Cost Of Incarceration Essay

The United States has less than five percent of the world’s population and over a quarter of the world’s prisoners (A. Liptak, 2008). Something about this doesn’t sit well with me and it never has. With 309,090,740 people in the United States it is hard to believe that 1 in every 100 American adults are currently behind bars and from 2006 to 2007, the prison population alone grew by 25,000 (A. Liptak, 2008). This does not include county jails. It costs the federal and state governments approximately $20,000 to $30,000 a year to incarcerate one offender. That means that if a convicted felon’s sentence is 10 years, it will cost the government at least $220,000. The estimated total annual cost of housing, feeding and providing services to all prisoners is $40 billion.
The U.S. correction system has three main goals: punish, protect the
population and rehabilitate the offenders. However, I feel that based on the statistics, the system has sacrificed funds meant for rehabilitation for more prisons in order to accommodate the ever growing number of prisoners. The most obvious goal of the correctional system is to punish offenders of the law and in theory is supposed to serve as a deterrent against the repeat of criminal activity. The growing number of prisoners in the United States correctional system proves that this theory is mostly unsupported.
Punishment within the corrections system comes in many forms. The first form of punishment is incarceration itself. Once an offender has been convicted of a crime and is sentenced to serve time in a correctional facility, he or she will be transported to either a county jail or state prison depending on the length of their sentence and the severity of their offense. Criminals who have committed offenses that require substantial supervision will be shipped to a higher security facility, while offenders who have committed less severe crimes will likely spend time in county jail or minimum security prison.
Another way the corrections system punishes offenders is death by lethal injection. An offender sentenced to death will almost always serve a lengthy prison sentence before his or her execution date. This allows time for appeals. Many death row inmates actually die prior to their execution date. The process is actually a fairly quick one. On the day of execution, 30 minutes before the scheduled execution, the prisoner is dressed in clean denim pants, a blue work shirt and is strapped to a table. The inmate is then equipped with a cardiac monitor and has two IVs placed in two viable veins. One IV is a back-up in case the first malfunctions during the process. At the warden’s signal the first of three chemicals are issued into the inmate’s veins. After the third chemical is administered and the inmate has been declared dead, the witnesses (usually family and approved friends) are ushered out of the witness observation area and the body is removed from the table with dignity. Normally, the family claims the body, but if this is not the case, the state makes arrangements for burial or cremation. The total cost of all three medications issued during a lethal injection is about $86.08, though recently, the second medication administered has become unavailable, forcing the United States to replace it with a more expensive medication. Execution is the most severe punishment given by the justice system. There are several other methods of execution. However, they have been deemed cruel and unusual and are only used at the request of the inmate. Requests can still be denied by the judge overseeing the case.
However, if you are not sentenced to death, offenders are released and are usually required to spend more time under the supervision of a parole officer. The parole officer is required to ensure that you attend required counseling, job training or substance abuse treatment that may have been mandated by the courts upon release from prison. However, more often than we’d like to admit, offenders slip through the cracks and end up re-offending due to improper supervision, education and support from their parole officer.
To help ease the transition from incarceration to reentry to the public, the United States corrections system also has quite few programs in place to help rehabilitate inmates prior to their return to society.
Sadly, funding for these programs are cut substantially every single year resulting in several states cutting the programs from their prisons completely. Substance-abuse treatment, vocational training and educational programs are all designed to give offenders the chance to turn their life around, hold jobs and function normally in society.
The National Emotional Literacy Project for Prisoners gives incarcerated men and women throughout the United States a program to help them change life-long patterns of violence and addiction. Their main course book “Houses of Healing” guides them down a road where they learn better ways to cope in society and learn about themselves as a result. They’re given an opportunity to learn that they aren’t defined by the crimes they’ve committed but instead by the person they are and is a wonderful way to change the mindset of a person who thinks they’ll never be any better than they already
are.
Rehabilitation has been proven to be the better method in deterring crime and reducing the rate of recidivism. Throwing someone in a cell to sit idly until the end of their sentence with zero hours of intervention or rehabilitation is a waste of time and a waste of a human life. One million dollars spent on correctional education prevents about 600 crimes, while that same money invested in incarceration prevents 350 crimes (A. Bazos, J. Hausman, 2004). Correctional education has also proven to reduce recidivism. Participants in such programs are 10-20 percent less likely to re-offend than someone who didn’t participate. So if it is proven that correctional education (just one method of prison rehabilitation) is not only proven to reduce more crimes but also prevent recidivism by 10-20 percent, why aren’t we jumping at the chance to significantly lower America’s crime rate?
I think it is clear why I favor rehabilitation over incarceration alone. Americans need to stop pouring money into funding for building bigger prisons and expanding current ones, and put the same money into funding rehab and education programs. The end result is a lower crime rate and a safer community for our children and families nationwide.