Response to Comment

Great question Cian. I believe that jail should be for rehabilitation mostly. I think it is more beneficial to help people become productive members of society than to toss them in a cell for a few years and give them no support when they get out. This is especially true when more than half of the people in jail are there for drug offenses. However, I do think we should sprinkle in a little suffering here and there. I think that we should punish those who have committed serious crimes against society, particularly if the person is sentenced to jail for life. Jail should be both a place for rehabilitation and a deterrent to future crime in my opinion.

3 More Articles

http://online.wsj.com/articles/federal-prison-population-drops-1411469837

This article claims that federal prions are actually shrinking due to lesser sentencing for non-violent offenses. However, this comes with an uptick of incarceration at the state level. It seems that while removing a lot of the mandatory sentencing that comes with non-violent crimes reduces the amount of people in federal jail, they just end up with shorter sentences in a state jail. This is not a good solution.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21583680-eric-holders-ideas-lockig-up-fewer-americans-are-welcome-do-not-go-far-enough-one

This article has some good statistics on the US prisons. The United States has 5% of the world population but 25% of the total prisoners in the world. It costs us $80 billion a year to maintain this, or nearly $35,000 dollars per inmate. Federal prisons have grown by 800% since 1980. These statistics fit in nicely with the other information I gathered.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/05/us-prison-population_n_4214626.html

This article again gives some interesting statistics. There are more prisoners than school teachers in the US. It also says that the amount of prisoners is in decline since its peak in 2009. It again cites that many are trying to do away with the mandatory sentencing that many drugs had. I agree with that, but I think that the root of the problem is the addiction to drugs that keeps people going back to jail. While I agree that we should eliminate harsh mandatory sentencing for non-violent crimes we should also focus on rehabilitation.

Norweigian Prisons

Norway is renowned for its progressive views on the prison system. Unlike the U.S. prisons' concrete cells with hard communal toilets, Norway's prisons instead have been compared to "Holiday Camps". The prisons run a sort of "open campus" format, where they are not forced to stay in the building and they can do activities such as fishing in their spare time. Norway also has no death penalty or even life sentences in their penal system. Even Anders Breivik, the shooter who killed 77 people in Norway, only received the maximum sentence of 21 years. However, it should be noted that Norway has the lowest recidivism rate in Europe at just under 30%. This is much lower than the United State's rate as well, which is around 70%.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people

Recidivism Rates

The Bureau of Justice Statistics released the following data about our prison system:

• 3 in 4 former prisoners go back to jail within 5 years
• Sentence lengths have only gone up in the past 15 years

http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17

CBS also ran a piece on Recidivism:

• 82% of property offenders arrested for another crime
• 77% drug offenders
• 74% of public order offenders
• 71% violent offenders

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/once-a-criminal-always-a-criminal/

What does this data tell us? It shows that our prison system does not actually rehabilitate inmates. If we have 3 out of every 4 inmates coming back to jail within five years then we have a major problem. If we instead focused on rehabilitation then we would save money and have less crowded prisons, even if it meant putting more money into it right now. As of right now, we are wasting money by having people go to jail over and over again.

New York Times on Capital Punishment

On September 8th, Daniel Lachance of the New York Times wrote a scathing piece on the current penal system, eviscerating the policy of our country having the death penalty. The article began with,  " To opponents of the death penalty, recent accounts of botched executions and DNA-based exonerations of death-row prisoners have revived hope that judges and voters will finally see capital punishment for what it is: an intolerable affront to human dignity." Lachance then calmed down a bit and delved into his reasoning. He cites the inability of the government to put down death row inmates quickly. "As late as 1959, most of those executed spent less than two years on death row...inmates put to death in 2012 had waited an average of almost 16 years for their execution date." He goes on to say that this is because not enough lawyers want to take on these cases, so inmates will have to wait years for a government appointed lawyer while they appeal. Lachance's main point in this article is that if we are going to convince others to abolish the death penalty it will not be through the argument of morality, but rather the argument of money. He says that we should argue that the death penalty is a waste of our own tax money, and by abolishing it we would save a buck, which is easier to get behind than "save the mass murderer because the death penalty is unfair".

I personally agree with Lachance on this piece. Waiting 16 years to be executed is absurd, especially when you take into account the cost of housing a criminal for that time just for them to die at the hands of the state. It is also a bit strange that capital punishment is up to the state to decide. Is a murder in Texas really worse than a murder in Massachusetts? I think that the supreme court should have decided in 1972 to either make it legal or illegal, not declare it unconstitutional but leave it for the states to deal with. Now we have a national debate that really should have been cleared up years ago. Either way, I agree with Lachance in that the death penalty is not worth it for the cost it has.

Privatized Prisons

A hot new topic in the field of crime and punishment is the issue of private prisons. Contrary to what many people believe, the government does not run all of the prisons in our country. Instead, private agencies are springing up and taking over the prison market. From 2002 to 2009, the amount of private prisons in the country increased by 37%. Many are not too sure about this new influx of private prisons, and they have began to advocate against them. Others believe they are a good, necessary implementation and that private prisons are here to stay.

Those who are for the private prisons have one main argument for them, and that is that it is much cheaper to run a private prison. Private agencies claim that they can run a prison much more efficiently than the government can as they have the ability to cut unnecessary expenses and hold to tighter budgets.

People who are against it claim that these private prisons are a bad thing. Some private prisons have cut certain rehabilitation programs in order to make more money. Another problem is that these private agencies are making money off of people's incarceration. Is it really moral to make money by locking people up? These agencies want more people in jail so they can increase their profits. It seems unfair to prey on those who make poor decisions in life, especially when the prison does not really rehabilitate its prisoners.

Immigration

Immigration is a hot topic today, as the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico and other countries has created quite a polarizing issue. I chose this topic as a possibility because of the amount of press it has gotten and also because everyone seems to have an opinion on the issue. It would be interesting to see the statistics that comes with this topic and to possibly dispel certain notions that others have about illegal aliens as well to form an educated view on the matter.

The blogs on immigration were surprisingly scarce, but I did notice that the people writing them had an agenda they wanted to push. Some believed that it should be easier to immigrate while others thought that harsher immigration laws were for the better.