Why We Must Fix Our Prisons

America's criminal system has become chaotic and since we have ignored the problem it has just gotten worse. Our failure to address this problem has cause prisons to overflow and become so crowded that they are blursting at the seams. This should mean that there are fewer criminals running throughout neighborhoods--wrong! The crime rate has increased and all America is doing is wasting billions of dollars and deminishing millions of lives!

America needs to fix this system. However, this process will not happen over night. It will require a nationwide recalculation of who goes to jail and how long they stay there. The United States has by far the world's highest incarceration rate. With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world's reported prisoners. America's over crowded prisons are breeding grounds for the same type of criminals that we put into jail. This is because with the little space prisons become places of violence, physical abuse, and hate. The author, Senator Jim Webb, said, "With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different--and vastly counterproductive."

Most of the people that are put into jail suffer from mental illness. This article states that 16% of the population that are in jail, which is 350,000, suffer from a mental illness. Also the article says that our correctional institutions are also heavily populated by the "criminally ill," including inmates who suffer from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and hepatitis.

America is not locking up people who are putting the public's safety at risk. We are locking up people who have commited non-violent crimes.

"I believe that American ingenuity can discover better ways to deal with the problems of drugs and nonviolent criminal behavior while still minimizing violent crime and large-scale gang activity. And we all deserve to live in a country made better by such changes."
~Senator Jim Webb