Having more than 40 inmates share a toilet is no fun for the inmates. Turns out overcrowding is no fun for the prisons either. Huffington Post’s Michael McLaughlin reports on how prison officials and guards are fearing riots due inmate agitation:

Wardens may see a spike in violence as more inmates are squeezed into tight living quarters, researchers warned. The overcrowding contributes "to increased inmate misconduct, which negatively affects the safety and security of inmates and staff," according to the report…

With more prisoners confined to limited spaces . . .  [t]wo and three inmates are bunked in rooms designed for one prisoner or in common areas that were never meant to be used as cells…

"Once they get frustrated enough, we're looking at another riot. And that's what scares me," said Dale Deshotel, president of the Council of Prison Locals, which represents about 32,000 federal prison employees…

As the prison population boomed, Deshotel said the government in 2005 reduced the average number of guards stationed in prison housing units. "There's no way that they can monitor that many prisoners," he said of the guard-to-inmate ratio…

California is scrambling to comply with a Supreme Court order that said severe overcrowding was unconstitutional. By mid-2013, the state must reduce its inmate population by 30,000.

Reducing the number of guards is, of course, no solution. If anything it makes matters worse. Meanwhile, cash-strapped states don't have the money to build more and more prisons and jails, particularly given that most incarcerated people are in for nonviolent offenses. So what's the solution? Might we start thinking about other ways of achieving public safety than a reflexive commitment to incarceration?

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