Overcrowding In Prisons

Has society as a whole ever wondered why people a wrongfully accused and imprisoned for years without fair trial or proper evidence or even intelligent judgement? Or maybe you want to know why the reoffender rate is so high and rehabilitation rate is so low? Some might even want to understand how prisons are the second highest resource given money from the government and yet we still have constant overcrowding. The prison system is a disadvantage to the economic growth of the tax payers. I’m here to give you proper insight and answers to all of these questions.
Government spending has long been a topic that has been disputed over. The U.S. corrections system has gone through an enormous expansion during the last couple of decades, with a more …show more content…
What is the reoffender rate of inmates who have been rehabilitated in the system? Is there a more effective way in funding the prison system? The New York Times released an article stating the cost for each individual inmate was as low as 31,000 to the highest of 60,000 per year (Santora, 2013). According to statistics a petty crime such as theft with no weapon with the merchandise being less than a 1,000 in value can result in up to a year in prison, which is not equivalent to the cost of housing that prisoner for the tax payers. As reported by the Huffington Post more than 25,400 former inmates who were either released outright from federal prisons or placed on probation in 2005, the 60-page report found almost half (49.3%) had, within the next eight years, been arrested again, whether for a new offense or for violating conditions of their parole or release (Zoukis, 2016). This is a ridiculous statistic, this just shows that the prison system is not doing what they say there doing to the inmates. Instead of rehabilitating the inmates the system is beginning to confine them into a cycle that is setting them up for a pattern of failure. There not progressing even though the prison system claims to have resources to get them on track. According to Tennessee Corrections on inmate jobs throughout the prisons, “ More than 5,000 inmates work in support services inside our prisons preparing food, cleaning the institutions, landscaping, laundry, recycling, and maintaining buildings and equipment. This reduces operational costs, as well as teaches new skills. Over 1,000 inmates also work as teacher’s aides, counselor aides, clerks, and library assistants” (Department of Correction, 2014). We do all of these as a society and yet we still have more than half that find their way back to prison. One last question we might ask is how can we improve the funding for

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