To Incarcerate or Rehabilitate: Does Anything Really Work - Essay Example

As much as these policies are expected to reduce the crime rate by keeping possible recidivists off the streets, these methods are also supposedly effective enough to deter prisoners from offending again. The extent to which these policies succeed at achieving their goals is a subject of relentless debates. But even assuming they do, they create another set of policy hitches: the problem of ballooning prison populations, rampant overcrowding, the ethics of obtaining private prisons and the problem of released prisoners, who for their sake as well as society's must be reintegrated into the community (Lin, 2000, p. 4). No doubt that the U.S. prison system transformed into gargantuan industry, expanding from 500,000 prisoners in 1978 to nearly 2 million in 2001. The U.S.

incarceration rate leads the world. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. The yearly cost of operating U.S. . Why should Americans be concerned about the overcrowding in prisons Just take this case in Venezuela, which has some of the worst prison crowding problems in the world. Its thirty-three prisons, built to house 15,000 inmates, now hold more than 24,000. In 1994, 274 inmates were killed by other inmates in Venezuelan jails.

The system largely ignores all minimum standards of hygiene, medical care, and security. According to Joan Mariner of the Human Rights Watch in New York, "every aspect of the system is overloaded and not functioning (Times, 1998, p. A30). According to the Human Rights Watch, violence may be a factor in many prison deaths, but the most common causes of death are the spread of diseases and the subsequent lack of medical care that are promulgated by prison crowding. As reported by some cases, inmates acquire HIV/AIDS as a result of sharing dirty needles or having sexual contact with other inmates; in other cases, inmates enter prison with the disease.

In 1995, it was estimated that over 27,000 inmates in the U.S. prison system were infected with HIV or AIDS (Human Rights Watch Website, 1995).Indeed, the U.S. is faced with the need to spend in extensive building programs to relieve prison crowding and court decisions have forced prison administrators to deal with poor conditions related to crowding. It is quite depressing that the only two goals of sentencing that U.S. prisons seem to achieve are the ones that admit to failure: retribution and incapacitation.

The more optimistic goals of rehabilitation and deterrence have not been achieved even in the most progressive, humane, and costly prison systems, in the United States or elsewhere.1One of the more feasible options to alleviate the ballooning