Prison overcrowding causes destruction within prison walls, with tensions rising and separation within inmates prisons do not seem to be fulfilling their purpose of finding inmates the right help. The U.S also has an issue of spending more money on the incarceration of citizens than the education of their citizens. $70 billion a year is a lot more than this country needs to be spending on corrections, with the grand amount of money issues this country faces there are plenty of other debts to pay. It is time to reconstruct the prison system and find a better solution to this country’s never ending problem. Mass incarceration is hurting the U.S and if we do not fix the issues on the past they will continue to ruin
With 105 prisons being public and 14 being private sector there have been long discussions and decisions being made to make numerous public sector run prisons, private. The quality of service provided by private prisons is being faced with criticism that quality is being reduced to improve efficiency. Michel Gove has to make sure he is being efficient with his finances to run public prisons as he is facing 40% budget cuts. This table shows how the private and public prisons budgets have been split over the past 5 years: The public sector figures for 2015/16 exclude budgets that will be added over the course of the year which includes the prison industries, contractors’, escorts and learning and skills. 2016 will be the first full year with the prisons and offender management system going through the new reformed system with a new budget of £3,230.414m programmes resource expenditure and a further £8.000m capital expenditure and a new focus of stabilisation of the system including finances and public value (Ministry of Justice, 2015) Justice Minister Jeremy Wright gave a statement to The Telegraph (2013) on private prisons that states: ”The cost of running our prisons is too high and must be reduced.
James V. Bennett, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, states that institutions like Alcatraz were necessary to control the security issues of gangster era criminals. According to Donna Raaphorst, author of Alcatraz- the History of an Island Prison, Raaphorst states, “Bennett and Homer Cummings agreed Alcatraz would alleviate the stress in the rest of the system. Confining the escape artists and the real troublemakers on the Island would result in less regimentation and a freer atmosphere in the other prisons and in American societies” (139). Bennett also claims that existing federal prisons were overcrowded due to the
The main idea that Marc Mauer was discussing during his lecture was about the American prison system needs to be fix. America has the largest prisoner population in a develop country. The main issue is that people of color has a greater chance to be in jail because the environment they were raised in. Some people of higher class have the income to help them not receive any sentences while a person of color may have a greater chance to go to jail due to the lack of access of resources. People who are send to jail they receive a harsh prison sentence because some places have a three strike system.
and you’re out” laws, and get tough legislation. These factors led to an inflation in the prison population, and an increase in the amount of parole violators put back in prison. 2. Today’s inmates do not have the same characteristics or backgrounds. Today’s inmate population is comprised of 93% male and 7% female.
Once outlawed in the beginning of the 20th Century Vickers (1991), private corporations have made a come back with possessing and operating prisons for profit. Privatization is a controversial issue that can be dated all the way back to the days of the civil war. The corrections industry analyzes its re-appearance today amidst globalization and the most impressive growth of prisons in all of modern history, painting an analyzable portrait of what few are calling the "prison industrial complex. " Whenever a state wanted to build a new prison, they traditionally would ask the voters to approve the cost through a bond issue. But, voters throughout the country began to say no.
One theory that can explain the topic of Mass Incarceration is that people are being sent to jail more and more for a longer period of time. Also, there is an obvious and high rate imprisonment within the community of color. For many years we have been told that the number one reason for increasing rates of incarceration is due to the war on drugs but in recent years we are learning through statistics that it not just drugs. Legislating has passed many new and tougher sentencing laws over the past 35 years. To explain prison growth, in state prisons 90 percent of prisoners only about 17 percent of incarcerated are due to drug offenses.
This is ensuing to prisoners being sent to prisons that are a long way from their homes, henceforth upsetting the visits, one example of unofficial actors. According to Rebekah Stratton (2004), in 2011, Governor Jerry Brown introduced a plan that helped California prisons, reduction the prison population, by relocating prisoners with non-violent charges to county jails and probation center. Official actors, The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision such fellow Governor of California, Jerry Brown policy in order to tackle this overcrowding problem, the current policy are not effective, cause each year, “a large number of people wind up in prison without being prosecuted for a long periods of time” (Aborn & Cannon, 2013). In the event that the person can 't afford the cost of bail, the person may invest months in detention while his or her case is pending. As agreed by Aborn & Cannon (2013), “10 to 40 percent of the entire incarcerated population is behind bars without a conviction in most countries in the Americas”.
The Impact of Privatization on Prison Quality Crime policies adopted in the US since the 1980s as well as federal and state budget constraints have facilitated a crisis in the nation’s prisons. Campaigns like The War on Drugs, harsher sentencing policies, and the adoption of mandatory minimum sentences have resulted in overcrowding of the country’s prison system. The need for managing the rapid growth in prison population has driven the government to look for efficient alternatives to provide correctional services without increasing public spending, including the privatization of penitentiaries. Proponents of privatized prisons have long claimed that the private sector could operate prisons more efficiently.
Introduction Incarceration is a growing problem in the United States. Overall, the prison capacity has increased due to the frequency of custodial punishment, longer sentences, and high recidivism rates, which leaves approximately 60% of the prisons at maximum capacity (Ginn, 2012). This environment presents challenges for security as well as for prison healthcare practitioners. Since security is the major concern in these prison facilities, healthcare is a subsequent interest. However, if competent healthcare is not available to inmates, they don’t have the luxury to find another source to treat their health concerns.
Over the years budget crises have forced many states to re-examine budgets, starting with the cost of maintaining their prison and jail systems. The United States has the largest prison population with about two million prisoners. To try and make a plan for the large population and some budget cuts, politicians want to change some of the parole policies and are trying to get some of the criminal laws revised for some drug offenders and white collar criminals. Due to the fact that the politicians are undecided the have put work release programs and strict parole release into effect. Prison is a place for people who break the law should be detained, but if the prisoner has twelve months or less until their release date, and show that they have been
America has sent more people away to jails and prisons because of attitudes that shape laws and policy. The three strikes law has lots of people in prison for life that do not need to be in prison for life. Mandatory minimums are another reason that people go to prison for a longer periods of time. In the 1980’s, the expected time to serve in prison for a drug charge was an average of 22 months. By 2004, that number has almost increased three times (The Sentencing
It is a shocking truth that privatized prisons in America are getting paid for having a certain amount of inmates filling their beds. Between 1990 and 2009, the number of private prison inmates increased by more that 1600 percent and 65 percent of all private prison contracts pay private prisons a set amount of cash per prisoner. AZ, OK, LA and VA all have contracts that require 95% to 100% occupancy in private prisons at all times. When the prisons dont meet this percentage, they have to pay. Or in some corrupt and terrible situations the prisons pay members of authority to arrest and put people in their prisons so they dont have to pay and can get more money because their beds are full.
Since the law is set in place for any person who receives a criteria fitting third strike, whether it is from a big or small crime, the person is sent away to prison for basically the rest of their life. Due to the growth of the amount of people being sent to prison as a result of this policy, it is continuing to be more and more expensive to keep them in prison. High crime rate in California was the tipping point for former president Clinton to pass the law. The prison located in California now holds roughly 135,000 inmates (Shipley 1). It has more than doubled mainly because of the policy.
The issue of mass increase in the number of aging inmates has become a major concern for the government agencies and researchers. This is based on the resulting social and economic impact that the growing population of elderly inmates impose. As Rikard and Rosenberg (2013) notes, the trend of rapidly increasing population of prisoners above fifty five years is likely to go higher unless the current federal and state laws are reviewed to come up with a possible solution to deal with the associated impacts of the elderly population in prisons. According to the research conducted on the causes of this trend, it is noted that the shift of sentencing from rehabilitative to incapacitating sentence after the Vietnam War can be attributed to be the cause of the current situation in prisons in addition to resulting to overpopulation in correctional facilities.