Mass Incarceration

The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for several reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. This literature review will discuss the ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system and how mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism has become a problem.

In America, 2.3 million people are in prison. American has the highest prison population in the world. This is due to “tough on crime laws” that have been enforced since the 1960’s. Although these laws do help keep crime off the street, they have done more harm than good for our country. Mass incarceration is a major issues in America, it leads to poverty, broken families, money wasted, and many other problems.

Mass incarceration is somewhat overlooked by those on the outside and those who are on the inside are considered forgotten about and viewed as less than. But the reality is, these high rates of imprisonment effect many areas of the community. Not to mention the social costs linked to the communities from which these immense population of felons come from. Pattillo, Weiman, & Western, 2006 analyzes how this disregarded population can sometimes increase criminal statistics after the prisoners return into the same community they left – which is another point rarely ever talked about. Other than the invisible consequences that mass incarceration provides, there are even more myriad studies offered surrounding this topic, identified in The Prison

A prominent political analyst and author Mark Braider recently made the case in a 2015 New York Times piece stating that corporations and their influence on our government is a major, often un-recognized pitfall of America. While many may be ignorant of the issue, those who are informed often come to the same conclusions as Braider in his argument about to which the extent of corporations in America affect our government and way of life; often for the worse. Looking at the macro scale at which government has an effect the lives we live; private prisons serve as the epitome in commercial-political interaction. The issue of private prisons the reason why I strongly agree with Braider’s controversial opinion about the importance of informing the ignorant of this pressing issue. American politics work somewhat simply at the legislative level in regards to their relationships with major companies and corporations.

There are currently around 37,000 prisoners in Australia and over 2, 200, 000 in America, populations that have both been increasing greatly in the past decade. 1 2 Therefore more people every year face the immediate concern of rebuilding life, upon release from correctional facilities, and the stigma that will follow them forever. It is the government’s duty to make the transition from prison to society as effective as possible, and to help prisoners become active members of society. Although both America and Australia have strategies that function both inside and out of prisons there are many flaws that are present in these systems. One thing both countries have realised is that it is important to start the process of reintegration

In comparison to other countries around the world, America has the highest incarceration rate (Class Discussion). Yet still, crime remains at a constant state. Other countries, such as Germany and Norway, have low incarceration rates, low crimes rates, and prefer rehabilitative alternatives to incarceration (Class Discussion). The irony of America, is that for decades evidence has indicated a crime decrease, incarceration increase, and defects in the criminal justice systems effort to prevent reoffending. A benefiting factor of high incarceration rates is the increase of free labor from prisoners.

What are your thoughts about the prison system? Today 's prisons are so bad that prisons in the United States hold 5 percent of the US population. Many people get sent to jail cause of the 3 law strike because a lot of minorities are caught with drugs. Plus the government is wasting 75 billion dollars on these facilities instead of using the money in a better way like making programs for the prisoners that need help with mental health or other stuff.

Incarceration has long been part of our corrections facilities in maintaining and holding criminals confined to themselves and harmless to the outside world. That’s not the exactly the way it is anymore, now they are creating treatment programs to rehabilitate people into better normal class citizens in prison because of the effects it has on prisoners in and outside the walls along with people they are associated with. For instance one article stated how in Germany they created state of the art treatment programs to help treat the criminals with their addictions. It was said to have great results in the treatments, but the program was very costly, so it was shut down. While another program in New York is trying to help the incarcerated fathers, by letting them portray the father

To begin with, the overall rates of incarceration in America is staggering as a whole. The population has grown exponentially during the last few decades, raising each and every year due to more opportunities in crime committing. Not only the raising rates occur on a federal level, but a state level as well. Discovered by John Hagan, a research professor and co-director of the center on law and globalization at the American Bar Foundation, and Traci Burch, assistant professor in political science at Northwestern University and Research professor at American Bar Foundation, that between the years 1920 and 1975, the state and federal prison population represented about 1 in 1,000, where as by 2001, .69 percent of the population was in prison

Mass incarceration is the way that the United States has locked up millions of people over the last forty years using unnecessary and disproportionate policies. Contrary to popular belief, this is racially fueled as most of these policies saw to it that blacks and latinos be locked up for longer than their white peers and for smaller crimes. These racist roots within the system can be traced back to when the first slave ship arrived in the US. But our first major prison boom was seen after the American Civil war. I know that the Civil War was far more than forty years ago.

A shift is happening in America. The pendulum is swinging from the ideals of get tough and mass incarceration. The swing has both positive and negative affects on the prison system. On the plus side, prison populations are decreasing. By shifting away from incarcerating any who break the law, there are fewer drug dealers and fewer violent offenders in the system.