Recent reports have concluded that the United States has the highest incarceration rate throughout the world at 2.2 million inmates. This increase is causing major concerns for corrections statewide, as prisons are seriously overcrowded ("University Of Phoenix," 2003). Prison populations are steadily growing year by year since the 1980s. However, the reason for this increase is a result of the Sentencing Reforming Act of 1984 (“Seller, R. P.” 2011). Once this act was put into use there was a significant increase in the incarceration rate, which resulted in correctional staff becoming burdened and overworked as a result of the extreme overcrowding.
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.
Secondly overcrowded prisons have an impact on rehabilitation programmes which potentially could be a reason for the high rate of reoffending in the UK. Finally the essay will discuss the crisis of the whole criminal justice system as the high volume of prisoners could be an indication of a wider crisis in The Criminal Justice System in England and Wales. At present it is estimated that crime and criminality costs UK society approximately £35 billion per year and currently the government spends approximately half of it on police services 2009/10 and fifth on courts dealing with the issue, of this money only £4.6 billion is spent on prisons (Ministry Of Justice, 2010). As the prison population is rise one of the main reasons for the crisis is the lack of availability of space. It has been argued that the penal system in England and Wales needs to become less punitive, more tolerant and successful (Scott , 2008) .
Since the mid-1970s, the prison population in the nation’s largest state has risen by more than 750%, from about 20,000 to more than 160,000 (Equal Justice Initiative, 2010). California’s prison system is among one of the worst in the system and part of it is due to their adaptation of their “Three Strikes” laws. The laws are harsh and the criminals, especially the ones already having two strikes don’t seem to care about the seriousness of committing crimes. California’s prisons, 33 total, are operating at almost twice their design capacity. Overcrowding is a very serious issue that worries the state officials such as Governor Schwarzenegger.
THE PRIVATE PRISON INDUSTRY The United States has more incarcerated people than any other country in the world ‒ as of 2011, over 2.3 million prisoners were locked up in local county jails and in state and federal prisons (Fisher, 2011). With more than 50 companies operating within the federal and state criminal justice system, the privatization of incarceration has become a five-billion dollar business. Several of these for profit businesses include The GEO Group, PA Child Care, and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) (Fisher, 2011). The for-profit prisons came into being because 1) the traditional prisons were getting overcrowded leading to exceptionally high price rise for the government and 2) the private prisons claimed increased, business-like efficiency along with major cost savings (Hunt, 2008). The cash-strapped communities found this idea to be irresistible.
Reasons for growth in the State Prison system part of the over population in prison has been merited to the changes in sentencing practices. The sentencing practices are part of the harsh constraints on judges and parole individuals, there are required to examine each individual case and their own special circumstances. 1980 was the large increase in incarceration; some say is based on the war on drugs and trafficking of illegal drugs to the United States. Poverty Poverty has many ways of dealing with the prison growth, there are more crime related issues than there are work, people try to get money easy and get themselves into a bigger hole. The profiling of people who have been incarcerated is one of the main reasons why most employers won’t hire an individual, therefore this people do not feel welcome in society and end up going back to prison, because they feel safer with food and
I personally believe that American prisons can be quite harsh when it comes down to how the prisoners are treated. A lot of factors come in to play when you look at the conditions of our prison systems. Such factors are population, cleanliness, the rules of the prison, and most importantly the severity of the punishments. The first thing I am going to discuss is the population. Ever since the populations of prisons have gradually increased over 2 million inmates, many prisons are becoming overcrowded.
WHAT IS CAUSING PRISON OVERCROWDING? FINDINGS Continued increase in the number of offenders sent to prison · High recidivism rate · High rate of offenders returned to prison for violating or unsuccessfully completing community supervision · New criminal offenses added to penal code · "War on drugs" · Harsher penalties for certain types of offenses · Increased role of victim and victim advocacy in the court and parole process Convicted inmates serving a greater portion of their sentences in prison · Shift from indeterminate to determinate sentencing caused average minimum sentences to increase · Elimination of "good time" · "Truth in sentencing" established time-served standards for parole eligibility and required 100 percent of court-imposed
62% of local jail inmates are awaiting trial. The cost of medical care for inmates grows by 10% annually. High rates of incarceration are due to sentence length. The United States incarcerates a large number of non-violent and victimless offenders. 50% of all prisoners are non-violent offenders, and 20% are drug related offenders.
These eye-popping numbers came about for many reasons: mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes legislation, illegal drugs, gangs, immorality in all its modern forms, the war on drugs, the decline of marriage and families, high rates of recidivism, incarceration of the mentally ill, the decline of capital punishment, problems with the criminal justice system and all the forces pushing tough crime policies. Difficult economic times focus attention on the increasing costs of keeping all these people - 93% of them men - behind bars. Each prisoner costs about $32,000 per year, and the average prisoner does little to offset the cost of confinement. The social costs may be even higher. Breadwinners are lost, families destroyed, more kids grow up without fathers or mothers, welfare costs increase, the entire sex ratio is thrown out of balance and prisoners face grim prospects when released.