Prisons In America Term paper

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America's prisons have been called "graduate schools for crime." It

stands to reason: Take a group of people, strip them of possessions and privacy,

expose them to constant threats of violence, overcrowd their cell- block,

deprive them of meaningful work, and the result is an embittered underclass more

intent on getting even with society than contributing to it. Prisons take the

nonviolent offender and make him live by violence. They take the nonviolent

offender and make him a hardened killer. America has to wake up and realize that

the current structure of our penal system is failing terribly. The government

has to devise new ways to punish the guilty, and still manage to keep American

citizens satisfied that our prison system is still effective. Americans pay a

great deal for prisons to fail so badly. Like all big government solutions, they

are expensive. In the course of my studies dealing with the criminal justice

system, I have learned that the government spends approximately eighty-thousand

dollars to build one cell, and $28,000 per year to keep a prisoner locked up.

That's about the same as the cost of sending a student to Harvard. Because of

overcrowding, it is estimated that more than ten-billion dollars in construction

is needed to create sufficient space for just the current prison population. The

plain truth is that the very nature of prison, no matter how humane society

attempts to make it, produces an environment that is inevitably devastating to

its residents. Even if their release is delayed by longer sentences, those

residents inevitably return to damage the community, and we are paying top

dollar to make this possible. Why should tax payers be forced to pay amounts to

keep nonviolent criminals sitting in prison cells where they become bitter and

more likely to repeat their offenses when they are released? Instead, why not

put them to work outside prison where they could pay back the victims of their

crimes? The government should initiate work programs; where the criminal is

given a job and must relinquish his or her earnings to the victim of their crime

until the mental and physical damages of their victims are sufficed. A court

will determine how much money the criminal will have to pay for his restitution

costs, and what job the criminal will have to do to pay back that restitution.

The most obvious benefit of this approach is that it takes care of the victim,

the forgotten person in the current system. Those who experience property crime

deserve more than just the satisfaction of seeing the offender go to prison.

Daniel Van Ness, president of Justice Fellowship, has said: All the legal

systems which helped form western law emphasize the need for offenders to settle

with victims. The offense was seen as primarily a violation against the victim.

While the common welfare had been violated and the community therefore had an

interest and responsibility in seeing that the wrong was addressed and the

offender punished, the offense was not considered primarily a crime against the

state as it is today. (76) Restitution offers the criminal a means to restore

himself-to undergo a real change of character. Mere imprisonment cannot do this;

nothing can destroy a man's soul more surely than living without useful work and

purpose. Feodor Dostoevsky, a prisoner for ten years during czarist repression,

wrote, "If one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on

him the most terrible of punishments...one need only give him work on a

completely useless and irrational character" (77). This is exactly what

goes on in the "make work" approach of our prisons and it is one of

the contributing factors to prison violence. To quote Jack Kemp, author of Crime

and Punishment in Modern America: The idea that a burglar should return stolen

goods, pay for damage to the house he broke into and pay his victims for the

time lost from work to appear at a trial meets with universal support from the

American people. There is, of course, a reason that the concept of restitution

appeals to America's sense of justice. Restitution also provides an alternative

to imprisonment for nonviolent criminals, reducing the need for taxpayers to

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