A Huge Dilemma

Our prison population has been continuously striving in numbers throughout the United States. It has become a financial crisis for our working government as well as our society as a whole.“Build them and they will come” is a phrase I have heard by many of my criminal justice professors and I am beginning to really understand why they’ve said that as it is hard to believe, just in California the number amount of prisons have more than tripled and are continuing to be filled to the maximum capacity with inmates.

It seems as though we have a growing dilemma with those entering and re-entering our prisons in the criminal justice system.. Severe overcrowding makes the safe operation of a prison system nearly impossible.. Everything is known to revolve around overcrowding such as the deficiencies in the classification plan are unavailable because of staff doing other tasks associated with overcrowding problems. California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has even recognized and posed a state of emergency back in the year 2006 due to the dangers overcrowding poses posed to prisoners, prison staff, and even the public (Specter 2010). As a state of emergency was in alert for California in 2006, still nothing has changed. If a state of emergency alert can still change nothing for even the state of California then we will continue to be we are faced with a dilemma in the number of growing and never ending inmates.

Despite the amount of money washed away taking care of the many needs of inmates, there is another round of bad news in which is just an extension of the first. Low and behold the more money a state spends on building and running prisons, the less there is for everything else, from roads and bridges to health care and public schools (Brown 2008). If our criminal justice system continues to run like this, our prison population will continue to grow and pretty soon in my eyes it will be even more hardmore troubling to uphold a stable lifestyle for the community of most American families.

With angry and tired citizens’ tax money going to waste to accommodate incarcerated felons off the streets; I think I speak for most when I say, something must be done. There must be a way we can go about holding and/or treating inmates for the better in which our money and streets will be protected. What about who we are holding in our cells and who we are releasing? I do not want to waste any more of my tax dollars keeping non-violent offenders locked up when they could be doing hard labor making jobs on our streets in means of restitution with a way of also making ourand communities looking better; with patrol supervision of course, even allowing more jobs for our every day law abiding citizens.

Brown, E. & Gonnerman, J. (2008). We are locking up 1 in every 100 american adults-and going bankrupt in the process. Slammed, 33(4), 44-46.

Specter, D. (2010). The State of California Prisons. Everything revolves around overcrowding, 22 (3), 194-199.