“The Stacking Effect”

Although the documentary we watched in class already discussed many of the reasons behind the continuous growth of the prison population, I thought I’d share one that I believe the Netflix special didn’t touch on enough. “The Stacking Effect” is a theory which refers to the sentences of different lengths being piled one on top another in the prison system. After the 1970s, when politicians were pressured to crack down on crime, lengthier sentences were being dealt out. Statistics at the time proved that a majority of inmates reoffended after they were released from prison. The public blamed prisons for not doing their job of rehabilitating, and politicians and law makers solution to this problem was to just give out lengthier sentences. However, a lengthier sentence does not mean that a person will be successfully rehabilitated while serving time, it just means they’ll be behind bars for longer. Back to the actual effect though, the argument behind it is that the steady flow of inmates going in and out, in and out, did not increase. Short sentences stayed at a steady rate. However, these short sentenced prisoners were now being put into a prison which already contained a number of inmates who would be stuck behind bars for many more years to come. This is the reason for the spike in prison population. If you’re keeping people in your prison for a majority or even the entirety of their life, then of course the population is going to rise, because you aren’t moving people out as quickly anymore. A more positive solution would not be to increase the years on a persons sentence, but instead to learn how to successfully rehabilitate within a prison cell. Punishment just for the sake of punishment is a lot of time and money wasted.