The Real Costs of Incarceration

The Real Costs of Incarceration

Nowadays, incarceration is one of the most wide-spread measures of punishment; furthermore, in numerous cases, it is the only way to sentence a personality who has committed a crime. It regards the cases when house imprisonment or death sentence is impossible or legally prohibited. On the one hand, incarceration has an abundance of various positive effects, for instance, criminals are isolated from the society, any harm which can be done by them is prevented, and they have an opportunity to repent and to become a law-abiding citizen in future. What is more, "the argument here is that loss of liberty in itself is a severe punishment, especially for periods of years" (Prenzler 161). On the other hand, the costs of incarceration are quite high, as well.

First of all, these costs include financial ones. In is of common knowledge that large sums of money are spent to keep prisons in good repair. Moreover, some sums of money are set aside for prisoners' personal needs such as food and clothes. The proof of this fact is the U.S.A. "Northeastern states have the highest costs of incarceration ($37,625 per prisoner), and southern states have the lowest average costs ($18,768)" (Raphaell, Stoll 335). The wide range of costs is dependent on the weather conditions of each state and the average salary of those people who live there. It means that each citizen of the United States, who pays taxes, needs to pay for the jails and the prisoners.

Moreover, another problem of various prisons all over the world is the lack of space the prisoners. Unfortunately, the criminal situation has already demonstrated that the amount of criminals was high. In this case, it was obvious that overcrowding of prisons had become a serious problem. This was the reason why large sums of money had to be spent on building new jails in order to prevent their overcrowding. The cost of constructing new jails depends on the country and on the state in case of the U.S.A. being observed. As a rule, the governments of ten states from all over the world make their mind to build new prisons or jails. For example, Luddock County, which is situated in the U.S.A., in Texas state, decided to spend about $11 millions In Broward County, in Florida, the costs of incarceration are $115 per day whereas about $7 are spent on each prisoner. In general, it is evident that about a quarter of the taxes that are paid by the citizens who live in Florida are pent on the prisoners of the jails, which are located in the abovementioned state.

Nowadays, there are both a lot of advocates and numerous foes of the necessity to pay so large sums of money for prisons. The advocates of it admit that, in this way, the safety of numerous law-abiding citizens is guaranteed. The foes of it are sure that there is no reason to apply to prisons as there are a lot of alternative ways of punishment which areas much