There are approximately 2.3 million people in U.S Prison Systems according to the Prison Policy Initiative. And the housing of all these convicted prisoners costs 42.8 billion dollars yearly, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.
This is an insane amount of money we are paying especially since the majority end up going back into the prison system, as The National Reentry Resource Center states. The prison system is too focused on punishment, rather than rehabilitation, and it truly is only making matters worse.
As there are approximately 20,000 people in prison that are innocent, according to the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal institute to exonerate the wrongfully convicted. If you place people who may be law-abiding citizens, or even non-law-abiding citizens, around other non-law-abiding citizens, they learn stuff. They pick up on certain habits, whether it may be theft, drugs, how to sell drugs, or other possible things that may lead to crime. This is exactly what our prison system does. According to a study done by the University of Texas on Health Concordance, if there is a couple who smoke, and one of them quits, it is much more likely for the other person to quit. What this study shows is others mimic each other’s behavior when they are in close proximity. What this means is that when prisoners who are rightfully convicted are with other people in close proximity, they will start to mimic each other in their respective bad or good habits.
If we want a better society, the prisoners that have done things that were bad need to be able to be taught to do good. This can be done by actually allowing them to learn to integrate back into society, by giving them skills to rely on rather than being reliant on crime for money, and also giving them solid examples to follow, because the majority of prisoners do end up going back out into the world.
We can see that there is a heavy correlation between prisoners and education, because if someone doesn’t have the skillset or knowledge to be able to get a decent job, they end up being much more likely to commit crimes. The majority of inmates have lower education, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The only system we have in place to really solve this is that some prisoners who have access to the computers might be able to go to college online, while still going thousands of dollars into debt.
If we reduce the numbers of the uneducated, then we could reduce crime, that way we are no longer wasting money on a prison system that does almost nothing, as the Bureau Of Justice Systems states that almost 67.8% who were released in 2015 in 30 states were arrested again in 3 years.
Numerous research papers such as ones done by the American Academy of Pediatrics and Ministry of Social Development show that punishment is absolutely terrible at actually reducing negative behaviors. The only time it is semi-effective is when it is immediate, quick and repeated thoroughly right after the act is done and continued until the person dies, as it is shown that a repeated, continuous but swift punishment only works for a while, but once the punishment is pulled, the person tends to go back to their old habits.
The US is already spending so much money on prison systems, there is no way it is humanly possible to do this. Punishment also has undesirable effects such as behavior disorders, which often makes the person more likely to commit more crimes, according to VeryWellMind.
This makes sense, since most criminals who get out of jail end up committing the same crime or a worse one. We need to be able to use other techniques such as better education, or even fighting illiteracy like Canada is currently doing, to decrease crime rates because of the large correlation between illiteracy and crime according to COPIAN. These techniques may help because educated people are less likely to need to rely on crimes to live. America is doing very little about most of this.
The reason why is because prison started to put rehabilitation on the back burner in the mid-1970s and started to see it as a punishment, according to the American Psychological Association.
America should be re-focusing on actually giving benefits for good behavior in prison, and out. This is also not the case in America, as it almost seems we are rewarding antisocial behavior, as one out of every five CEOs are Psychopaths according to The Telegraph. So who is it that our society seems to reward? Those that are honest, caring and intelligent, or those that are better at using others, lying and lack empathy?
For-profit prisons are rewarded for allowing people to stay mentally ill, or having antisocial behaviors and just strengthen these behaviors in their prisoners. They know that if they do, the chances of prisoners coming back are higher which means that they can earn more money from people, even if they were originally innocent. The reason for this is that they are paid per-prisoner. If these cells aren’t full, they aren’t earning as much money as they could be.
According to Romper, a private prison earns about 18,000 dollars per year for each prisoner. That’s plenty of incentive to want them to stay. A solid way to start avoiding this is, rather than paying the prisons for the prisoners they are keeping it, paying the prisons benefits based on how long the prisoners stay out of prison.
The prison system has been making crimes worse because it uses this punishment method which VeryWellMind has shown to be ineffective unless used repeatedly, basically forever, because people tend to repeat what they were doing once the threat of punishment is rescinded. The people of the US need to stop this. The US needs to create reform in the prison system. Students and adults alike can do this by lowering the amount of illiteracy and raising education levels, by making proper education more available to both prisoners and people outside of prison. Everyone should be communicating with our congressmen and others publicly to push for change in the system. As with proper reform, it is certainly possible to make it so when people go to prison and then get released, the majority of people do not end up going back to jail, within just 3 years, so that we may fix the focus of prison systems on rehabilitation rather than the inherently broken way of punishment which we so dearly took up in the mid-1970s.
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