The Pros And Cons Of The Judicial System

Schools preach that “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” (Albert Einstein) Yet, in the U.S., petty crimes committed by naive teenagers are ruthlessly cracked down upon by the judicial system, as thousands of adolescents are robbed of their futures. When President Nixon declared a war on drugs, his “...all-out offensive” strategy quadrupled the prison population by 2012. Resulting from a 6-8% increase in the prison population yearly from 1972 to 2000, the current inmate count reaches 2.5 million. One of the greatest problems facing Americans now is a flawed prison system which “institutionalizes” convicted felons, fails to successfully incorporate them into society, and has created an inherently unequal environment where, not even those who try to succeed, have the slimmest chance of prospering. Paralleling the current situation with Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, the repeated phrase “All roads lead to Johannesburg” (Paton 52) mirrors the current judicial system which has a 76.6% recidivism rate. Americans …show more content…
taxpayers spend tens of billions of dollars a year on housing the ever-growing prison population. Instead of complaining about how dysfunctional the system has become and how we are wasting our money, we need to think about the solution. Just think, 46.4% of inmates have been convicted of some type of drug-related offense. That’s the price of the “War on Drugs”. Isn 't it absolutely ridiculous that we are overpopulating our facilities and wasting our finite resources in combatting a war we cannot win using these methods. There needs to be another way. That other way isn’t privatizing prisons. John Oliver pointed out that when these private corporations pitched to government officials, they boasted about high rates of recidivism off of which they make their money. Is it not counter-intuitive to hand over correctional facilities to people who use not correcting human behaviour as an argument for