corrections

Alternative Methods to Incarcerations

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The American jail system is said to be one of the most overcrowded in the world something that hampers the rehabilitation process of the offenders . Due to this fact , managing jails have become an uphill task The American government in trying to make these systems to be effective has come up with a plan of building more prisons and jails but this has also proved to be ineffective . For this reason , this system incarcerating offenders has greatly been criticized

. It is nit the best way of controlling crime infact , there is not any evidence that proves that is so . Because of this it should be replaced with other alternative methods such as community service , parole , death penalty and putting them in rehabilitation institutions such as probation schools

According to a report that was released by the Bureau for Justice Statistics revealed that in US , the number of prisoners has almost doubled recently and this has been witnessed even in the past period For example in 1996 , there was an increase in the number of inmates in United States by 55 ,900 criminals and by the end of that year the carrying capacity was already exceeded by 16-24 percent . The most affected prisons were the federal ones which had a 25 percent increase of inmates . Today despite the fact that the US government has constructed more and more prisons the problem still persists as the jails are still overcrowded . There are dangers that are associated with overcrowding and some of these are escape attempts increase , the states ' budget is further strained , the prisons become understaffed this is because the inmates - staff ratio goes down as the number of prisoners outdo that of the staff . Overcrowding in prisons leads to the release of unhabilitated dangerous criminals before their due period is over . This causes these criminals to turn to be recidivists for they are released before they have completed their jail term (Romano J . 1991

This problem has a domino effect on other government sectors for example the tax payers become overburdened with taxes so that the government can meet the need of those imprisoned though they are considered as social misfits and yet this money could be used in other sectors that of the government that are in dire need of financial assistance . These are institutions such as hospitals , schools , libraries and parks that are in dire need of assistance . The government spends a lot of money in building more jails in an effort to address the issue of overcrowding for example in 1992 it spent 94 US Dollars on civil and criminal justice (Cornell , G . December 1 , 1990

This domino effect results because when overcrowding becomes a common thing , the effectiveness in correcting the behaviors of the offenders goes down . Many people repeat the same mistakes and end up in the same jails . This tends to overburdening of the prosecutors , juries , public defendants and other support agencies . The overburdening of cases...