States throughout the nation, including Arizona have experienced a tremendous increase in prison population, as a result of adopting a “Truth in Sentencing” type criminal code. With this increase, due to budgetary restraints, we have seen a decrease in available programming within the prison systems. While punishment is one factor that should determine a sentence, Courts also need to take into account rehabilitation, restitution, and deterrence.

Many states are currently hurting due to the economic problems, we as a nation, are facing. One contributing factor to the financial hardships is due to the expanded prison systems. It is expensive both to build facilities and then run these facilities properly. Recently Federal judges ordered the State of California to release tens of thousands of inmates. California’s 33 prisons have become so overcrowded, according to the Court, they violate the constitutional rights of inmates by subjecting them to “cruel and unusual” punishment. Just over a third of the state’s 158,000 prisoners must be set free by 2012 to ensure that basic healthcare is provided to those who remain behind, the judges said.

The prison crisis is not limited to California. Michigan, where Detroit has America’s highest murder rate, will release 4,000 prisoners who have served their minimum sentences. New Jersey, Carolina and Vermont are putting drug-addicted offenders into treatment rather than prison. Louisiana, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world, is hoping to reform a system that spends more on prisons than on higher education. Other states’ prison systems, such as Arizona, are so overcrowded that they are placing inmates in contract prisons outside the boundaries of Arizona. In many cases these inmates no longer get visits from families due to the travel and hotel costs. This creates a hardship not only for the inmate’s family and the inmate; it also makes it more difficult for the inmate to be reintegrated back into society at the end of his or her sentence.

convert this post to pdf.