The United States currently has an outstanding 2,019,234 prisoners, which means that per capita the United States has 715 inmates per 100,000 civilians (Dailypaul); making the United Sates the highest prisoner having nation in the planet. This is very concerning to me as a student because most states in the nation, like Florida, Texas, and California for example, spend more money on their prisoners that their students. In these particular states approximately spend around an average of 8,000-9,000 dollars are per student every year (npr.org), compared to a whopping 22,650 dollars per inmate a year (quora), coming in at a 37 billion dollar annual spending on U.S. inmates (money.cnn). According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, California happens to be the guiltiest of all of the state’s spending up to 49,000 dollars per inmate annually, and those on death role go up to 90,000 dollars annually until execution, which can last up to ten years from the moment the inmate is put on death row which comes to about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since 1978, or four billion dollars so far (deathpenalty).
Concerns
Now this is such a huge concern because student education is incredibly important and key to the country's future, the problem here is that the government thinks that it is apparently more of a necessity to take care of these people than the nation’s students. These men and women are criminals and do not deserve the privileges that are given to them; inmates are given rights, healthcare, food, and given certain privileges like prison jobs or allowed to have electronics like stereos (direct). These are criminals, not civilians, and they should be treated as such. Without any compassion or privileges as they have now, if the some states like particularly Utah can spend down words of 6,000 dollars for a student annually, the U.S. government can very well lower the standards of living of a criminal and spend less on inmates than they do on students. These people don’t deserve anything more than a hard life for the crimes they have committed.
Audience
Another issue is that the money being used to house inmates and provide or them is tax payer money. The enormous concern here is that every single legal citizen in this nation has to pay taxes, and some of this hard earn money used to pay taxes is then used in the prison systems for inmates, so in other words, the good American hard working citizens are providing for the low scum inmate criminals in this nation, people that are being stolen from have to pay for their thieves housing. To a student and a tax paying citizen, this is absolutely disgusting and absolute blasphemy. It cannot be emphasized enough that inmates should lose every right as citizens the minute they commit a crime, these are no longer man and women, and to me they are only a simple number in the prison system. The most common audience for this specific topic would be families with inmate family members because these people support the prison system and are not concerned with how much money is spent on inmates because these people want their family member to be well taken care of, and of course as said before tax payers because these are the people who house the inmates and keep them alive and healthy.
Media
This specific topic is not very well publicized do to the lack of interest and knowledge of the subject, many people do not have the slightest idea this is even an issue. The way information is spread about this issue is thanks to sources like CNN and The Bureau of Justice Statistics, these are resources provided by the us government; who are one of the deciders on how much money should be spent on prison inmates annually. Since this is not a very talked about issue, this information that will not be necessarily found in common public media tools such as Facebook, the way to get information about this, one would need to do their own research and use news media like CNN or The Bureau of Justice Statistics as mentioned earlier. These sources update annually bringing reliable knowledge to the general public on how the prison systems are being handled and how much money is being spent on the system. The main and ultimate decider of how much should be spent on prison and per inmate annually is the State; such as California and Texas who are some of the biggest spenders on the prison system. All these decisions must be published to the public, but a significant amount of research must be done in order to get a hold of this information.
A possible solution this problem would be to move to another state like New York which spends upwards of 18,000 dollars a year on its students, however in my opinion the ultimate solution is to lower such high spending on inmates and treat them like the criminals they really are. These people don’t deserve any better than the lowest amount of money needed to keep them alive, specially not the scums in death row who use up twice as much money as anyone else.
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