Minimize federal prison expenditures. Stop the superfluous waste of money on rehabilitative facilitates which only exacerbate recidivism. Prisoners deserve no privileges. Retribution remains the sole solution. The victimless offenders belong in rehabilitative centers. Heinous perpetrators deserve proper stringent punishment as a means of deterrence. By strengthening punishment, removing rehabilitative facilities, public officials attempt to reduce both unnecessary expenditure and recurring recidivism.
Though controversial, capital punishment may provide one solution for maximum threat criminals. Removing the most heinous perpetrators might accommodate sufficient space to reduce overcrowding and economize prison facility expenditures. However, various flaws inhibit efficient capital punishment application.
For one, racist motivations still exist. A disproportionately high number of African Americans receive capital punishment. Evidently, “42%” of death row inmates comprise Blacks (Bowman Kearney, 441). How unconscionable! In most situations, their selection for death row remains unjustified.
Secondly, it takes months, sometimes years, before a prisoner receives sentencing for execution. A New Jersey Policy Perspectives report corroborated that its state death penalty system cost taxpayers, “$253 million since 1983,” (NJADP, 1). Society demands an immediate, cost efficient solution to the death penalty.
Still, the death penalty remains a contentious issue. Prisoners need to die on their own terms. Ultimately, only God determines who deserves to die, as our Judeo-Christian foundation of justice advocates.
However, America also remains a secular institution as our First Amendment guarantees and the Eye-for-An-Eye Code of Hammurabi, which represents biblical Old Testament scripture, also applies to our American criminal justice model.
Yet, other critics consider the death penalty a violation of our 8th Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment. Again, death deserves death as enumerated by Hammurabi Code. Our system provides impartial corresponding punishment. If a person maliciously kills another than death appears justified in these worst-case scenarios.
Also, the conventional death penalty appears insufficiently harsh, and even appeasing, for criminals like Timothy Mc Veigh among others who find death an easy escape to life imprisonment. Perhaps putting people like McVeigh in a black hole, and allowing him to die on his own terms, might offer one feasible compromise. Another more humane solution might include exile, permanent abandonment from the U.S., and extraterritorial charges in a foreign prison.
Conclusion
The Prison system presents a significant problem of unparalleled proportions. Superfluous government expenditure, inadequate deterrence and application of punishment, alongside prisoner overpopulation pervade its system.
Our public officials assume a unreasonably reckless, cavalier attitude toward reform, since numerous common sense solutions exist. Nonetheless, they choose to avoid the issue, and these problems only perpetuate and escalate.
As Americans, we need to amalgamate as a nation, reform these degenerative aspects, and restore impartial justice as intended by our constitutional founders. Must taxpayers relinquish billions of dollars on unnecessary prison facilities and programs without representation or purpose? Must innocuous victimless criminals suffer unjustifiable penalties, while society exonerates the most heinous perpetrators? Hence, for these aforementioned reasons the prison system demands extensive reform.
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