Persuasive Essay On Prison Reform

With all of the issues the government must worry about, prison overcrowding should not be one of them. The lazy and effortless attempts of the justice system that resulted in the outstanding number of people inside prisons is overbearing. There needs to be a change. Mandatory sentencing laws, lack of awareness and inhumane treatment of prisoners is unjust. For society to progress, new laws must be passed, recognition must happen, and action needs to take place.

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.

In the article, “Bring Back Flogging” by Jeff Jacoby states that flogging should be brought back for criminals instead of putting them in prisons. The United States imprisons more people than any other country. Crime is getting out of control and the crime rate is a 250 percent increased since 1980. Many inmates that are convicted of felons are released to early or not locked up at all. The price of keeping criminals behind bars is about $30,000 per inmate per year.

This deliberate measure has deteriorated the main purpose of correctional facilities. The penal harm movement has to led to overcrowding of prisons, degraded inmate living, and health conditions, and numerous other ramifications, which continues to cause society further complications in finding a more efficacious and progressive response to crime. The penal harm movement of 1970’s was introduced to the U.S. correctional facilities by policy makers, after pressure from the public to inflict harsher punishment on inmates. The corrections system often justifies the increasement of penal harm on the basis of retribution and deterrence.

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.

isn’t the only thing people believe needs to change; the reasons for arrests have been criticized by many. America incarcerates more citizens for drug related crimes than any other place in the world. Of the roughly 200,000 in federal prison, 52% are being held for drug crimes and only 8% are for violent crimes, such as: murder, assault, and robbery (Waldman, 2013). Many believe that the “War on Drugs” must become less aggressive because of its large contribution to the prison population. The distribution of prisoners by race has also raised concern among Americans.

Findings have identified the important changes and continuum in understanding imprisonment in the United States. Race was and still has remained a critical predictor of higher incarceration. Findings have also implied that the relationship between violent crime and incarceration became more important as violent crime had increased in 1980 and 1990 however it declined around1970, and no longer was powerful as crime declined by 2000. Attitudes on African Americans and crime regardless of crime decreasing still remained relatively the same. Even though the drop of offending amongst blacks the size of the black population continued to produce as a proxy for real offending.

This sparked a height in incarceration rates, especially those of black men. Through the system, Alexander believes we have pushed people into second class status, and therefore our criminal justice system remains unfair. The fifth theme is due to the lying, manipulation, subterfuge, and obfuscation of the American people. Alexander (2012), believes that from day one we have been lied to by our government. The war on drugs pushed people into fear, and therefore manipulated law enforcement to go after people of color.

Police brutality is a major problem in the world today. Now, is the time to do something most of us just sit back and wait for change. We need to take action if we want to see change in not only police brutality but, racism as well. Many innocent people have been either killed or incarcerated due to police brutality. It is a crucial problem that has affected us all, whether we are citizens or law enforcement officers.

Mass incarceration is a phenomenon described by Ta Nehisi-Coates as a way to explain the increase in incarcerated people in the United States over the past 40 years. This phenomenon can be traced back most obviously to the early 70s, when Nixon started his presidential term (DRUGPOLICY.ORG). Nixon came into presidency when the rebellious 60s were starting to really pose a threat to the government of the United States. His two main enemies were the major proponents of revolution: liberals against the violence of Vietnam and black people (DRUGPOLICY.ORG). He understood that these groups, but especially the poor black communities, depended on black market drug trade for a lot of their income and therefore found an extremely effective way to quell

We are paying too much for prisons and this can be greatly reduced I believe. The goal of going to prison in my opinion is to have that person change, realize what they’ve done and have a form of normalization practiced in the prisons so they have that preparation for re-assimilation into the normal world. Don’t get me wrong, SOME inmates do not deserve a second change to be with society again. Those I would consider to be the more heinous of crimes.

For example, Attica Prison operates in relative secrecy using taxpayer money but with the right amount of public attention this can be put to an end. In addition to that there are more things that need to be changed within prison institutions. For example, solitary confinement should be one of the main things the people and government push to put an end to because of the emotional and physical stress it puts people through. Just by seeing the emotional toll spending 9 days in a prison did to these normal people we can now see that clearly there are things that need to be changed. Not only should this experiment not have been done, the people shouldve been told what they were getting themselves

However, as many of these institutions began to change and reform prison sentences, many still viewed punishment techniques as “coercive forms of control” (Wright, N/D, p 318). Even though, prisons are meant to control inmates every movement, they are also abusing that power in separating

The community needs to be aware of the issues as well since they

Being that there was such a need to increase law enforcement and the amount of guards in the prison system there was a need to make sure there was enough funding to have enough prisons to avoid the possibility of overcrowding. The bill allocated $9.9 billion, including $7.9 billion to build state prisons for violent offenders, and $1.8 billion to states for jailing criminal illegal immigrant (US Department of Justic,1993). When hearing the conditions of the act one can presume the amount of crime taking place would decrease (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco& Firearms June,16,1996). During the late 1980’s there were many high-profile cases of violent crime that spread rapidly throughout the United States. One example includes The 101 California Street Shooting.