Essay on Criminal Rehabilitation in the United States...

Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission) This quote from Dave Kelly shows many of the issues with the United State’s criminal justice system today. The prison population is increasing because prisoners are being taken in at a higher rate than they are released.†¦show more content†¦As the imprisoned population in the United States grows and American culture changes, rehabilitation is becoming popular among these alternatives to a standard prison system. Rehabilitation when referring to criminal justice are programs and methods used to assist prisoners in reforming themselves in order to avoid the habits that placed them in prison in the first place. These programs are becoming more popular due to the high cost of imprisonment and a change in American culture. Each prisoner costs forty thousand dollars each year to keep in prison(Weissmueller). This is money that is coming out of the taxes paid by United States citizens who aren’t even in the prison system. Alongside this, American culture is changing to be supporting of rehabilitation efforts as Americans see the effectiveness of criminal justice systems that include it. This was seen on a trip to Europe by U.S. prison officials; once they had seen the effectiveness of German and Dutch prison rehabilitation, they wanted to bring similar programs to their prisons (â€Å"People, not prisoners†). A rehabilitation based criminal justice system in the United States is gaining popularity, and as it does so it is earning the attention it needs and deserves. However, the U.S. criminal justice system has already reduced crime; the system works so a reform is not truly needed. If it is not broken, then why fix it? The current system of imprisoning a large number ofShow MoreRelatedThe Criminal Justice System1308 Words   |  5 Pagesï » ¿Criminal Justice System The criminal justice system refers to the way in which a society chooses to handle all aspects of crime and punishment. In the Western world, particularly the United States, the criminal justice system is an official governmental system that focuses on crime and punishment, though some societies still incorporate a significant amount of informal social controls into their criminal justice systems. 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