As you can see in the above picture, most of our prisoners are nonviolent criminals. We have such a high crime rate with such a low tolerance, that our prisons are busting at the seems. Nobody wants to pay for prisoners, and prisoners will not stand for poor conditions. It is a never ending battle between tax payers, the government, and prisoners. Guetzkow and Schoon write, “Booming incarceration rates coupled with inertia against prison spending provided fertile grounds for litigation aimed at improving prison conditions and reducing crowding.”(Guetzkow and Schoon.) The civil right cases grew right alongside the incarceration rates. This problem continues to grow along with its neighboring problems, but fixing it is difficult when very few care. Guetskow and Schoon discussed the “Not in my backyard,” phenomenon which occurred when there was funding available to build prisons but nobody wanted a prison build in their neighborhood. Which is understandable for family friendly neighborhoods. It is also understandable when considering the health issues prisons have to offer. In “Prison Health, Public Health,” written by John Jacobi he breaks down the health issues overcrowding causes inside and outside of the prison system as a result of these “booming incarceration rates.” In one of the California prisons toured by the Judge: ‘The main medical examining room lacked any means of sanitation – there was no sink and no alcohol gel – where roughly one hundred per day undergo medical screening, and the Court observed that the dentist neither washed his hands nor changed his gloves after treating patients into whose mouths he had placed his hands.’ Experts report on this prison noted referral slips for health care unattended for over one month, and dirty, dangerous, and antiquated facilities, unchanged by prior court orders due to indifference of corrections officials (Jacobi 454.) The picture painted by the judge would be ground for a very large law suit in any other doctor’s office. So why not in this one? All of these passages pull together so much evidence. Prisons are filthy and do not provide an adequate living environment for any human, felon or not. In the article written by John Jacobi, he says, “America has been on a twenty-year spree of prison building and has filled its old and new prisons and jails with unprecedented numbers of prisoners” (Jacobi 449.) The problem is only getting worse and will continue to get worse.