The Problem We’re All Ignoring….
According to The Sentencing Project, the United States is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons and jails — a 500% increase over the last forty years. The author who put together the fact sheet used as the source, Ashley Nellis, has a professional background in analyzing criminal justice policies and practice and has extensive experience in analyzing racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. She also wrote, A Return to Justice: Rethinking Our Approach to Juveniles in the System. Ashley also goes on to explain that changes in sentencing law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain the increase of imprisoned people. The problem being that this leads to the overcrowding of prisons and become fiscal problems for states to accommodate to. This NAACP fact sheet states that African American and Hispanic people made up fifty eight percent of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up about one quarter of the United States Population. This can’t just be a coincidence; this shows that we have a huge racial advantage as white people to not be imprisoned as much as our colored brothers and sisters.
As Americans, we should all embrace one another for being different and we should be protecting each other. This problem cannot be ignored any longer. The NAACP also discusses the cost of incarceration. About $70 billion dollars are spend on corrections yearly. We are pouring money into the punishment of humans for their wrongdoings, but what are we doing inside our prisons to help them become better people? We need to be offering better rehabilitation, better resources for education, and better mental health facilities within prisons, and we need to make sure these resources are available.
If we continue to ignore these issues, people are going to go into prions just to do their time, not learn any valuable lessons, and then go back into society with terrible morals and no education about how the world functions since they’ve been locked up. We need to want to send these people out into the world better people, so they can become functioning members of society.
