many reasons why people in the United States want convicts to work. America is tired of paying for prisons and the number of prisoners is growing so much that inmates are having to pay for their prison stays. That is why Prisons extract money from their inmates by charging for court costs, imposing medical co-payments, seizing prisoners assets, garnishing prisoners wages, and pursuing former prisoners for the cost of their incarceration. (Paventi 26) Prison officials were surveyed and were found to believe that inmate work programs should be increased by 166 percent and that inmates should pay at least three times more for their stay. (Ingley 28) It costs a page 5 large amount of money to build more room for the increasing number of prisoners and the staff needed to watch them. Statistics show that the prison population is growing faster than ever. The population in prisons today is three-hundred percent more than it was in the seventies. (Selke 1) Another statistic shows that the rate of increase is going to continue to grow. By the year 2002 the inmate population is expected to increase by another 43 percent. (M. O. Reynolds 58) Just the last eight years has shown that the prison population is growing even when crime is going down. The prison population has almost doubled to 1.2 million since 1990. (Let the Prisoners Work 14) The result is an increasing percentage of taxpayers money going to cover the rising population. Prisons cost America twenty-five billion dollars a year which is about two hundred and fifty dollars a year per family. (M. O. Reynolds 58) To some people this proves the need for convict labor and chain gangs, but there are still many reasons against them. Often chain gangs were so unbearable that inmates tried to escape. A Virginia man who escaped from a chain gang in 1956 was caught by bounty hunters. Curtis Brown had served two of his ten year burglary sentence when he escaped on June 5, 1956. Brown could not with...
