What Is Prison Overcrowding

Introduction
The overcrowding of prisons have become drastically overcrowded over the past years. The overcrowding of prisons have created a dangerous environment for the inmates. Being a growing concern, we want to look into the underlying problems that overcrowd prisons.
Summary
For this document analysis I chose took into and evaluate mass incarceration or as we call it- prison overcrowding. The documentary I watched and will be writing about was on “Mass incarceration in the united states” It was really straight to the point and interesting video on the prison policy which I will talk about later on in the analysis. Something worth pointing out from the documentary are when they spoke about the treatment of prisoners due to overpopulation .Prison can be very tough on inmates and issue cruel punishment. We tend to focus more on punishment than the concept of corrections itself.

The united states alone have the highest incarceration rate in the world. It is considered a violation of standards, according to the video, solitary confinement increases instability and violence in inmates as considered by international law to be torture or cruel,, but here in America, it can’t be regulated by anyone except for prison officials. This war on inmates is a failed experiment and a complete waste of time that could have been used into putting thought on well
plans of action to better the overall penal system. With a long way ahead of the prison system, only time will be able to finally mend the broken system –making it so called perfect.

What causes prison Overcrowding? “Prison overcrowding is due to numerous issues, such as running out of space to put inmates, fluctuating crime rates, or the sudden changes to certain laws.
The number on cause by researchers is found to be because of harsher penalties for crimes, changes with laws make new activities illegal and the basic needs of improvement within the penal system for the correction officers and wardens” Other issues involved with overcrowding are the psychological impacts of inmate overcrowding is known to cause more stressful situations where the prison officials act out of control or inappropriately when apprehending an
inmate.
Options other than prison
Instead of spending billions of dollars on prison as form of punishment, the system should turn to other alternatives. Some policies our penal system should implement are:
1) Investing in rehabilitative programs
2) Changing existing correctional sentencing such as introducing policies that reduce sentencing to a minimum
3) Change some of the penalties
4) Placing inmates on parole instead of sending to prison for lesser offense crimes
5) Have an early release measure
If our penal system introduce and implement these options versus prison, then we would be better off and would not run into as many problems. There were other policies I did not mention because in my opinion they would not do anything to help the issues with the penal system. Some of the policies I thought would not be as effective were the ones that suggested building new private prisons as an example; it would create worst problems and quickly become overpopulated.