Recidivism In Prisons

The degrees to which prison populations are growing suggest great encouragement towards finding alternative forms of punishment and the processing of criminals. Crimes that are committed by an individual and require a sentence within a prison demonstrate how the court systems manage these cases on a daily basis and in severity, sentence individuals to separate them from society. With these sentences, the overall purpose is to punish to deter future crimes from occurring. However, there are sentences in which retribution is needed to demonstrate to the individual that their crime will have consequences of equal magnitude, and show that the punishment will fit the crime committed. Crimes are committed and punishment is then processed by …show more content…
The Bureau of Justice Statistics followed the patterns of prisoners who were released from prison in 2005 for a five-year period and what they discovered through the research of Durose, Cooper & Snyder (2014) was that of prisoners released in 30 states in 2005, more than two-thirds (67.8%) had some form of contact with the justice system within 3 years and almost half (49.7%) had returned to jail or prison, either for violation of parole or a new crime. The recidivism rate for non-violent offenders during this period was higher than that of violent offenders. For the non-violent offenders, this has a lot to do with the history of the criminal justice system and the way that the system prepares the inmate for interaction in the real world upon release. According to Phelps and Pager (2016) between 1984 and 1998, the chances of receiving a prison sentence following arrest increased by more than 50 percent, and the average length of sentences increased by nearly 40