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California Penal System

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Submitted By mthom5560
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Ever since we were all kids we have all been taught about the possibility of being sent to jail or prison for any crimes we commit. While not all crimes end with incarceration, it is common knowledge that there will be some form of punishment for any crimes that we may commit. When it comes to punishment for crimes, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world when compared to the rates of other countries. The current incarceration rate in the United States is more than four times than the world average with some Individual states imprisoning up to six times more people than individual counties with a comparable population (National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 2012). The Incarceration rate for countries with populations comparable to that of the United States is around 100 prisoners for every 100,00 people, however, The United States has a rate that is about 500 per every 100,000 people (Population Reference Bureau, 2012). The jail population within the United States is made up of mostly Males making up more than 90 percent of the population while females make up 10 percent of the population but that number is also steadily rising. The number of women that have been incarcerated has seen a dramatic increase rising from a little over 15,000 in 1980 to close to 118,000 in 2010 (The Sentencing Project, 2012). Many view prison as a place to impose punishments for those to have committed crimes but the original philosophy of prison was to rehabilitate those offenders to prepare them for life as productive members of society. Even though the same cannot be said today, the California penal system was once a model that many states had used to structure their prison system after. In the 1950’s the California Penal system was structured to focus more on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Prisoners were not given mandatory sentences as they

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