Nature Of Prison Overcrowding

Introduction

In the society, people should behave in an appropriate conduct within the law of the country. People who violated the law will be punished. Prison is a measure that imprisons the criminals for punishment and prevents further crimes occur in the society. People should stay in the prison to introspect for their criminal behaviour. It means that people are restricted with their activities in jail as compared with the lifestyle in common. In the prison, prisoners should be obedient to some command and often do not have alternatives. Being with the serious offences, the criminals are mostly sentenced the permanent imprisonment as replaced the death penalty. For example, drug offenders, murders, etc. Therefore, it will easy to

As a report claimed, the prison population has nearly doubled when comparing with the datum of the last two decades in England and Wales and the range is about 45,000 to over 85,000 (Criminal Justice Alliance, 2012). It may know that the numbers of the prisoners are increasing steadily per year.

Prison overcrowding is the situation that the prisoners are living with the poor environment when being incarcerated due to the large number of prisoners in prison (Albrecht, 2012). After the criminals committed crime, they are often penalised with fine and incarceration. For imprisonment, even if the incarceration of a prisoner is in a short period of time, the problem of prison overcrowding has not been solved. This is because there are many people committing crime every day. Crime cannot be avoided and the criminal justice system tend to use the incarceration as a serious punishment to the criminals. Hence, prison overcrowding is a chronic problem in the society. It cannot not be discovered immediately, and therefore the government usually neglect the problem and does not have an emergency measure for the prison

Sometime, it may generate mental harm to the prisoners. For example, when arranging the prisoners to use the facilities in the prison, there may have restriction to the prisoners (GenFKD, 2016). The facilities are including the dining halls, bathrooms, television, others recreational activities, etc. Prisoners are not always permitted to use the facilities because of the limited capacity for the activities. Therefore, the quality of life of the prisoners will be influenced and they may not have a normal social relationship with others. The government is accountable for giving an opportunity to prisoners to learn the routine of the society and thus, to correct their behaviour. Prison overcrowding may restrict these opportunities of the prisoners because of the environmental restriction. These external factors are the reasons that lead to the problem of prison overcrowding. It seems that the problem of prison overcrowding is avoidable if the criminal justice system and prison system altered properly by the government. This is because the initiation of the prison is to prevent more crime occur but not to produce problems for the