Overcrowding In California Essay

“You’ve got to milk the cow when it’s ready to be milked.” That was the wisest advice and, the coldest advice I’ve ever received in my life. I just turned twenty-one and just had a child and I was not aware that me and my son were about to be introduced to the shrewd, cold business of incarceration and its terrible effects on our lives as well as the lives of many other Californians. Little did I know that at the same time a bigger and more promising company was making their entry into California. They are known as the Private prisons of America. California began using private prisons as an immediate solution to deal with massive overcrowding. Instead of using privatized prisons to eliminate overcrowding, the state should consider alternate solutions because the private prisons only create more problems for the economy, families and immigration. What caused the reemergence of private prisons in California? We can start in 1979 when President Nixon declare a war on drugs. From the year 1979 to 1986 the prison population explodes and creates what is known in the field of economics as market entry. In October 1986 President Reagan signs the Anti-Drug Abuse act of 1986. This act was meant to appropriate a little over 1.7 billion dollars to attack this war on drugs by sentence …show more content…
Another thing is The state of California sent 3060 inmates to a private facility in Arizona to reduce the overcrowding. It would have been less costly for their families to visit them if they remained in California or simply been released early. Now if they want to visit their incarcerated family member they need to either drive over 12 hours or fly. They also need to pay for a hotel which can be extremely costly for the