Should There Be More Education Opportunities In Prison Programs

Competence obsoletes over time; in order to help rehabilitate inmates, 350 college degree programs were once provided in prisons all over the State. However, by 2005, the number has shrunk down to 12 programs in 12 prisons. Prison jobs and educational training have a waiting list of more than 10,000 people. Prisoners are unable to regain their life by better equipping themselves in time of custody due to the fact that the government fails to deliver education to inmates. This is what ‘institutionalization’ from Shawshank’s Redemption is about.

III. Literature Review Prison overcrowding has been a global issue for many years. We can all attest to the fact that incarceration is said to be the main deterrent for individuals who have committed a criminal offense. The sole purpose of this literature review is to identify prospective policies that may assist Ohio with the reduction of their overcrowded prison population. My aimed is to identify four best practices that other states like New York, New Jersey, California and Massachusetts have been using as alternatives to prison hence reducing prison overcrowding.

Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration–The Problem of the United States In America, the private prison industry was made for necessary profit based off of the management of prisons by large, private companies. In David Shapiro’s insightful report “Banking on Bondage”, he discusses the logistics of the United States prison system, saying “In America, our criminal justice system should keep us safe, operate fairly, and be cost-effective”. Today, the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran.

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.

Since 1970, our prison population has risen by some 700% - an increase far outpacing rates of population growth and crime1”. The reason America has so many incarcerated people is not because Americans commit more crimes or the police are just better at finding criminals,

Over the past 40 years U.S. incarceration has grown at an extraordinary rate, with the United States’ prison population increasing from 320,000 inmates in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million inmates in 2013. The growth in prison population is in part due to society’s shift toward tough on crime policies including determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing laws, and mandatory minimums. These tough on crime policies resulted in more individuals committing less serious crimes being sentenced to serve time and longer prison sentences. The 1970s-1980s: The War on Drugs and Changes in Sentencing Policy Incarceration rates did rise above 140 persons imprisoned per 100,000 of the population until the mid 1970s.

Prison reform has been an ongoing topic in the history of America, and has gone through many changes in America's past. Mixed feelings have been persevered on the status of implementing these prison reform programs, with little getting done, and whether it is the right thing to do to help those who have committed a crime. Many criminal justice experts have viewed imprisonment as a way to improve oneself and maintain that people in prison come out changed for the better (encyclopedia.com, 2007). In the colonial days, American prisons were utilized to brutally punish individuals, creating a gruesome experience for the prisoners in an attempt to make them rectify their behavior and fear a return to prison (encyclopedia.com, 2007). This practice may have worked 200 years ago, but as the world has grown more complex, time has proven that fear alone does not prevent recidivism.

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.

The public school to prison pipeline was examined in the literature review through zero-tolerance policies and the effects it has played on graduation rates. Zero-tolerance policies have dramatically increased students being recommended to the court system according to the literature review. The literature review has shown a need for school districts to examine zero-tolerance policies and the negative effects that it has caused on students. Fran Silverman (2005) discusses students being punished under zero-tolerance and says, “The students were disciplined under their school’s zero tolerance policy and some advocates are saying these codes of conduct have become so strict that schools are turning into criminal justice systems, or worse, jailhouses” (pg. 54).

The prison-industrial complex is a corrupt political system that consists of overpowered politicians whose sole ambition is exploiting poor, uneducated, and under-privileged Americans to make money. Although, it wasn’t initially the purpose when Rockefeller started the war on drugs, but he started something bigger than he could’ve imagined at that time. The prison system has been proven to be ineffective, and costly waste of resources. However, it probably won’t be abolished due to the cash flow that it brings to some of the largest corporations in the

Does it make sense to lock up 2.4 million people on any given day, giving the U.S the highest incarceration rate in the world. More people are going to jail, this implies that people are taken to prison everyday for many facilities and many go for no reason. People go to jail and get treated the worst way as possible. This is a reason why the prison system needs to be changed. Inmates need to be treated better.

Criminology has within its scope the process of reacting toward the breaking of laws, breaking laws, and making laws. The objective of all criminology is the development of a body of

According to Phelps (2013), as from 1998 to 2007 states that had the greatest increases in incarceration rates failed to observe a corresponding drop in crime rates. On the other hands, states such as New York, Texas, New Jersey and North and South Carolina that lowered their incarceration rates in favor of community corrections programs experienced a drop in crime rates (p.53). Incarceration has also failed in correcting prisoners. Most of the prisoners always go back to committing crimes once released from prison. It has led to a rise in the recidivism rates of prisoners.

Many people have different viewpoints as to what criminal justice and criminology are, in my point of view I believe these two terms have a distinct definition and action. Although they might sound somewhat similar based on the textbook criminal justice is said to be defined as “institutions, policies, and practices with the goal of maintaining social control through sanctions and rehabilitation.” and it also states that criminology is “academic discipline that investigates the nature extent and causes of criminal offending”. In my own words, what my understanding of criminal justice is that it refers to the system of law enforcement, courts, and corrections in the U.S. that includes actions from the government in which aim to lessen the occurrence

The first challenge is breaking the myth that the cost of providing facilities to educate the prisoners is exceptionally high. Many in the public might be tempted to think that college education for prisoners costs millions of dollars in addition to the money already being spent on prisons. This is because the detainees will not be in a position to contribute anything towards this form of education (Stoll, Raphael, & Project Muse, 2009, p. 45). Being one of the largest costs borne by taxpayers besides budgets in defence, healthcare, and retirement benefits, it costs somewhere between $52 billion and $70 billion dollars on average for U.S. taxpayers annually and $31,238 cost per inmate; However, cost of providing a college education for an incarcerated student only costs $ 2,000 to $4,000 a year (“Breaking the Prison Cycle”) and, in the longer term, a prison education proves to be far more beneficial than harmful in terms of cost-benefit analysis. According to a research by RAND Corporation, “a $1 investment in prison education reducing incarceration costs by $4 to $5, and those who receive a prison education have 43% less change of returning to prison than inmates who do not”(“Education and Vocational Training,” 2013).