Cost Of Incarceration Essay

The United States has less than five percent of the world’s population and over a quarter of the world’s prisoners (A. Liptak, 2008). Something about this doesn’t sit well with me and it never has. With 309,090,740 people in the United States it is hard to believe that 1 in every 100 American adults are currently behind bars and from 2006 to 2007, the prison population alone grew by 25,000 (A. Liptak, 2008). This does not include county jails. It costs the federal and state governments approximately $20,000 to $30,000 a year to incarcerate one offender. That means that if a convicted felon’s sentence is 10 years, it will cost the government at least $220,000. The estimated total annual cost of housing, feeding and providing services to all prisoners is $40 billion.
The U.S. correction system has three main goals: punish, protect the
Sadly, funding for these programs are cut substantially every single year resulting in several states cutting the programs from their prisons completely. Substance-abuse treatment, vocational training and educational programs are all designed to give offenders the chance to turn their life around, hold jobs and function normally in society.
The National Emotional Literacy Project for Prisoners gives incarcerated men and women throughout the United States a program to help them change life-long patterns of violence and addiction. Their main course book “Houses of Healing” guides them down a road where they learn better ways to cope in society and learn about themselves as a result. They’re given an opportunity to learn that they aren’t defined by the crimes they’ve committed but instead by the person they are and is a wonderful way to change the mindset of a person who thinks they’ll never be any better than they already