An_Alternative_for_Prison

An Alternative for Prison America's prisons have been called "graduate schools for crime." It stands to reason: Take a group of people, strip them of possessions and privacy, expose them to constant threats of violence, overcrowd their cell-block, deprive them of meaningful work, and the result is an embittered underclass more intent on getting even with society than contributing to it. Prisons take the nonviolent offender and make him live by violence. They take the nonviolent offender and make him a hardened killer. America has to wake up and realize that the current structure of our penal system is failing terribly. The government has to devise new ways to punish the guilty, and still manage to keep American citizens satisfied that our prison system is still effective. Americans pay a great deal for prisons to fail so badly. Like all big government solutions, they are expensive. In the course of my studies dealing with the criminal justice system, I have learned that the government spends approximately eighty-thousand dollars to build one cell, and $28,000 per year to keep a prisoner locked up. That's about the same as the cost of sending a student to Harvard. Because of overcrowding, it is estimated that more than prison, alternative, crime, make, restitution, pay, criminal, work, punishment, offender, system, one, current, programs, prisons, nonviolent, justice, dollars, criminals, prison, world, violence, time, society, should, result, prisoner, people, need, much, lives, live, keep, just, job, form, civilized, been, back, offender, years, wrong, ways, victims, victim, thing