Changes in Correction Over Time (Essay Sample)

Changes in Correction over Time
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Aging in Prisons
Currently, the United States prison system houses a sizable population of elderly inmates. The number of elderly convicts in the United States has increased by around seventy five percent during the previous decade. For instance, there are about two hundred and fifty aged and physically handicapped inmates in the Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, Oklahoma. Notably, the prison population's senior population will continue to grow at a rate of forty percent every year.
Having a significant number of elderly inmates in jail is costly (Williams et al., 2012). An old convict costs $70,000, three times as much as a youthful criminal. Their health issues, impairments, mental disorders, and serious illnesses cause higher expenditures. For example, at the 63-year-old Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York, most convicts have dementia and Eczema (Rushing, 2010). The Oklahoma Department of Corrections is now challenged by mounting expenditures linked with an aging population. Oklahoma relies on retired professionals, preachers, community workers, and volunteer inmates to help save expenditures. However, New York has created a facility for the elderly. Other states will be forced to create comparable centers to help the aging population's mental capabilities. However, with expenses exceeding $100,000 per senior convict, governments lack immediate money (Rushing, 2010).
The release of elderly convicts is connected with a number of positive impacts. Correctional institutions, for example, will reduce the costs connected with the health issues of the elderly, functional impairments, mental illness, and serious illnesses. One old convict who has been freed can provide financial support for three young offenders. Furthermore, many convicts are still in good health at that age, and as a result, they may make a constructive contribution to society.
Does the death penalty (capital punishment) impose an undue hardship on the wrongfully convicted?
What sort of life would it be for someone to suffer in prison knowing they were genuinely innocent from the start, only to be sentenced to twenty years in prison or the death penalty by a court who also knows they were truly innocent from the start? While the adolescent years and the mid-twenties through the thirties are supposed to be the happiest years of one's life, consider how much time has