The prison industrial complex Every year more and more inmates are being locked up behind bars and eventually the prisons become over populated this is due to the prison industrial complex, fear is built up in peoples mind that all the criminals should be cleared off the street and put behind bars, however the question here is, whether that is the right solution. Statistics show that today the United States has approximately 8.1 million people behind bars. (Eric Schlosser). This shows that crime rates are significantly increasing in America and prisons are becoming full. One can argue the issue of racism in America is emphasized to be the cause for more violence and eventually more crime rates increase.
By shifting the sentencing structure, more youth are going to prison for minor crimes. Incarceration at a young age can be damaging to a young adult, often ending in a cycle of prison time and crime. While it is likely that females always committed crime, women prisoners are a growing population in today’s prisons. Women are the fastest growing population in jail and prisons, greatly passing the male population rate in almost every state. These crimes are generally drug
Illegal Immigration Illegal Immigration AP Government 1/22/2012 AP Government 1/22/2012 Matt Graves Matt Graves With the number of illegal immigrants in the United States now over 12 million and rising, immigration is once again a main topic of debate. A reason it is becoming more of an issue is because illegal immigrants are now spreading far beyond the normal states such as California and Texas. Complaints about illegal immigrants are daily and can be heard on many news, radio or any other media outlet. In recent presidential elections, along with the economy and other issues, illegal immigration has become a very dominant theme, particularly on the republican side. Even
Pros and Cons of Plea Bargaining Everyday 90% of all criminal cases resolve in some sort of agreement to a plea, leaving about 10% going to actual trial. With the huge numbers favoring a plea there must be a reason and more importantly what is the better option for people either accurately accused or falsely accused of a crime. Judges have incentives in agreeing to plea-bargaining because of the lack of judges available to hear trials compared against the ever-growing numbers of criminal cases and the rise of criminals serving time in prison. Judges also realize the amount of money needed to fund a criminal trial is much more than agreeing on a plea, even if that plea is only a fraction of the time the offender would face in prison if convicted
Policy Development Paper Vance Reed CJA/464 Criminal Justice Policy Analysis 04/22/2012 Thomas McGrath Abstract Overcrowded prisons have been on an up rise for the last two decades. Overcrowded prisons are blamed for a number of reasons, such as the war on drugs, and the Three Strikes law, and the new laws regarding drugs crimes. Financially speaking, the cost is rising every year, even with new prisons and remodeling the population is steady rising. Crime peaked in the early 1990’s and this added to the high incarceration rates. Strangely enough, though the crime rate is now on a downward slope the overpopulated prisons are still increasing.
Among civilized nations, American prisons have the highest incarceration rate—nearly 1% of Americans are in prison. Statistics show that American prisons and the justice system are in need of some serious work. In recent history, the most popular solutions to crime were longer sentences and increasingly harsh punishment of inmates while in prison—this approach is clearly not working. There are many issues surrounding the U.S. correctional system. Most, if not all of these issues have the potential to be corrected through more effective management of our prisons.
The prisons in America seem to cause more problems than assistance in today's society. The country's penal system is overcrowded, expensive, and some argue that is ineffective as well as inefficient. The costs to staff and support these facilities increase dramatically every year. Prisons, which are supposed to be correctional facilities, are currently filled with violence and hostility. These institutions are created to control crime by deterrence, incapacitating criminals, which protects society from potentially dangerous criminals, but it is hard to tell if this is being
Criminal Justice Overview Paper Overcrowded prisons have become a serious issue in the criminal justice system. Get tough legislations, new penal codes, high recidivism rates, and the war on drugs are partly to blame for the overcrowding in American prisons. This paper will explain how overcrowding prisons have affected the criminal justice system. It will also list changes made to the system in response to the issue, and explain why the changes were or were not sufficient in eliminating the issue. The Affect The criminal justice system has been affected greatly by overcrowded prisons in many ways.
These high levels of incarceration have in turn made sending people to prison profitable. Mass incarceration is not only a huge problem within itself but it has additional negative effect on productivity both economic and societal, and parental availability to their children. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reports that from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled-from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people” (“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet”, n.d.). According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “The United States imprisons more people—both per capita and in absolute terms—than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran” (“Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration”, 2011). When a nation begins to incarcerate that many of its citizens people begin to question what exactly is causing this trend?
8 Editor’s Commentary A regressive step: Incarcerating adolescents with adults By Gregory K. Fritz, MD. hode Island has finally joined the movement already embraced by many states to incarcerate teenagers in our adult prison. Several months ago, in what was clearly defined as a costs-saving measure the face of a tight budget, the state legislature voted to move 17-year-olds from the Rhode Island Training School to the adult prison. Nationally, this trend began in the 1980’s as a way to “get tough on juvenile crime” in response to rising crime rates. Since 1992 most states have enacted policies that make it easier to prosecute and incarcerate teenagers in the adult criminal justice system, thus reversing the pattern of the previous 100