Something will always need to be fixed in society because society is a reflection of us, and we are not perfect. Recently, there’s been many issues that have caught the attention of people living all across the world. Things such as police brutality, sexual assault in the workplace, and immigration law, just to name a few, but there’s also been an underlying issue that people are becoming more informed about, and that I believe matters - prison reform. Prison reform matters because in many instances, prisoners are treated inhumanely when they are locked up, and aren’t treated as humans when they have served their time. I believe we can bring about change in the prison system by changing the way we punish people who do commit crimes and focusing more on actual rehabilitation. In 1972, former President Richard Nixon made his infamous statements regarding crime and drug abuse. In this speech, he declared a war on crime and drugs and intended to decrease the number of people using drugs and the amount of crimes that were committed. Since this declaration, incarceration rates in the U.S. have gone up by 500%, even though the amount of crime happening has gone down. One of the reasons why I feel our rates have risen, is because sometimes, we put people in jail when they don’t need to be there in the first place. 46.3% of prisoners are in jail …show more content…
There’s a multitude of things that need to be repaired in our system, and prison is one of them. Prison reform is an important issue because we need to take care of everyone and with the way we treat criminals, we do not see them as equal. We need to assess illegal acts correctly instead of trying to put people in jail for the rest of their lives. We also need to work more on how we try to rehabilitate people. Instead of barring convicts off from the rest of us, we need to teach them how to integrate, so they can live better lives than they did
Thesis: It is very important for the sake of Americans tax dollars that we change the way that prisons are run and increase the productivity of inmates so when they are released from jail they are ready to be a productive member in society and have the confidence to achieve new goals. Introduction: Day after day, millions of inmates sit in jail doing nothing productive with their lives. We are paying to house inmates that may not even have a good reason to be there. For example, drug offenders are being kept with murderers and other violent offenders.
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.
As I mentioned above, since the War on Drugs era, the prison population has increased at an alarming rate. Overcriminalization has most of the responsibility for this problem. Along with the overcrowding of prisons, the obstacle of overcriminalization also brings sentencing reform to the table. It puts citizens that had no criminal intent in their actions and non-violent offenders in prison for unjust lengths of time. Serving
The major problem we have today is that prisons shouldn't deal with taking care of the mentally ill, that's the mental hospital facilities job. The people that work in this type of setting need to be patient with the mentally ill. Its not easy to deal with people that are mentally ill, they require so much attention. Putting mentally ill people in a prison is the worst thing to do, it makes their mental illness worse due to being in isolation.
It's going to be hard because the standard story put the shocking story out which are not essential problems facing prison population. People more likely to gravitate that story rather than the story that could help the country. According to lock in, “in a survey of registered US voters by the Pew Research Center in early 2016, 44 percent of all residents said they believed that “reforming the criminal justice system should be a top priority”; the percentage rose to 73 percent for black respondents and 48 percent for Hispanics" (Pfaff,2017, P5). People have faith in reforming the justice system. This survey was carried to see if people are satisfied with the justice system and have the voter’s responses that they believe it should reform.
They shouldn’t force prisoners to stay in their dirty, 10x10 feet cell for twenty three hours a day, everyday. They should allow more “social” events such as adding a game night or something. I believe adding something new that is social will help them fix their social issues, and hopefully tunnel some inmates thoughts away from violence. Prisons should also teach inmates the laws and rules in society to keep them safe. They should be taught to respect the laws in a civil society.
The United States has five percent of the world 's population, yet holds twenty-five percent of the world 's prisoners. In 2013, there were 1.57 million inmates who had sentences longer than a year, and there were enough inmates to produce a GDP equivalent to 133 nations. With those statistics in mind, do you think there should be a change? Today I am here to protect those Americans in prison who are in need for reformation. There 're many reasons for a reformed prison, one being to protect human rights.
Prison Overcrowding in America In our country today, we account for roughly five percent of the world’s population, yet we hold over twenty-five percent of the globe’s inmate population. According to John Irwin, we currently imprison more people for lesser crimes than any other country in the world. In 1987 alone, our prison population rested steadily at just 500,000 incarcerated inmates in the U.S. Although in the past twenty-seven years, the American prison population has actually quadruped to almost 2.4 million (Pratt, 2009).
I believe that the the abolition of private prisons would be the best course of action to take. It is completely unconstitutional, from my perspective, to allow enterprises to make a profit off of prisoners, who are, in reality, just people who have made a mistake. It is a given that there are exceptions to this, but as Representative Ellison stated, “Incarceration should be about rehabilitation, not profit.” The fact that nothing has been done due to the clutch these corporations have on legislators is terrifying to me, and taking a stance against them would be sending a message to all wealthy businesses across the U.S., making it clear that the government can not be bought out. In a cost-benefit analysis, as the Justice is Not for Sale Act provides, it is much more fiscally responsible to invest in the rehabilitation of inmates than it is to hire private prisons.
There are many problems in the correctional system in the United States. One of the main problem is that prisons are overcrowded. These prisons have been overcrowded for a very long time. Prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. One solution to this problem is placing offenders with minor offenses on house arrest.
This preconceived notion could not be farther from the truth. In reality, these reform movements are idiotically placing a bandaid over the tremendous issue that the prison system is. An imbalance of reforms between women and men, unrestrained sexual abuse in women’s prisons, and tyrannical gender roles are just three of countless examples of how prison reform movements only create more misfortune and fail to provide any real solution to worsening prison conditions. Perhaps instead of conjuring up additional ideas on how to reform prisons, America’s so-called democratic society should agree upon abolishing prisons as a whole. This being said, it is crucial to identify ongoing issues in today’s society, understand how they contribute to unlawful behavior, and seek a solution.
Through each resource we have covered different perspectives and solutions for mass incarceration. There is not one finite cause of mass incarceration, but a culmination of issues like the war on drugs, prison-industrial complex, and increase felony charges. Reforming the law and looking at cases individuality can help put checks on district attorneys and prosecutors. Educating the public can be one of the best methods to reduce the rate of incarceration, but until then the issue will remain
Also, 53% of the inmates in state prison are there because of violent crime. This leads me to believe that what really needs to be addressed is violence and drugs. Although violence is hard to control, there is something being done about the drug epidemic that is increasingly growing. The United States’ drug epidemic is much more intense compared to other countries, including developed and non-developed countries. Something else that the United States does that is different worldwide is the “three-strikes rule.”
Americans broken prisons as people say need to be fixed, but how. Personally, I believe the problem is the people in the prisons. Putting someone in a time out boxed is very effective for three year old, as for adults it depend on how reasonable the person is. Through my eyes, American’s prison are not as effective as they once were because we have people who go in and out of jail their whole life, people don’t care about the and lastly crazy people need to be in there for life but a released by their judgement. The first issue I will address is the fact that most people go in and out of prison for the same thing or similar crimes.
There has always been a system to contribute to the prosperity of a society, whether that be an economic system, educational system, social systems and many more. Although these are to help the country there are also flaws in them. One system in society that has major flaws in the prison system. The prison system has failed many Americans and strayed away from its main goal which was to help inmates to not become victims of recidivism. Prisons need to find a way to help inmates become stable enough to go back into society.