The current state of U.S. prisons is they are severely overcrowded for a number of reasons. Our current judicial system has favored prisons becoming multi-million dollar businesses with large amounts of staff running them, some of them even have CEO’s. The current number of prisoners in the United States is 1,561,500 (BJS); that is between the federal and state prisons. The problem is so prevalent that the United States has a total of 5% of the world population and over 25% of the total prisoner population for the world (Roeder). Our current judicial system is justifying putting people in jail for violating social norms, most notably—drug charges.
This problem needs to be solved because it is leading to mass over spending in federal AND state …show more content…
Currently there is a broken system of how to deal with drug offenders, obviously it needs to be changed and I’m sure courts have sent your low level drug offenders to rehabilitation facilities and do so pretty often. The current issue is that 46.4% of current inmates (at the federal level) are in prison for drug offenses (BJS). Certainly there is something we can do to deter individuals from using drugs in such a manner to keep them out of prison. We can fund as many programs and initiatives as we want, but if we do not get the offenders involved in the programs there is no sense in making them. Also, if these drug offenders are not harming anyone but themselves, why even bother putting them in jail? We need to address the drug problem via health research and look into rehabilitative ways to solve the problem rather than just throwing them in prison and hoping for the …show more content…
There would still be enough prisoners for the prison system to keep going at a regular pace and not have to require more funding. You could also make the argument that the medical research and education will cost more than the actual imprisonment of the offenders, which might be true in the short run (1-5 years) but will pay off in the long run, because as I stated earlier the new and current generation will benefit for the advancement of medical science and the ‘new’ generation will benefit more so from education. Another objection or alternative solution would be to just keep the judicial/punishment system how it is, as “if it works don’t fix it” is a key ‘murica’ slogan. Which I could see how you might want to keep our current system if it wasn’t totally broken and now you even have private prisons running the show. I’m just not sure how the government can let a company run how a prison works, as they aren’t even fulfilling their duty to at least rehabilitate the prisoners somewhat while
This problem needs to be solved because it is leading to mass over spending in federal AND state …show more content…
Currently there is a broken system of how to deal with drug offenders, obviously it needs to be changed and I’m sure courts have sent your low level drug offenders to rehabilitation facilities and do so pretty often. The current issue is that 46.4% of current inmates (at the federal level) are in prison for drug offenses (BJS). Certainly there is something we can do to deter individuals from using drugs in such a manner to keep them out of prison. We can fund as many programs and initiatives as we want, but if we do not get the offenders involved in the programs there is no sense in making them. Also, if these drug offenders are not harming anyone but themselves, why even bother putting them in jail? We need to address the drug problem via health research and look into rehabilitative ways to solve the problem rather than just throwing them in prison and hoping for the …show more content…
There would still be enough prisoners for the prison system to keep going at a regular pace and not have to require more funding. You could also make the argument that the medical research and education will cost more than the actual imprisonment of the offenders, which might be true in the short run (1-5 years) but will pay off in the long run, because as I stated earlier the new and current generation will benefit for the advancement of medical science and the ‘new’ generation will benefit more so from education. Another objection or alternative solution would be to just keep the judicial/punishment system how it is, as “if it works don’t fix it” is a key ‘murica’ slogan. Which I could see how you might want to keep our current system if it wasn’t totally broken and now you even have private prisons running the show. I’m just not sure how the government can let a company run how a prison works, as they aren’t even fulfilling their duty to at least rehabilitate the prisoners somewhat while