Assignment 5: Senior Seminar ProjectDue Week 10 and worth 200 points In Week 1, you chose a topic area and problem or challenge within that area. Throughout this course, you have researched the dynami
IDENTIFYING THE CHALLENGE 5
Identifying the Challenge
CRJ 499: Undergraduate Capstone in Criminal Justice
July 21, 2019
Identifying the Challenge Introduction The area chosen for this final project is prisons/corrections. Inmates in prisons are in the receiving end of a lot of problems and challenges. This paper, however, will focus on one of the most common and popular problems in prisons, and that is the overcrowding of prisons and correction centers. Outline the context of the problem or challenge, including the history and any policy decisions that have contributed to the situation. The prison system in the country is the most overpopulated in the globe. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are about 2.2 million individuals behind bars in the United States (Enns, 2018). To put this in a more understandable context, it means that 655 individuals out of a group of every 100000 individuals are behind bars (Enns, 2018). The problem, however, has not been the fact that too many people are incarcerated but it is the fact that too many people are incarcerated without enough resources and capacity to handle the numbers. Most prisons in the country are forced to operate way above 100% capacity. This is a problem that arose in the 19th century. This is because in the 18th-century jails only served the purpose of holding individuals temporarily before they were taken to trial. During this period, the punishment was in the form of corporal as well as capital punishment (Morris & Rothman, 2008). However, people started becoming uncomfortable with this form of punishment and hence started seeking alternatives. This led to the introduction of the prison system first in West Jersey and Quakers. This problem did not arise as a result of policy but rather as a result of the population boom that took place in the 19th century as the mortality rate of individuals lowered, and immigration became high (Morris & Rothman, 2008). With four decades the population of the country had doubled, and this resulted in more strain on the resources, decency as well as infrastructure in the prison system. This led to overcrowding and ineffectiveness of the system ever since. Why is it important that the problem is addressed? The one main reason why this problem needs to be solved is to help ease the financial strain that it is causing to our government at to the taxpayers. Maintaining so many people in the prisons is costing our government so much money, and the problem is passed down to the taxpayers (Travis, Western & Redburn, 2014). Easing this tension would be important as it would also ensure that the money is put to more productive uses. It is also important to address this problem because it makes the correction system ineffective as it becomes hard for it to serve its purpose and denies inmates of basic rights while in prison. Who is impacted internally and externally? From the description above, it is easy to see the parties that are impacted by this problem. Internally, this problem affects the inmates in they lack the resources and infrastructure they need and the result of this is high gang activities, violence, disease spread rates, mental health problems and violence (Enns, 2018). The problem also affects the prison staff by causing work stress since they are understaffed. Externally this affects the society in general since more burden is imposed on them as taxpayers and the fact that the ineffective system does very little to enhance safety and security. The government is also impacted since more resources are demanded from it. Why do you feel the problem hasn’t already been solved? Over time a lot of effort has been to try and resolve this problem, especially in the recent past. However, the reason why the problem has not been solved yet is that this is a problem that has built up over time, and therefore, it will also take a long time to solve it completely. This is a problem that has persisted over decades and centuries, and therefore, one would not expect efforts put over a few years to correct the whole issue. References Enns, P. (2016). Incarceration nation: how the United States became the most punitive democracy in the world. New York NY: Cambridge University Press.
Morris, N. & Rothman, D. (2008). The Oxford history of the prison: the practice of punishment in western society. New York: Oxford University Press.
Travis, J., Western, B. & Redburn, S. (2014). The growth of incarceration in the United States: exploring causes and consequences. Washington, District of Columbia: National Academies Press.
