The purpose of the United States correctional system is to protect citizens from criminals, rehabilitate inmates, and remove their rights as free citizens to pay their debt to society. Unfortunately, prisoners are doing time but are not appropriately punished for crimes. Prisoners are not paying their debt to society because they have nothing to offer society while imprisoned. Yet while locked up, the prisoners are steady sucking the taxpayers of thousands of dollars just to incarcerate and provide them every basic necessity. Longer incarceration for non-violent inmates caused unprecedented social and economic problems in California. Newer sentencing guidelines caused expenses to skyrocket that led to an overview of the laws. Offenders are given harsher sentences for non-violent crimes and consequently overcrowding has beleaguered the prison system, specifically California. Subsequently, in 2010, the United States prison population increased by 790% in the federal prison population alone (Biron). There have been many amended state and federal laws aimed at controlling the statutes relating to criminal incarceration and punishments. At one time, laws deemed capital punishment too severe for non-violent crimes therefore the law was amended. Reforming capital punishment to exclude burglary and impose it on violent crimes is one example of an ethical issue of alternative penalties for lesser crimes. Nowadays, the American Corrections Association campaigns for the civil rights of the incarcerated. .
Major human rights violations affect the most disadvantaged population, such as minorities and low income individuals, but these injustices were not addressed. Instead in 2011, the Supreme Court case Brown vs. Plata argued that California's overcrowded prisons are so terrible they violate the Eight Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment therefore the state was ordered to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates (p.