Imprisonment of America's 2.3 million prisoners, costing $24,000 per inmate per year, and $5.1 billion in new prison construction, consumes $60.3 billion in budget expenditures, and it continues to grow. Nationally, the rate of states’ prison spending is increasing faster than education spending. In most states millions of dollars are spent to lock up residents, but the education infrastructure is crippled. For example Pennsylvania continues to invest in prisons, it has
Determinate sentences involve sentences that have a fixed or flat time (Jirard, 2009). Determinate sentences play a large part in the increasing number of individuals in prison, which, as you can imagine, puts more strain on prisons financially. In the past two decades, we have become increasingly “tough on crime” which has helped to decrease crime to a certain extent. According to an article in the New York Times (2008), the US has fewer than five percent of the entire world’s population, but almost twenty five percent of the world’s prisoners (Liptak & , 2008). The author of the article goes on to say that people in the US are sentenced to do time for crimes that would not produce such a sentence in other countries.
In this paper, I will illustrate the ways in which the Books Not Bars (BNB) campaign launched by the Ella Baker Center addresses juvenile incarceration, a key issue in the problem space of urban poverty. In the United States, incarceration rates have had an exponential growth since the 1980s (see Graph 1). This incredible growth of incarceration is mind-boggling, once one considers “we account for 25 percent of all prisoners but only 5 percent of the global population.” (3) Steven Hawkins, “Education vs Incarceration,” The American Prospect, December 6, 2010 http://prospect.org/article/education-vs-incarceration. This disturbing trend has led
In fact the U.S.’s rate of incarceration is 455 people per every 100,000 people (Smolowe, 1994). To put that in perspective, it is the highest rate of incarceration compared to any other country in the world. Even South Africa, our close second, only imprisons 311 people per ever 100,000 (Smolowe, 1994). Due to the harsh punishment of imprisonment for even the most minor of crimes, the United States has been facing a difficult issue of overcrowding in our prisons. Overcrowding in prisons is linked to several different causes, but the overall ignition of the overcrowding links specifically to the “War on Drugs” that began in the 1970’s (“What Causes Overcrowding,” 2011).
One reason America as a whole–as opposed to its brightest lights– is beset in international competition is that the country misspends. It infamously has done so on housing assets, probably does on motor vehicles and arguably is feeding a bubble in college expense. But through government it also is plowing too much into the low end of the human experience: prisons. In fiscal 2006, the latest year available, federal, state and local governments spent $68 billion on “corrections,” according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Justice Department. Ten years before, that total was $41 billion.
Another example would be that the United States gives an average burglary sentence around sixteen months, but Canada gives a sentence of five months, and in England people get about seven months. This is a rather large difference, and can explain why the United States as of 2009 holds the highest incarceration rate throughout the world at 754 inmates per 100,000 people. The war on drugs in the United States has seriously impacted the criminal justice system. There have been a lot more people arrested and sentenced for non violent crimes. This has also had a big part in the current overcrowding of the United States prisons.
This meant layoffs for thousands of people. Starting in late 2006 early 2007, the city was getting closer to hitting its rock bottom. Detroit became the number one city in the nation ranked for foreclosures. It was said that more than 5% of households were entering the state of foreclosure. Compared to the rest of the country, Detroit had 4.8 times the number of foreclosures (2007 in Detroit was brutal, more than 113,889 homes had filed or were about to file for foreclose.
In addition, it is believed that as many as half of all burglaries go unreported, which might account for the low clearance average clearance rate of 14 % in the U.S. A significant factor related to the low clearance rate is that about 65 percent of residential burglaries investigated do not produce enough evidence or information about the crime, therefore making it one of the most difficult crimes to solve (Weisel, 2004, p. 1). The official rate of residential burglary, as measured by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Burglary rates increased in the United
Juveniles and Social Justice Linda Buch Ashford University CRJ 422 Instructor J. Kerr March 3, 2014 Juveniles and Social Justice Drug use has been a major concern in American society for as long as our country has existed and is thought to be what has led to the many unfolding issues of the now overcrowded prison population in America. In 1980, there were “41,000 people in jails and prisons for drug offences, but by 2012 the number had risen to 507,000” (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2013). Why the rise in prison population? President Richard Nixon's declaration of a "war on drugs", a war that thus far has cost roughly a trillion dollars and has engendered little to no effect on the supply of or demand for drugs in the Cumulated
The average corrections officer in the U.S. can make between $29,660 and $51,000(Indeed.com). Working in a correctional institution can be stressful and hazardous. Every year, correctional officers are injured in confrontations with inmates. Correctional officers and jailers have one of the highest rates of nonfatal on-the-job injuries. First-line supervisors/managers of correctional officers also face the risk of work-related injury.