The Changes Of Incarceration Rates Essay

When we are talking about the changes in incarceration rates there are many aspects that need to be covered. First, when looking back on last week’s literature, we learned a tremendous amount of knowledge that showed us that the early twentieth century and throughout the mid twentieth century; we saw more push towards rehabilitation. We also saw a push for the more political aspect involved in criminal justice to be not necessarily eliminated, but scaled down. There was a use of professionals in the criminal justice system, and the courts and government were satisfied by this, they believed this should be left up to the professionals. However, going into the late twentieth century we were going though change with penal code. According to Lynch (2011), we had penal policies that were in place that actually lengthened offender’s sentences as well as increased the amount of individuals going to prison. During the 1970’s society saw a major increase in the prison population, due to numerous factors. First, when researchers looked into why there was such an increase in mass incarceration they found it hard to generalize a region based on maybe one states findings. We as a country are not easy to generalize in the way that we punish, and how we operate (Lynch, 2011). Furthermore, there was a push for more taxes and fines to pay for the rising incarceration rates. However, this was the result of the federal government stepping in and wanting penal changes within the prisons,…