Prison Overcrowding in America\'s Prison

Prison Overcrowding

Overcrowding in America's Prison

The nature of America's prison system is such that rehabilitation and corrective incarceration typically are secondary to the importance of penal justice and isolation from society. In reality though, this is an approach which should be reserved only for those offenders who are sufficiently violent and dangerous enough to warrant lifelong separation from society. For many others, the goal of seeing them returned to society is often done great detriment by the simultaneous failure of prison to distinguish between violent and nonviolent criminals and the tendency of prisons to incubate something of a networking atmosphere for all types of criminals.

These are conditions which feed into a discussion on the relative state of overcrowding in the nation's jails, contributing to an array of practical and humanitarian shortcomings that are costly both to our society and to our economy. It is this latter issue which directs our discussion toward resolutions that might help to mitigate this set of shortcomings. Before proceeding to such recommendations though, it is appropriate to elaborate on those issues which most compromise the value of this approach to the administration of justice.

Particularly, the interest which must always be present in the process of criminal sentencing is that which denotes the likelihood that many incarcerated individuals will one day again need to return to society. In such cases, it is important that the experience of prison has not intensified the conditions which stimulate criminal behavior and the tendency toward recidivism. This is especially a concern for those who enter jail terms with no history of violent offense and with the potential to be rehabilitated and eventually re-acclimated to society. For those who enter jail under terms that do not suggest antisocial tendencies, patterns of repetitive danger, violence or other more severe degrees of criminality, there is a clear danger that the context of prison can lead one down these paths.

At the very least, many prisons have a justified reputation as themselves being violent places where the concentration of criminal personalities will tend to stimulate higher levels of gang affiliation, internal drug trade and abuse, and, in general, absorption in a culture where criminality is normal. The result is that many who enter young, with limited criminal experience or with more modest criminal proclivities may be exposed to the kinds of patterns and behaviors that will ultimately lead to a repetitive susceptibility to criminal behavior once released.