"Our criminal justice system is not as smart as it should be" and "Mass incarceration makes our entire country worse off, and we need to do something about it regard” is what President Obama said in 2015. Now, in 2020, five years later, despite all the changes the President has made to reform the legal system, there are still several problems in American society. The improper use of prison for minor and trivial crimes and the excessive use of pre-trial detention in the United States is a much debated topic that often divides opinions, in fact following this situation, in recent years, we have discovered phenomena such as mass incarceration and prison overcrowding. Although the high incarceration rate may seem like an insignificant factor, it has a truly significant role that no one should underestimate. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayCurrently, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, beating much larger countries like China and India, and more totalitarian countries like Russia and the Philippines. According to statistics, more than 2.12 million people are currently behind bars, in jails and prisons nationwide. This situation seems worrying especially because the number of prisoners has quadrupled, compared to just 500,000 in 1980, but also because although the United States represents approximately 4.4% of the world's population, the country hosts 25% of the world's prison population. we are facing an extremely relevant phenomenon, we know in fact that the high incarceration of recent years has spread. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, statistics overwhelmingly demonstrate that the United States has a huge prison problem as most people are incarcerated for minor infractions such as driving with a suspended license, public drunkenness, or shoplifting. What caused mass incarceration? One of the main reasons is the Crime Bill of 1994, written by Joe Biden and proposed by President Clinton to Congress. The Crime Bill aimed to solve street crime, which became a national political issue in the 1960s. Furthermore, this decree introduced fundamental provisions in every field of the legal system and imposed severe punishments on people who violated the law. He implemented many things including the mandatory “three strikes” life sentence for repeat offenders. After the Crime Bill went into effect, the United States witnessed a general boom in incarceration and the beginning of an era of exceptional punitiveness. Over 30 billion dollars have been spent on the implementation of this legal project. Clinton increased funding to build prisons and hired approximately 100,000 additional police officers, as a result of which the number of incarcerations increased dramatically. From an international point of view, there is a correlation between human rights and mass incarceration, in particular, the The United Nations Human Rights Council has encouraged the United States to solve the problem of incarceration which highlights several problems including the racial disparities. A really interesting document is the first United Nations report on mass incarceration, which focuses on describing the problems of this particular phenomenon and spreading global attention to the negative impact of mass incarceration on the enjoyment of human rights. The human rights-based approach to criminal justice focuses on “crime prevention and rehabilitation efforts: behavioral therapy, intensive mental health and substance abuse treatmentdrugs and preventive programs can reduce crime without destroying lives and families”. Mass incarceration is closely linked to prison overcrowding, caused not only by insufficient prison capacity but also by a high percentage of people not yet convicted, representing more than two-thirds of all inmates in local prisons. Over the past 30 years, the number of federal laws on the books have nearly doubled; this is due to criminalization, a growing problem, which consists of excessive or improper use of criminal law, which generally leads to over-criminalizing and punishing many. This phenomenon today is caused by an excessive number of laws and regulations that have transformed America into an over-policed ​​country. The 8th Amendment of the American Constitution, which prevents the federal government from imposing harsh sanctions on criminal defendants, plays an essential role in the above-mentioned phenomena. Furthermore, it states that “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Unfortunately, several elements demonstrate that there is no real implementation of this amendment in real life, in fact discrepancies between legal reality and objective reality can be highlighted. These differences became even more apparent when analyzing U.S. incarceration rates and the 8th Amendment side by side. Several legal cases such as Brown v. Plata are perfect examples of processes against mass incarceration and prison overcrowding. In this particular case, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state of California to reduce its prison population by approximately 40,000 criminals or find another way to reach 137% of its intended capacity, within two years. The essential problem in this case was the overcrowding of California prisons. At the time of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, the overcrowding situation was uncontrolled and, in fact, the primary cause of the prisoners' inadequate medical and mental health care, thus violating the prisoners' Eighth Amendment rights. Other interesting legal cases are Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida, both cases show “cruel and unusual punishment” for sentencing juveniles, contrary to the Eighth Amendment. The amicus brief urges the U.S. Supreme Court to evaluate comprehensive laws as indicators that life in prison without parole is indecent and is assessed as excessive punishment for children under 18. The United States is the only nation in the world that imposes sentences of life without parole on juveniles. These legal phenomena have a serious and negative impact on the entire American society. The issue, in fact, does not only concern individuals who have to spend time in prison or prison, but also involves other areas such as communities, in ways that scholars are just beginning to explore. Firstly, because it causes various psychological effects on the individual. prisoners of prisoners. Some prisoners are in fact affected by post-prison syndrome and mental health disorders in general. Secondly, because this has an important effect on the health and well-being of the community, and in particular of the poorest families. But these problems are not only about health but also about social impact. Third, due to the severe impact on the American economic system, mass incarceration costs approximately $182 billion each year. This economic impact also affects families, in fact children who lose even a parent due to incarceration risk growing up in poverty. To resolve all these legal issues is necessaryreconfigure the law on imprisonment. This change could also help us facilitate judicial review and convert the law into a more logical and fairer law towards citizens. Another reason to reconfigure this system is the existence of countless criminal acts, these acts in the US legal system are many more than we can imagine, and as a result, we get the disorder caused by the multiplicity of laws. Such a difficult problem can lead to an innocent and involuntary violation of the rules and to a more complicated and insidious understanding of them by citizens. Regarding the efficiency of the laws, one of the most debated laws is the three strikes law, this law consists in the application of a life sentence when a person commits three crimes. To explain this law in a clearer light we could equate it to the baseball term “three strikes and you're out”. In fact, a strike in baseball occurs when the batter swings at the ball and misses it, or more generally when the ball reaches the 'strike zone'. When the batter gets three strikes, we can say that the baseball team is "out", the same thing happens in the legal field when a person reaches three felonies, we can say without a doubt that he is "out" or more specifically "out of society ”, behind prison bars. The three strikes law was enacted based on the limit of recidivism, the tendency of a criminal to repeat an unwanted behavior. At first glance, the law might seem like a positive idea for deterring crime, but unlike how things appear, it doesn't work. The evidence does not support the three strikes law, this is due to the fact that the law does not work as a deterrent against crime, there is no real effectiveness of it, but rather it significantly increases penalties as numerous analyzes have shown. The three strikes law presents a very clear dilemma that consists primarily of the fact that people with three nonviolent felonies are eligible for such a harsh sentence. Researchers at Stanford Law School showed that more than 4,000 inmates in California were serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes under the three strikes law. Second, it may not always work as efficiently to limit crime violations as community change claims. , “these laws encourage punishment rather than healing, and the vague wording surrounding them criminalizes far more people than is fair.” Then we come to the aforementioned problem of mass incarceration, which has grown dramatically over time, with a 500% increase in the last forty years. Legal reasonableness is generally linked to constitutional texts and has a leading role because it intends to reconcile normative reasons with concrete needs. In the United States, reasonableness is a prerequisite for judicial review of fundamental rights, but sometimes we can find a clear discrepancy between the American Constitution and legal reasonableness. In this case, this discrepancy is particularly evident since the phenomenon of mass incarceration is constantly debated, especially from the ethical and philosophical approach. Except for the Eighth Amendment, which “prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishment,” no other constitutional law, even indirectly, seeks to limit the distinctive problem of the United States. The most relevant issue consists in the fact that the US system is essentially a system without gradations of punishment, which is also characterized by its sanctions which are usually mass corporal punishment and performance of shows, intended to discourage the crime.