The article called U.S. PRISON POPULATION HITS ALL-TIME HIGH I found to be very interesting and informative. I happened to learn a lot from this article. This particular article talked about a couple important aspects that have to do with the population in our jails and prison’s all over the country. The main point that this article makes is that the increasing population of the prison and jail system is not due to more crimes being committed but the change in the mandatory sentencing that were set in place in the 1980’s. Another thing that this article talked about is how the population of the jails and prisons break down into race and sex. According to (Munoz, 2009) Angela Munoz the jail and prison ratios in 200l were as follows: “black males accounted for about a third of all state and federal prison inmates. More than 10 percent of all black men in the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 29 were in prison, compared to just over two percent of Hispanic males and 1.2 percent of white men in that age group.”
The article also compared the United States to Canada with how many people were going to jail and being imprisoned. For instance Canada imprisons 116 people out of every 100,000 and the United States imprisons 702 per 100,000. The article talks about how our country and certain states are paying the costs for the increased rates of population in prisons. The main way the country is paying for the increased population is by paying $40 Billion a year to operate the prison systems and straining state budgets.
Lastly the article talks about what United States as a whole and the individual states are doing to compensate for the budget strains due to the increased prison population. The first thing the states have done is loosened the sentencing terms because the original ones as they are were to expensive.
