"The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. At year-end 2009 it was 743 adults incarcerated per 100,000 population."(BJS) Russia has the second highest at around 500 per 100,000. This static should be cause enough to have Americans wanting to know why! Isn’t America supposed to be the land of the free? I believe that statement and the incarceration statistics contradict each other. But this, believe it or not is not my main area of concern. The re-incarceration rates in America are what leads me to believe we have a problem that needs to be addressed.

  I will be presenting you with tons of statistics to prove that our prison system is not doing the job that I believe it should be doing. I believe that the job of the prison systems is to help inmates change their lives, understand what they've done and learn how to abide by our laws, instead of just punishing them.  I also believe that the younger we start this rehabilitation process among "criminals" the better it will work.