How Does Federalism Effect America's Prison Reform?
The United States is a mosaic of different prison systems, state run, federal, and private. Not to mention city, county, and local jails. This mosaic called federalism, the division and relationship of the federal government and state governments is essential to the survival of our country yet it gets in the way of prison effective reform. Prisons law in the hands of the states for the majority, this means that it is very hard for the federal government to pass laws, like ones about creating rehabilitation programs, across the states. Each state would have to pass it individually.
SolutionsWhat is the realistic solution here? Two come to mind, one passive, the other active. The active approach is to create laws that either give incentives for states to create effective rehabilitation programs or punish them for having very high recidivism rates. Either way works, but incentives would be much more effective and could be done easier in reality. More will be discussed in the Economics Page.
The passive approach would be for the federal government to help the states like North Dakota and Oregon financially on the programs they are already doing, setting a standard here in America. Once the effects start to take hold in those states, others will have a close to home template to start from. |
Set Backs
The most obvious set back here is that the states can always just do what they want. Yes we all want there to be lower a prison population, but some states make a lot of money and or are comfortable with the systems they have in place.
Yes this idea seems far out, and seemingly impossible but in Economics we can see how this idea might actually be a viable option.