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Pros And Cons Of Incarceration

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After reading both articles about incarceration, I am in more support of the article The Greatest Correctional Myth: Winning the War on Crime Through Incarceration. There are many reasons as to why I chose to support the claims made in this article. Firstly, almost everyone who has been previously incarcerated or is currently incarcerated will eventually be released back into society. With that being said, the way our correctional system is set up is not beneficial for those released convicts. Having individuals locked up and hidden from society is not the right way to go about punishment. Instead the correctional system should guide and mentor those convicted and should help alter their behavior so that they are more suitable to live in society. Sentencing someone to prison without giving them the tools to correct the behavior that was problematic in the first place actually defeats the purpose of the punishment because the individual will likely repeat the same offense over …show more content…

If incarceration truly worked then there wouldn’t be more inmates coming into the prisons then there are leaving out of the prisons. As stated in the article “a crime-prevention policy based primarily on increased imprisonment is at best inadequate, at worst, a clogged pipe of human beings”(Rogers) What this high turnover rate leads to is overcrowding in these institutions. No matter how much these institutions expand, it will never suffice because as soon as there is more room, they get filled with new inmates instead of making more room for current inmates. Coupled with this is the fact that the increase of inmates means more inmate per single correctional officer to look after. An examination conducted by Gerald Gaes and William McGuire showed that this overcrowding is the most influential factor in predicting not only inmate to inmate assaults but inmate to correctional assaults as

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