America has one of the highest incarceration rates compared to other developed countries. Before we put on the handcuffs, let's check again why they are placed. Criminals, as we call them, are people who have been found guilty of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. They have committed crimes that the public believes require punishment or some sort of rehabilitation. Therefore, we send them to penitentiaries so that they can have a "break" until they have served sufficient time equal to the crime they committed. That's us, just another American who unfortunately disobeyed the law that requires us to live civilly with each other. That said, we must keep them in mind as we place convicted criminals in prisons and determine how to spend our resources to supply those prisons. Laws: Now let's dive into the laws. There are two classifications of laws in the United States that we voluntarily accept, the first being the civil laws about our responsibilities to others. Civil torts are usually breaches of contracts, such as marriage, landlord/tenant disputes, or property disputes. The second category of laws we consider are criminal laws; these are “rules of conduct that have been codified and carry with them standardized consequences for their violation” (Del Castillo, 2012). The criminal laws are divided into two sections and will be covered in this paragraph. The malums in themselves are criminal offenses that involve behaviors deemed "naturally evil according to the sense of the civil community" (Del Castillo, 2012). These include murder, rape, robbery and assault. Malums in themselves require a violent state of mind because they are considered destructive in nature. Malum Prohibitums are "offensive to the public welfare... middle of paper... and, widely used and accepted, so much so that the Constitution of the United States was written on cannabis paper. Works Cited Henrichson, C. and Delaney, R. (2012). The price of prisons: what incarceration costs taxpayers. Federal Sentencing Reporter, 25(1), 68-80. 1.68Trout, G. (2011).THE COST OF IMPRISONMENT: OHIO'S PRISONS.University Of Toledo Law Review, 42(4), 891-901.Katel, P. (2007, April 6). CQ, 17, 289-312. Retrieved from http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/Conyers Jr., J. (2013). 377-387.STELLOH, T. (2013).California's Great Prison Experiment, 296(26/27), 31-34.Wallace, G. (2012). Prison health care and how to solve it, 4(1), 265-297.