Beginning of Essay
E-mail: ervinscott@hotmail.com "The " America has to wake up and realize that the current structure of our penal system is failing terribly. Take a group of people, strip them of possessions and privacy, expose them to constant threats of violence, overcrowd thei ....

Middle of Essay
.... to overcrowding, more than ten billion dollars in construction is needed to create sufficient space for just the current prison population. "Building more prisons to address crime is like building more graveyards to address a fatal disease." (Robert Gangi, Executive Director, Correctional Association of New York) Ervin 2 Prisons take the nonviolent offender and make him live in the same conditions that a hardened killer would have. The very nature of prison, no matter how humane society attempts to make it, produces an environment that is inevitably harmful to its residents. Even by delaying release by longer sentences, residents will eventually re ....