Correctional or Destructional

In America today we make up 5% of the worlds population yet we hold 25% of the world's prisoners. Am I the only one horrified by those numbers?

Bruce Western, a Harvard student, is conducting a study of our country's correctional system and how it affects those who emerge from it. Western interviewed an ex-inmate named Jerry and Jerry admitted to having trouble sleeping because he was so used to the prison quarters. Jerry confessed in the interview, "“It’s like my body left the prison, but my mind is still in there." According to Western, "subjects have said they simply can’t cope on the outside—that going back to prison seems comforting and familiar"

I find it incredible that a prison cell could be referred to as "comforting and familiar," meaning reassuring and intimate or personal. These are words that are frequently saved for describing your own home so it is shocking to me that someone could ever feel at home in a prison. However these inmates are forced to because since they are spending so much time there they slowly lose their connections to the outside world. Western explains that, "Prison time strains relationships with partners and children, and the men often live separately after their release." Some even end up homeless because of financial problems stemming from unemployment.

To top it all off, the people who end up in prisons are most likely troubled in ways that don't stem from a need to kill or murder or rape, they stem from something that is above their control. The nonprofit Human Rights Watch found that 56 percent of U.S. inmates are mentally ill.
at least two-thirds are thought to have substance-abuse problems.

The 2.2 million inmates living in America today require actual help maybe with a substance problem or a mental illness so we shouldn't just stick them behind bars and let them waste their life away as we forget about them, we should put them in a place where they will actually get help. They need rehab or a facility that can take care of their illnesses and problems so that all the fathers out there can be reunited with sons, and mothers to daughters and relationships and precious lives can be salvaged.