Prisons

Overcrowding In Prisons Today in America there are over one million people imprisoned. The number of inmates is steadily increasing, and shockingly we are running out of room for all these criminals. This is a result of many different social, political, and economic issues that we have today. These include problems such as new taxes for money in order to build new prisons, mandatory minimum sentences, stricter parole eligibility laws, and the neglect of social problems that foster criminal attitudes. Without a doubt, these are problems that have forced the U.S. to imprison a larger share of its criminal population than any other nation in the world. In America, most believe that criminals of serious crimes should be sent away to a prison facility to do time in accordance to their wrong doing. This is happening more and more each year and the bulk of Americans do not see how this can be a major problem. They simply see that all the criminals are being put away and that it is a good thing; they are blindly missing the point that more prisoners brings about an array of problems with it. These problems range from riots in prisons to the transfer of serious criminals to local holding cells.

The United States has the highest rate of imprisonment out of 15 countries, as high as 529 per 100,000 persons. At the conclusion of 2002, 2,166,260 people were being held in a United States prison, jail or juvenile correctional facility. This astoundingly high number has forced state prisons to operate at levels between 1% and 16% above capacity and federal prisons are at an even worse 33% over capacity http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/p02pr.htm (Beck, Harrison, 2003). "There is not a single prison in the United States that is under its maximum capacity. The prisons are either right at their maximum capacity or they are exceeding it." (Will, 505) These facts have made it evident that the United States has reached a crisis in its criminal justice system that must be addressed. It has been made clear that there are number of contributing causes to this dilemma, but it is much more difficult to define a single, simple answer to the problem. When analyzing the problem of prison overcrowding, possible solutions should be separated into two main categories, short and long term. Long term solutions are usually much more difficult to achieve and often must go through a lot of red tape before becoming a solution