Free Essay About Responses To Posts On Prison Population

Response to Post No.1

While I wholly agree that something must be done to ease the huge population of prisons in the country, I do not think that ankle monitors is a good idea. It is as impractical as confining all kinds of law violators, petty and serious, in prisons. The underlying rationale for their use is to alert the police if the wearer goes beyond a designated area. If such a gadget is made to solve the overcrowding problem in US prisons it would mean that a lot of offenders will be made to wear them. Do states have enough law enforcement manpower to go after all those who go beyond the allowed range? Even if they do, law enforcers would be most likely preoccupied with the task of going after violators leaving other important matters unattended. I like, however, that the poster made special mention of the fact that a majority of prisoners had been employed a month before they were arrested (Haley and Bohm 2014, p. 357). I always thought economic desperation was the chief reason that drove people to commit crimes.

Response to Post No. 2

Indeed, operating at 100% for states and 38% more than its highest capacity for the federal level (Haley and Bohm 2014, p. 355) is disturbing. I could just imagine prisoners cramped in prison cells in a market-like atmosphere. Maintaining security and order must be a nightmare despite the range of procedures employed by them (Haley and Bohm 2014, pp. 374-375). Statistics have been cited showing that more than half of prisoners in state and federals prisons suffer from mental health problems. Worse, they are mixed with the general prison population pending evaluation (Haley and Bohm 2014, p. 378). Indiscriminately placing all offenders in prison does not solve America’s problem because unless serving lifetime sentence or executed, prisoners will all eventually come out in worse mental condition than when they entered prisons posing more danger to society than ever before.

References

Haley, K. and Bohm, R. (2014). Introduction to Criminal Justice. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill.