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Nonviolent Crime In Prisons

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Nonviolent crimes should be punishable with fines rather than jail time, It has caused a large amount of prisons to be at overcapacity. Understand that a nonviolent crime is a crime that does not involve the use of any force.
The population surging in jails and prisons all around America and the amount of money that goes into taking care of these inmates continues to expand. Jails provide three meals a day, basic health care, protection, and power/electric for every inmate admitted. This problem is getting worse and worse by the years and even former president Barrack Obama commented- “Over the last few decades, we’ve locked up more and more nonviolent offenders than ever before. Longer than ever before and that is the real reason our prison population is so high.” The United States has imprisoned more than 25 percent of all the prisoners in the world, even though we only have about 5 percent of the world’s population. …show more content…

It could change who you are as a person completely. In prisons and jails across the United States, inmates must adapt and react to survive. As a result, some inmates become institutionalized. The adaptation to imprisonment is very difficult and sometimes can create habits of thinking/acting. Adaptation is when an inmate is shaped and acclimated by the institutional environment. “For some Inmates, incarceration is so stark and psychologically painful that it represents a form of traumatic stress severe enough to produce PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) reactions once released.”-Craig Haney (University of California, Santa Cruz). Prisons and jails can negatively affect inmates mentally. Suicide is the number one cause of death among inmates in local jails and top 5 for the state prisons.-Alana Horowitz. Some inmates are so hurt emotionally and cave under the pressures they face every day. Sometimes the only way they see to end the pain is to kill

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