What can be done about prison overcrowding - Research Proposal Example

it was able to come up with additional resources to build prison cells, the increase of inmates has still proven to be too overwhelming for the government to keep up with. In California, some inmates have taken to sleeping on floors because of the shortage of cells (Lake “News”). In other parts of America, the early release of prisoners has been sought by prison administrators just to ease inmate population. America has been shelling out billions of dollars to support the prison system.

“State prison systems spend more than $30 billion annually, and the Bureau of Prisons budgeted $5 billion for just 182,000 federal inmates this year” (Myser “Business”). This overcrowding problem is attributed to a variety of factors, from the economic to the sociological, to the political. On an economic standpoint, the increase of poverty rates has unfortunately contributed to the increase of criminal activities. Various societal problems also encourage and breed criminal behavior.

Legislative changes and new laws like mandatory life sentences, the three-strike rule, and strict parole eligibility provisions have also served to increase prison population. Without the corresponding increase in funding and in prison cells, these numbers will continue to rise. This paper will discuss some possible solutions to the problem of prison overcrowding, the viability of these solutions, the risk of unintended or undesirable consequences to these solutions, and the practical impediments that could hamper the development, approval, and implementation of the proposed solutions.

Solutions to prison overcrowding that will be discussed in this paper shall focus on measures to reduce the number of prisoners and not solutions to increase the number of prison cells. These solutions will be more long-term. Increasing the number of cells will not stop prison overcrowding, especially if more inmates will keep coming in and filling up the new cells. This paper suggests changes