THE COST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MENS AND WOMENS PRISONS IN THE UNITED Essay

THE COST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MENS AND WOMENS PRISONS IN THE UNITED STATES - Essay Example People who are convicted of federal or state laws violation are held by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, serving more then one year sentences. All the States have their own prison systems and they hold persons under the State laws’ violation. Furthermore, there are a myriad of local jail systems which hold less then one year sentence convicts, those waiting to be sentenced or tied as well as those waiting to be transferred (Stephan James, 2004). From the above evidence statistics indicative of massive arrests and incarcerations, one cannot fail to imagine the burden of costs involved, not only in maintenance of the prisoners in jails but also on the free tax payers who have regularly been inflicted to increased taxes in many fields to provide the government with the staggering funding it requires for this task. The inmates must be provided with food, health care, housing, protection, probation, psychological counseling, and many other social economic amenities (Donna Willmott & Juliana van Olphen, 2005, pp. 42). However, as we delve in this endeavor of understanding the various prison costs of inmates, it is necessary to understand that there are differences between how these costs impacts on women and men in prison. Before making an in depth consideration of these differentiations, it is necessary to have a look at the trends of incarcerations in the united states from 1990 to date. The above statistics illustrated in figure 2 above indicates that women prisoners’ numbers are proportionately increasing at a faster rate than those of men prisoners. From 2000 to 2005, the populations of women prisoners in State and Federal systems increased by 2.9% while the population of male prisoners in the same systems increased by 1.8%. A total of $38.2 billion was spent by corrective authorities in the 2001 fiscal year for Nation’s State correction facilities, of which $29.5