Do we send too many people to prison - Term Paper Example

s probably the most effective way of keeping the streets free of dangerous criminals, but locking up too many prisoners makes each extra prisoner lesser and lesser dangerous. There are certainly several benefits as well as certain losses associated with the practice of putting too many people in prison. Owing to the sensitivity and complexity of the matter, there is dire need to evaluate the benefits and losses and reach at the optimal decision. This paper discusses different aspects of imprisonment in the US and concludes that there is a need of reducing the number of people that are sent to prison in the US.

People in the US are imprisoned for all kinds of reasons that include but are not limited to violation of the immigration rules, and criminal penalties. The trend of sending too many people to prison in the US has resulted into prisons being packed with petty thieves along with serious criminals and rapists. Many of the imprisoned drug dealers were scary in their youth and over the time, have become too miserable to cause the society any kind of risk. In 2010, the number of prisoners in the US over 50 years of age was about 200,000 which in 1970 was the amount of prisoners belonging to all age groups in the US (“America locks up”).

This provides evidence for the congestion of people belonging to all age groups in the jails in US. “It seems odd that a country that rejoices in limiting the power of the state should give so many draconian powers to its government, yet for the past 40 years American lawmakers have generally regarded selling to voters the idea of locking up fewer people as political suicide” (“America locks up”). The growing number of imprisoned people in the US is a huge burden on the shoulders of the government as it is for the government to provide them with all kinds of resources that they need.

Every individual who is imprisoned is a load on the government because instead of playing his/her constructive role in the building of