Don't Do The Crime If You Can't Do The Time

Looking through the Chicago Tribune website, there was a list of articles that went on for pages and pages. When looking at the context of each article, i noticed a similarity throughout. In the first ten articles alone, six of them had to do with people being sent to prison. This made me think of back to last week in class, when we were learning about the Civil Rights Movement, and how there are more people in prison now then there were back then. 


That was a statistic that shocked me. Learning about that time period back in elementary and middle school, for every violent occurrence i was taught, i would hear how many African Americans were arrested. The numbers just seemed incredibly high to me, and i always assumed it had lowered down from that time. In reality though, the numbers jumped from 350,000 in the 1970s, to nearly 2 million people in prison today. 


While reading different causes to why the numbers are so high, one explanation was because the United States has longer sentences than everywhere else in the world. One example i read, is that  the average burglary sentence in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England. My opinion on this though, is better safe than sorry, and i think keeping people in prison longer would usually be better. A study was done showing that within three years of being released, 67% of ex-prisoners re-offend and 52% are re-incarcerated. From these statistics, wouldn't you rather have people in prison for longer, even if that means we're known as having the highest incarceration rate in the world?