Budget Construction Justification Paper

Problem Evaluation: Overcrowded Prisons

The correctional system plays an important role in the criminal justice system. Imprisonment serves as a method of locking away dangerous people for the purpose of protecting the public and rehabilitating people who have been caught committing various crimes so that they can be ready to be assimilated back into the communities with a lower risk of recidivism. Prisons also serve as a way of punishment, to discourage wrongdoing among the public. Due to these important roles, the criminal justice system has to imprison people. However, the system has experienced a huge problem of overcrowding because of the high rate of incarceration and the low availability of resources.

Problem Identification

Overcrowding of prisons is a huge problem that affects the United States criminal justice system. The United States prison population is growing at a higher rate than the government has been able to control. The number of incarcerated people was grown significantly between 1970 and 1990 during the government’s ‘war on drugs’ when the drug laws were enhanced to include more serious punishments for people involved in drug crimes. Additionally, the high prison population in the United States has been shown to be a result of the poor rehabilitation abilities of the prison system (Williams & Porter, 2016). Studies have shown that a majority of prisoners in the country are recidivists and drug offenders. The issue of prison overcrowding is a problem mainly because of the understaffing and the underfunding, which makes the prison conditions relatively poor. Therefore, it is important that this problem is examined and solutions developed to solve it.

Quantifying the Problem

Imprisonment is the most common form of punishment for criminal activity in the United States. It is estimated that America has the second highest imprisonment rate per capita in the world, only after Seychelles. As at 2014, it was recorded that there are 735 incarcerated people per 100,000 of the population. This value was increased by approximately 100 prisoners from the 698 value recorded the previous year (Tewksbury & Stickle, 2016). However, by 2017, the government had managed to reduce the imprisonment per capita rate to 673. In spite of this reduction, the United States prison system still hold inmates beyond its maximum capacity.

There are currently approximately 1.5 million people in the Federal prison system in the United States. Although there is a decreasing trend in the prison population during the past few years, the rate at which the population is decreasing is too low to deal with the overpopulation issue. At least 7 states have more than 25% of the prison’s capacity in population. The state with the highest overpopulation which has approximately 190% capacity. Illinois has a capacity of approximately 144%. In 2007, the State of California was forced to declare a state of emergency because of the overcrowding issue in its state’s prisons (Tewksbury & Stickle, 2016).

Prison overcrowding can is likely to be a problem resulting from the tougher sentences for crimes involving drugs. The image below shows the changes in the prison populations between 1980s and 2010s.

From the graph, it can be seen that the prison population grew at the highest rate from the 1980s. It is estimated that the war on drugs that took place in the 1980s caused the quadrupling of the prison population. One in every 31 people was either in prison, on probation, or on parole as a result of drug related crime (Williams & Porter, 2016).

Additionally, the prison population has been high because of the high rate of recidivism. According to a study done by the National Institute of Justice, approximately 67% of prisoners are rearrested within three years after they have been released. 76.6 percent are rearrested within five years. More than half of released prisoners are rearrested within just a year after release (Durose et al., 2011). With the high rate of recidivism, it is hard for the prison system to maintain low prisoners because those that are released end up going back.

Importance of Solving the Problem

It is important that the prison overcrowding issue is solved because it limits the quality of the criminal justice system. There are many risks that the prison system faces as a result of the high capacity of prisoners relative to the available resources. One of the risks of the overcrowding is the worsening of the prison conditions. When there are too many prisoners and too little resources to manage them, there is an increased risk of issues such as sanitation. Healthcare in the prisons is likely to be an issue if the prison population is not reduced. The risk of the spread of diseases within the prisons has been increased significantly because of the access capacity. The spread of infectious diseases is often worse in populations that are crowded. Some examples of illnesses that the prisoners are at the risk of spreading include HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and Tuberculosis.

Prison overcrowding also needs to be dealt with because it puts too much pressure on the inmates as well as the employees in the correctional facilities. Although they are in a correctional facility, the inmates need to be provided with a comfortable environment where they can get a chance to be rehabilitated as opposed to being exposed to stress. Issues such as prison violence can be reduced if the prisoners has a better environment where there are enough prisoners per facility. The prison employees also need to have positive working conditions, which have been hard to provide given the overpopulation issue.

Solving the overcrowding issue is also important because it will help to improve government spending on the prison system. The rate of spending on correctional facilities in the U.S. has grown three times more than in the education system (Kelly, 2016). If the government can reduce the prison population, then it can deal with the spending issue.

Proposed Solutions to the Problem

There are various strategies that can be applied to reduce the prison populations significantly. The justice system should use other forms of sentencing on more crimes. For instance, the application probation, house arrest, community service, and diversion programs should be extended to more forms of offenses to reduce the rate of incarceration. Additionally, assisted drug offenders should be placed under proper drug use rehabilitation as opposed to being forced into prison without proper medical care.

The population of the United States prisons can also be reduced through the improvement of the rehabilitation and community reentry programs in the current justice system. The high rate of repeat offenses shows that the current prison system is not successful in rehabilitating the prisoners and facilitating their reentry into the communities. New strategies for behavioral change should be developed to reduce the rate at which prisoners repeat their offenses after release.

Lastly, the easiest way that the government can deal with the overcrowding issue is through the building of new prisons and the expansion of the already existing prisons. However, this solution does not solve the underlying issues that cause the overcrowding in the first place. Therefore, there is a chance that with time the prisons might become overcrowded again. Therefore, it is important that the solutions presented above are given more consideration as they help to reduce the rate of incarceration.

References

Durose, Matthew R., Alexia D. Cooper, and Howard N. Snyder, Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 30 States in 2005: Patterns from 2005 to 2010 (pdf, 31 pages), Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, April 2014, NCJ 244205.