I believe as I reflect on the things that we went through in the course and the other things I’ve researched on the internet there were a lot of different populations that the criminal justice system serves. One thing that I have seen is a need to fix the overcrowding in most of the prisons and jails in the United States. There seems to be to many misdemeanor and non-violent crimes in the corrections division of the prison system. We need to focus on more of violent crimes and figure out what to do with the non-violent crimes. By no means should any crime go unpunished but we have to as a group of professionals figure this out and how to deal with it. Another issue that the criminal justice system needs to address is the homeless population that seems to endlessly flow through the system. There are 610,000 homeless people in the United States on any given day. The cost of housing these non-violent criminals are skyrocketing to the tax payers of this country I once again think the courts need to do a better job at dealing with these types of people. Last but not least mental illness is another population that the criminal justice system serves. Probably one of the more troubling aspects of the criminal justice system has to deal with. It seems that these people just seem to fall through the cracks of the system.
Dealing with or addressing the needs of these populations seems to be a never ending process. I really don’t believe that the department of corrections has really too much to do with addressing the problems of the populations they serve. They pretty much can only watch over and provide so much assistance to these people. My personal opinion is that we have over zealous prosecutors that just want convictions and don’t really care what happens to the people they convict. I have done some research and have found on the U.S. Department of Justice website that