Com156 – Prison Population of Drug Offenders

Prison Population of Drug Offenders With the linked States prison press out growing, did you know that almost every citizen knows at least single somebody that is in prison? Every day there atomic number 18 two hundred mod jail cells that argon constructed in the united States (ZHENG, SALGANIK, &038 GELMAN, 2006). With the highest ranges of captivity than any sepa aim country prisons are full in the United States of America, and yet we continue to build more than space and spend more tax dollars on building more prisons. This is an ever growing busy amongst Ameri ass citizens whose tax dollars are going into this ever building riddle.Something demand to be d bingle to change the course of this problem before it becomes large than it real should be, and we do deem a few options to consider. More than a canton of our countries prison populate is incarcerated for medicate offenses with sentences of anywhere from 1 to 30 years (Center for Cognitive Liberty &038 Et hics, 2012). 30 years seems like a long term to spend citizen tax dollars on someone who did vigour violent towards another, and was only hurting themself with the lifestyle that they chose to live.Our prison systems could potentially be more effectively used by focusing more on incarcerating medicate users based on the violent offenses they commit rather than the medicate offenses. Prison population has been a topic of conversation around the valet for many years now, and has recently become an ever growing dread in the United States. More than 10. 1 one million million million people are held in penal institutions around the world, and the United States holds more than a quarter of the worlds incarcerated population. At 2. 29 million people incarcerated in the United Sates (Walmsley, 2011), our prisons are full.The only country that has even close to as many prisoners as we do is mainland China at 1. 65 million people incarcerated (Walmsley, 2011). Chinas total population i s 1,354. 1 million, and the United States total population is 308. 4 million. Chinas total population is more than four cartridge clips that of the United States, and yet the United States prison population is almost one and a half times what Chinas is at. This could be because of the luxuries that bunko games get when incarcerated here in the United States that other countries do not provide for their inmates.Inmates in the United States receive production line television and new release movies, music and music players, and even an bringing up all of these are luxuries that most other countries do not widen their inmates. The luxuries that inmates in the United States receive cost taxpayer dollars to provide, the median(a) cost per inmate is $31,286. 00 per year (Henrichson &038 Delaney, 2012). That is a large lump sum of money, especially considering that the average American citizen only makes $46,000. 00 or less per year. The cost of inmates on taxpayers could be a whole t opic in itself. Of the 2. 9 million people incarcerated in the United States, 337,405 of them are in State or federal prisons for medicate offenses (Drugwarfacts. org, 2011) this number does not even include those in local anesthetic jails. According to the US Justice Department, 27. 9% of drug offenders in state prisons are serving time for possession, 69. 4% are serving time for trafficking offenses, and 2. 7% are in for other. (Drugwarfacts. org, 2011). These total are as well high. Penalties for trafficking are higher than possession, so 69. 4% will spend more time taking up that prison space and tax dollars than the 27. 9% of possessors will. dismantle at only 2. 7%, the rate for those incarcerated for other types of drug offenses is too high. In local jails alone, as of a 2002 federal survey there were 440,670 local inmates, a quarter of which (112,447) were drug offenders (Drugwarfacts. org, 2011). Of this 112,447, 11. 1% are there on possession charges, and 12. 8% for trafficking. At 112,447 people incarcerated in local jails, that is one third of what we already have incarcerated in State and Federal prisons. These poetry keep adding up and getting higher and higher. Something necessarily to change in order for these numbers to start decreasing.At 2. 29 million people incarcerated in the United States, with over populated prisons, we need to reconsider what wickednesss are worth(predicate) punishing, and if paying out $31,286. 00 per inmate per year in tax dollars is really necessary. Many studies show that change magnitude assentings to drug interpositions are associated with decreased captivity rates. According to Drugwarfacts. org (2011), States with a higher drug interference admission rate than the national average send, on average, 100 fewer people to prison per 100,000 in the population than states that have lower than average drug manipulation admissions. (Treatment). Of the 20 states that admit the most people to treatment pe r 100,000, 19 had incarceration rates below the national average. Of the 20 states that admitted the fewest people to treatment per 100,000, eight had incarceration rates above the national average. Increased admission to treatment rates also showed a decrease to crime rate and a reduction to control be. According to Drugwarfacts. org (2011) as well, Admissions to drug treatment increased 37. 4 percent and federal spending on drug treatment increased 14. 6 percent from 1995 to 2005.During the same period, violent crime fell 31. 5 percent. (Treatment). Also according to Drugwarfacts. org (2011), A study by the RAND Corporation found, the savings of treatment programs are larger than the control costs we estimate that the costs of crime and lost productivity are reduced by $7. 46 for every dollar spend on treatment. (Treatment). Even if we just shift what we put the tax dollars towards a little, it could have a big and beneficial impact on our economy and on our confederacy in gene ral. A lot can be learned from the Lusitanian decriminalization of illicit drugs in 2001.Since decriminalizing illicit drugs in Portugal the rate of drug related deaths, as well as the number of offenders arrested in Portugal for trafficker, trafficker-consumer, and consumer offences have all decreased. Since the decriminalization there has been a reduction in opiate-related deaths and infectious diseases. Most interviewees were of the view that the decriminalization had reduced the burden on the Portuguese criminal justice system and enabled police to refocus their attention on more serious offences, namely drug traf? cking-related offences. (Hughes &038 Stevens, 2010, p. 1008). Evidence also indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding in Portugal since the decriminalization of illicit drugs. If it can help with their overcrowding prison problem than it can help with ours as well. Portugal has taken a dramatic step in their justi ce system, and they have seen abundant benefits from it, as can we. The number of people arrested for criminal offences related to drug offences reduced from over 14,000 offenders in 2000 to an average of 5,0005,500 offenders per year. (Hughes &038 Stevens, 2010, p. 1008). There has also been an increased uptake of drug treatment. The facts speak for themselves the numbers are all too high, from the number of offenders incarcerated, to the amount of time that they spend for those crimes, and the tax dollars that are organism spent on them while they are incarcerated. Whether it is an increased requirement for drug treatment or an entire decriminalization of drug offenses as in Portugals example, we have a few options to consider something can be done to put a stop to this problem, and we need to start doing it.This problem will not just go away someone needs to take the first step towards the reform of our practices and policies. If nothing is done than the numbers will just keep i ncreasing further more new jail cells will continue to keep being constructed, and they will be filled with more new inmates, maybe someone that is close to you. depart you take the first step to ensure that this problem does not go any further? Lets start standing up and confronting this problem head on together we can conquer anything, one problem at a time. References ZHENG, T. , SALGANIK, M. J. , &038 GELMAN, A. 2006, June). How Many People Do You acknowledge in Prison? Using Overdispersion in Count Data to account Social Structure in Networks. Journal of the American Statistical Association, (), 409-423. Retrieved from http//www. stat. columbia. edu/gelman/ interrogation/published/overdisp_final. pdf Center for Cognitive Liberty &038 Ethics. (2012). Penalties for US Drug Offenses. Retrieved from http//www. cognitiveliberty. org/dll/drugpenalties. htm Walmsley, R. (2011, July). public prison population list. International Centre for Prison Studies, Ninth Edition(), 1-6. Ret rieved from http//www. cribd. com/ commercialism/77097293/World-Prison-Population-List-9th-edition Drugwarfacts. org. (2011). Retrieved from http//www. drugwarfacts. org/cms/Prisons_and_DrugsResearch Drugwarfacts. org. (2011). Retrieved from http//www. drugwarfacts. org/cms/Treatment HUGHES, C. , &038 STEVENS, A. (2010). What Can We Learn From The Portuguese Decriminalization of outlawed Drugs?. British Journal Of Criminology, 50(6), 999-1022. doi10. 1093/bjc/azq038 Christian Henrichson and Ruth Delaney, The Price of Prisons What captivity Costs Taxpayers. New York Vera Institute of Justice, 2012.