnight February 8, 2017. The total population is 180,885, with four of them being civil addict. Total in-custody is of 129,284 inmates, parole is 44,721, non-CDC jurisdiction is 1,022 and lastly other population #6 inmates with 5,854 (“Weekly Report of Population”, 2017). Once again looking at a weekly

With this being an important year for the 2016 Presidential Candidate elections, positions on certain topics can be the deciding vote for many Americans. Hot topics such as gay rights, immigration reform, and free education are dominating the debates and conversations of these politicians. However, there is one societal issue that is not being addressed enough; the current overpopulation of U.S prisons. Although this may seem like a topic that does not impact the country at large, with prisons overcrowded by almost 40 percent (Hunt, 2011), sentencing reform makes fiscal and humanitarian sense.

Prisons are overloaded with inmates; there are alternative resources being used to reduce the number of inmates in prison/jail. The alternative resources are community corrections. Community corrections are often a privatized agency that is similar and different from private prisons. Privatized community corrections can give a positive outcome in the criminal justice system, but can also have a negative impact on clients. Why are clients required to pay fees instead of the courts, or taxpayers? There are laws written in the state of Colorado regarding Community Corrections. Overall, community corrections have advantages as well as disadvantages.

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.

Overcrowding prisons can be toxic not only for the inmates but also the corrections officers who are constantly working. There are better ways to protect our communities than mass incarceration. In the United States, incarceration defers punishment based on the severity and kind of the crime and. For example, allow drug offenders to serve a shorter sentence, release more elderly prisoners, give prisoners a full year off their sentences for participating in drug rehabilitation, and send more foreign inmates to their home countries. In the article Prison Overcrowding Threatens Public Safety and State Budgets, the author informs “From the collected data, the Initiative found that the incarceration system in this country “hold[s] more than 2.4 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails” (Williams 1). This was published in 2014,

Incarceration is not meant to be fun. Prison overcrowding is becoming major issue all over the United State. Our prison and jail inmates are growing dramatically. More and more people are committing more crime, which cause them sometimes locked up. Each state has a different way of sentence offenders. The dictionary define overcrowding as beyond what is usual or comfortable, simple means you cannot have more than the amount of inmate in a cell than the state allows you to. A jail cell design for four inmates can’t have six inmates in there. California is one of the state that has been infected by prison overcrowding and need to come to a conclusion on how to fix and prevents it from happening. The number of inmates are increasing based on their

Overcrowding prisons are an issue that has been influencing the United States prison population for decades, however what is the true significance of overcrowding. As indicated by Jeff Bleich (1989) “the term overcrowding is repetitive, since crowding already refers to a higher level of social density than is desired”. An overcrowded prison is a shocking condition that causes outrage and dissatisfaction among detainees (Haney, 2014). This condition is so undesirable that one can consider it as unconstitutional. An overcrowded prison is commonly recognized as being the fundamental explanation behind appalling misconduct and the expansion of recidivism. According to Wagner and Sakala (2014), United States prison system “hold more than 2.4

Based on the Bureau for Justice Statistics, the number of prison inmates for federal and state increase by 261% from 1980 to 2009. The number of adult federal and state prison inmates increased from 139 per 100,000 to 502 per 100,000. (Welson, 2012). More than 2 million Americans are now incarcerated in prison and there are over 7.2 million are in some form of penal supervision such as jail, prison, parole or probation. (Welson, 2012).

Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a male earns- this statistic has been utilized to promote the idea that there is institutionalized discrimination against females in the workplace. This misleading figure has been parroted by former President Barrack Obama; and has been propagated by social media: famous feminists like Emma Watson have spoken out about the gender pay gap, and have tried to assert that women are paid less for preforming the same jobs as men- but that is a blatant mistruth. The statistic conveniently omits nuance- and doesn’t accurately portray the American labor force. Almost every country in the Western world has legal ramifications for discriminating against someone on the basis of gender; and even with policies like affirmative