Do Prisons Save Money

How Prisons Can Save Money

On July 10th, 2003, a fire was started just east of Farmington Utah. The fire consumed over 2000 acres of land, threatened dozens of homes, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight. The following day a thirty three year old man named Josef Heinz Bruhl confessed to starting the blaze, when asked for his motives he said it was to because he wanted to be sent to prison. Now I’m not trying to suggest that anybody with normal mental capacity would ever do something like this, obviously this guy has problems. But the fact that anybody would ever want to go to jail to better there situation says volumes on what is wrong with our prison system. Part of the problem is that each year the government spends about
Right now prisoners do a number of things to keep the inmates productive and occupied while providing them a small source of income. They do things such as make license plates, T.V. stands, chairs, and dressers. They cannot sell these items because it would compete with local business, but they give it to government buildings and the military. Prisoners also do a lot of community service especially with tasks like road clean-up that saves the community thousands of dollars. Another thing they could do is create gardens right next to the prison where inmates could grow their own food. Think of how much money a prison could save if they only had to buy half the fruits and vegetables that they are buying now. I’ve actually heard of one prison having a prison gift shop where people could buy things made at the prison. Another problem is that it’s hard to force inmates to work. We need to find a way to motivate these people to work for there one to two dollar an hour salary. I read that one prison is going to start charging for basic items such as toilet paper and toothpaste. Unfortunately members of the inmate’s family usually pay for these items, but if we were to not allow outside support we could almost guarantee that almost everyone would work. Just think of the dilemma that prisoners would have to face, they would have to decide if they don’t go to work they
We actually are letting people go so that we can fit others inside. Prison has to be the ultimate deterrent from crime, if it’s not then our prison system is literally failing. We need to decrease the amount of people coming back into jail, and we need to focus on keeping people off the streets in the first place. If people go to jail they need to learn there lesson and never want to come back again. I have a good friend who when she was little she had a serious biting problem. It became so bad that her dad went out to IFA one day and bought a cattle prod. After trying it on himself, to make sure it didn’t hurt to bad, he told his daughter that if she bit again she would get a taste of the cattle prod. Needless to say, she did it again and was cattle prodded, after one time she learned her lesson and she never bit again. Prison should be like that, after one stay in prison there should be no reason why you would want to go back to a life of crime, because prison should be the worst possible place in the world. If we could do these things we could keep people out of jail and we could you use the money to keep people out of jail rather than using it to keep people in. I know that this isn’t just about the money; we need to focus on the people, and making this country better for them and us. But I believe that if we do these things to save our money we can achieve the goal of helping our communities and society by keeping people out of