As many United States citizen’s, I’ve always heard of the talk of prison reform in our criminal justice system. From President Richard Nixon’s infamous War on Drugs, to the problem of minors being kept in solitary confinement, talk of the issues within America’s prison system is not something most citizens are strangers too. However, many are unaware of how necessary and in need of change America is. I didn’t become genuinely interested in this topic until my Junior year of high school when I did a presentation covering the injustices within the system. And that’s when I found it, Brandon W. Mathews TED Talk titled The Surprising Reason Our Correctional System Doesn’t Work. In this Mathews questions the effectiveness of our current criminal justice system, and claims it focuses too much on punishment when it instead should look towards rehabilitation. He proposes a “divorce” between the two in order to create a more successful prison system in America. This was my introduction into a whole new world, one that I believe is in need of change.

In order to identify a clear solution, it is first necessary to find the core of this problem: the reliance on punishment. To me it seems that our current correctional facilities do not take into consideration enough that the majority of their inmates will someday be released back out into society. Because of the lack of rehabilitation in our system, most of these released prisoners will end up back in jail. This is a phenomena known as recidivism, which is defined by the National Institute of Justice as “a person’s relapse into criminal behavior, often after the person receives sanctions or undergoes intervention for a previous crime.”

The Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted a study in 2005 where they tracked 400,000+ inmates from state prisons 5 years after their release to examine their recidivism rates. Their final data concluded that 76.6% of these former inmates were arrested again within the 5 years after their initial release. If this doesn’t scream problematic to you, don’t worry, it gets worse. Additionally, a followup was conducted in 2018, and the results showed that 83% of the ex-inmates were arrested within 9 years, and 82% of those arrested during the 9 years were also arrested in the first 3 years.

This data clearly shows that the current way the correctional system in the U.S. is functioning does not allow for the success of inmates post-imprisonment. People arrested for non-violent crimes such as drug or property offenses are likely to face recidivism, causing them to be unable to get their life back on track. And it all starts at the root: America prioritizing punishment over rehabilitation. It concerns me that many Americans are ignorant to the importance of this matter, how necessary it is to aid these inmates in order for them to become a successful part of society again. That is why I hope to bring light to this issue, so more people realize the wrong doings of this system and to demonstrate why we need reform.