Funding Prevention Programs vs. Funding More Prisons It seems like crime has been going up, but as it turns out crime has been going down overall since the 1990’s. The use of technology has made a dramatic decrease alone among differences in education and more. Our prison systems have been increased by it being much easier to be put in prison than before. With that being said, the discussion comes up on whether to continue to build more prisons or fund prevention programs. My main focus is on prevention in youths. One main distortion is that society is seeing that increasing arrests and imprisoning more people is effective in reducing crimes, but it doesn’t reduce the crime itself time and time again. Building more prisons shows that the US does not see crime to continue to go down and not feeling the weight nor willpower to develop more productive solutions like funding prevention programs for education and early life help increase chances at avoiding the wrong decisions in the first place, getting an education acquiring employment, and overall attaining a positive lifestyle.
Costs of Prevention Vs Prison A figure released by The Federal Bureau of Prisons in March of 2013 showed that the price tag for federal prisoners as of 2013 is $29,000 per year. The new figure was released by the federal Bureau of Prison, which houses more than 200,000 inmates in the United States. In a Federal Register publication, BOP reported that its lower-security, community-based housing rings are slightly cheaper than the prisons, costing $26,000 per prisoner (Wilson, 2013). Different intervention and prevention programs can help put taxpayer money into more cost effective programs rather than spending millions of dollars to go through the process of initial arrest, trial costs, incarcerate for years, and treat juveniles. Promoting social development and preventing those with higher chances of becoming delinquents can help save young lives from being completely wasted early on, therefore improving their quality of life and also help reduce the money spent in prisons that have a large portion of criminals that are put there to be out of sight out of mind when a lot of the crimes could have been saved earlier. Successful public safety would be best to starting more with commitments of providing services with support systems behind them and not having a commitment to incarcerating more people. It would be on these different treatment and prevention programs that are being created to help improve families along with the communities they live in.
Solutions to Overcrowding Overcrowding is the main reason building more prisons in something being considered. A temporary fix to overcrowding would be to fund and build new prisons. Trying to take out the negative effects of prison overcrowding by building prison after prison would not be a legitimate solution, but more of a band-aid to a larger problem. Building and maintaining prisons carries high expenses like discussed above. Using alternatives to prison would be the better way to counter that. This would include reforming after prison if that is the case, youth prevention programs for drugs and other crimes, among many more alternative that can help lower the amount of younger generations being taken out of society early and then being thrown back into society with a mark and possible hate for real society for the lack of knowing how