People should not be treated like animals for past transgressions. No one person is perfect and everyone is subject to mistakes, and, at times, even breaking the law. Prison overcrowding has been a problem that has burdened the U.S. prison system since its beginning. From my experience of going through basic training for the military, keeping too many individuals confined in small quarters for long periods of time starts to breed aggression, fear, and, ultimately, violence. Also, individual medical and psychological needs tend to be overlooked when an already overwhelmed system is flooded with an influx of people.
A lack of affordable housing has contributed to homelessness. The loss of affordable housing puts a great number of people at risk of homelessness. The lack of affordable housing has led to high rent burdens (rents which absorb a high proportion of income), overcrowding, and substandard housing. These phenomena’s, in turn, have not only forced many people to become homeless; they have put a large and growing number of people at risk of becoming homeless. Excessive waiting lists for public housing mean that people must remain in shelters or inadequate housing arrangements longer.
As a result of these poor living conditions, those men and women commit suicide at double the national inmate average and recive unproper medical treatment. They also experience many more prison lockdowns than should be neccesary, and sometimes they are always living in fear of violence. Luckily, something was done about this situation. The United States Supreme Court ruled in a five to four decision that those prisons violate the Eigth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment. "Overcrowding has overtaken the limited resources of prison staff, imposed demands well beyond the capacity of medical and mental heath facilities, and created unsanitary and unsafe conditions that make progress in the provision of care difficult or impossible to achieve."
Overcrowding of our prisons is a bad situation that will continue to get worse unless our government figures out a solution. Inmates are at risk, correctional officers are at risk, and the American public is at risk. Without a solution soon, we will be seeing a large scale problem get much larger. Overpopulation is defined as “the condition of having a population so dense as to cause environmental deterioration, an impaired quality of life, or a population crash” (Webster, 2014). Today our prison system has fallen into a desperate time with overcrowding and overpopulation of our prisons county, state, and federal.
These inmates enter this system with chronic health problems, chronic unemployment and homelessness, and financial instability. These individuals usually tend to not have health care coverage and with their financially instability are unable to support themselves financially thought treatment. They often times also lack a structured support system and positive reinforcement to support their emotional health and stability. These inmates often require specific services and housing needs not typical of other inmates. These inmates while incarcerated often require specialized attention, treatment, medication, and security.
The high crime rates make it difficult for Mr. & Mrs. J to allow their young children outside to play, and transportation restrictions create difficulties for obtaining healthy and fresh foods. The situation that this family is in creates vulnerability for all of them; no personal transportation for food or medical care and confinement in a high crime, low-income
On any given day, about 70,000 are psychotic. These numbers represent a severe crisis for prison systems throughout the country. The report discusses two main reasons why the numbers have risen to a crisis level. First, as a result of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s, many mental health hospitals were closed, but community mental health systems which were envisioned as taking the place of hospitals did not develop sufficiently. Many mentally ill—particularly the poor—are now without access to help.
Phone lines were cut and people had to stay on the side they ended up on when the wall was built; emigration was near impossible because of high security levels, and gaining access by means of a visa was also difficult as well as expensive. People were devastated; this was the first sign that they were losing their freedom in terms of travel and many panicked citizens tried to escape before the Wall was finished and fully guarded. This negatively affected the GDR as their people felt trapped, they were unhappy with the government system thrust upon them purely because of the district they happened to be in. Another negative impact of the Berlin Wall was that the GDR had to constantly strengthen the wall and its defences as they felt threatened by the West's increased military forces. The initial barbed wire barrier soon transformed into a concrete wall with weaponry and military forces defending the inner German border; so many military resources were devoted to the defence of the wall, a constant drain of the GDR's time, money, and work force, which could have been used elsewhere if the wall did not exist.
In our world today there is lack of opportunities for the elderly person to take part in; there are not enough facilities to cater to each person’s need, and in capabilities in that the elderly persons that are not gainfully employed cannot afford a house are to maintain him or herself on their own without the aid from the government agencies one out of every ten elderly person is now living in deep poverty. The elderly are subjected to serious scrutiny and discrimination in their jobs, their family and others in their social life if they have one. In their work place they are seen as not productive, burdensome and feeble, so once they have reach the age of 50 and 60 they are ask to leave and find another means to occupy their time, because the work place only caters to the young and made only provision for the younger generation. Elderly people are faced with a lot of problems that affect them until they are dead. Some of these problems are poverty, malnutrition, and lack of transportation, healthcare difficulties and elderly abuse.
One of the worst aspects of spending time in prison is that no matter how long you are required to stay, for many people it is a life sentence. By this I mean that even once prisoners are released, they are often unable to lead any kind of normal life. They are denied the right to work, the right to vote, and often the right to own their own homes. For adults this is often a tragedy and it starts a cycle where people see the only viable option is to return to crime. With juveniles, this is even more of a travesty because they enter this cycle at an earlier age.