I'm working on a writing question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

(Mitchell wyd Eric)

For a country that prides itself on freedom and the near limitless nature of our ambition, millions of Americans find themselves behind bars, often for extended periods of time, and often for more than one stay. American prison systems are overcrowded, underfunded and without answers (Guetzkow & Schoon, 2015). Although the population of the country has grown significantly, that alone cannot possibly help to explain the rise in civilian population percentage in America’s prison. What could explain the dramatic increase is the explosion of the number of laws now on the books that are used to imprison people every day.

Although there is no question that the United States uses its prison system as a catch-all response for the overwhelming majority of law breakers, the fact it is among the highest incarceration rate per 100,000 residents tells a larger story ( Gaes, 2018). This is perhaps best captured by the explosion of federal and state laws in action in todays society. There are tens of thousands of drug, gun, medical, and financial laws on the books now that simply did not exist in the beginning of the 20^th century ( Kreit , 2009). The war on drugs, the sometimes overlapping but often conflicting federal and state statutes on gun and drug practices make the net for catching so called ‘criminals’ much larger. As societies grows more complex, so too does the means of policing it, that much is clear ( Guetzkow & Schoon, 2015). But it certainly follows that making more things illegal means society will have more criminals to deal with, and thus a rise in the percentage of the population in prison.

This is not to say all drugs should be legalized, or that laws banning insider training on Wall St are contributing to the prison population. What cannot be denied however, is that the federalist system -despite its irreplaceable value to the American legal way of life- has left the citizens of this country with an inflated legal scrolls for which to follow (and by the looks of it) break all too often100 word response