I feel like with all the current issues on human rights, such as the legality of abortions and gay marriage, that overpopulated prisons have fallen through the cracks. Prisons have become the Spartan pit of American, but a little less kicking in the chest. They are overpopulated, really only a partial solution to many problems for the people thrown in have, and not to mention a serious cost to the government. I figure if you are going to put that much money and effort into anything that it becomes a force that will produce and accomplish something other than a community for the unfortunate tossed in a jail cell on a daily basis. There are three main issues I have with prisons: overpopulation, cost, which kind of go hand in hand, and the barbaric solution it has yet to fully evolve from.
According to The Washington Post, the U.S. had more than 2.4 million people in prison last year. We are throwing people in jail to teach them they've done wrong, but what they get is sometimes much better than what they had outside of prison. States actually put more money towards prisons than they do for students education. And to top it all off the government has given private prisons incentive to have more people in prison because of quotas, of occupancy guarantees, or just have the tax payer pay for empty beds. So we are throwing all this money on this system that only seems to cause more trouble than good. It's this form of out of sight out of mind and the lack of compassion towards these human beings that shouldn't be swept under the rug. Now I know I'm getting a lot of grief about how these people deserved it, but I'm not entirely sure that's even true. If these "criminals" aren't throwing themselves back in the system so that they can take advantage of it they might not belong there at all. If I could compare an insane asylum to the prison there wouldn't be much of difference other than guards have nurse training the jail is now a hospital. The procedures are very similar except people in prison are put to work at $0.12-$0.40 an hour according to Prison Policy Initiative. According to an article in the New York Times, in 2010 prison held more than three times more mentally ill than a hospital. This ignorance only exacerbates the issue of overpopulation, creating a dangerous and inhuman cocktail. Now these situations don't apply to everyone, but I think the good majority of these people deserve more serious attention and more thorough solution. Luckily there are some states taking the time to see this problem through and have taken steps to completely better the system.
According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, states that were able to drop their occupancy count still had no increase in violence. Actually the prisons that lowered their occupancy had lower crime rates compared to the prisons that actually raised their occupancy, which increased their violence. So it would not be the end of the world to lower some of the outrageous sentence lengths given to some people, but that isn't the only thing because these states stopped focusing on prisons they were able to invest some time and money into things like treatment and diversion programs, actual solutions.
It's amazing what can be accomplished when you see the good in people. If we can realize that these people have made mistakes as do all humans and are shown a little sympathy, then we can start to better this world.
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