Prison Overcrowding Presents Imbalance in Social America

The term "Prison Overcrowding" is a very self explanatory expression. This problem spins an intricate ghastly web among the network of prisons throughout our nation's correctional community. Prison overcrowding can be defined as: having more prisoners in any one correctional facility than the staff and services needed cannot adequately care for the prisoners or promise them a relatively safe, comfortable environment. "These places are overcrowded, under-resourced and crumbling," explained Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Prison overcrowding has continued to become a problem for correctional facilities even though crime has been taking a dive. The United States prison population has topped two million people; the highest incarceration population in the world. This is mostly the result of a few varied factors that are widespread across the United States. These factors include harsher penalties for crime, fewer opportunities for release for current inmates, and a newfound judicial approach that has little sympathy for criminals.

Prison overcrowding is a very serious problem worldwide. Prisons that are overcrowded or not resourceful enough to take care of inmates, show increased rates of suicide, more aggressive inmates with more prominent gang activity, as well as higher illness rates. These variables can all be linked directly to having too many people to appropriately care for. Higher suicide rates in these overcrowded institutions blossom as a result of increased depression; often caused by the invasion of your personal life that becomes routine in overcrowded prisons.

Prison suicides can often be innovative or gruesome and include such things as hanging themselves by bed sheets or cutting their wrists with sharpened pencils and other manipulatable utensils. About 55% of prison suicides occur in cases of women, who are statistically less emotionally stable in the prison environment. "Women come in with a lot of very difficult problems, and self injury is one of them," states Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform.