The U.S. Department of Corrections is reeling with a multitude of issues that are caused by the overflowing prison population. A little over ten percent of the nation’s population languishes in prisons across the nation. Despite harsher laws being passed often, career criminals keep pushing their luck and eventually end up right where they started. It is advocated that the core issue for recidivism is lack of education, drug abuse and poverty. However, there have been examples of people who gave up crime and were successful. The common characteristics in these extraordinary former inmates is that they chose to motivate themselves and discovered a hidden talent or quality that allowed them to scale great heights. The objective of the earliest prison system was to correct the criminal behavior and allow the individual an opportunity to make a new beginning. However, the punishments have been unusually deficient and have forced inmates to spend ten or fifteen years in prison for petty crimes such as shoplifting.
