October 28th: U.S. Prisons Myth vs. Mayhem

Basically the article "U.S. Prisons Myth vs. Mayhem" discusses about the true prison objectives. It explains how effective the prison system is and in reality it isn't. It discusses how we spend way too much money and keep investing so much in these prions while inmates still continue to leave and come back. It's basically become a worthless waste of time by expanding prisons for nonviolent criminals and teaching them antisocial ways of life that land them right back into prison again. Prison is not the best way with dealing with gang memebers because say you throw then in a penitentiary with rival gang members. It only creates problems within the prison because each member from the gangs are going to want to prove themselves worthy just like how they would on the streets. In my book, prison is seen as a cool thing to do for these gang members and they are able to operate a system within the prison walls. They even form their own gangs while within the prison. I think prison should have less investment into it. We should stop spending so much money on people who commit petty crimes and focus on sending more people to college. Drug related charges and petty theft is not a reason to overcrowd these prisons. Prisons should be made for sex offenders and murderers. Something interesting I learned from this article was that we spend over $4 billion on 4,700 different prisons around the nation. Yet other countries laugh at out judicial system because it is the most nonsuccesful. We live in a myth that "our system is scary enough to make people not want to stay in and successful enough to help the people in never want to go back." I was confused when the article discussed about the non correlation to prisons and crime rate