Prison overcrowding has been a wide-ranging topic in the United States for decades now. This issue has been the contributing factor to prison violence, safety endangerment, increase in psychological problems, poor health care, and lack of rehabilitation. Overpopulated prisons have been a common topic in the media and has come to be a controversial issue. Is Prison Reform the answer? Will it indeed improve the penal system that has been operating in injustice? “Prison Reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, while establishing a more effective penal system or implement alternatives to incarceration” (Wikipedia) . I have chosen three sources to explore and engage with, to understand this topic more in depth. The first article was written by Andrea Caumont who works for Pew Research Center titled “ Chart Week: The Problem with Prison Overcrowding”. The second article is titled “Are California Prisons Punishing inmates based on race?” it comes from ProPublica and was written by Christie Thompson. The last article is titled “Underfunded, Overcrowded State Prisons Struggle with Reform” comes from USA News Today written by Gaby Galvin. In these articles I will review keys points and understand the correlation between the three sources. Social media editor, Andrea Caumont, has several publications. Caumont works at the Pew Research Center and explains her job on her LinkedIn profile as collaborating with the researchers, and writers to research compound information into content that is easy to absorb with a broad audience being the target. “ Chart of the week: The problem with prison overcrowding” is an article that was written by Caumont in August of 2013 and, published by Pew Research Center on their website. In this article Caumont discusses the problem with prison overcrowding world- wide. Caumont interprets the prison occupancy chart, taken from The Economist Magazine, published on August 1, 2013. Caumont focus starts with the hunger strike initiated by the California prison inmates, in response to “solitary confinements state policies at the state prison”(Caumont). Furthermore, she discusses the U.S Supreme court ruling, stating that overcrowding was an issue of cruel and unusual punishment. Caumont references many issues resulting from overpopulated prisons such as disease(TB), increased inmate misconduct, and lack of meaningful work opportunities to name a few. She distinguishes the rise in prison population from 1978 to 2009 from 307,276 to 1.6 million. Caumont uses concrete factual information in the article. Logos is most prevalent through the article as she uses statistic-based findings. However, there are some points in the article where she uses pathos and ethos. In the article she paints a picture to the reader with the “ hunger strike” (Caumont),the prisoners initiated. The reader is able to feel some emotions from this. Ethos is exhibited when Caumont references the reader attention to the U.S Supreme court ruling. Throughout this article Caumont analyze other sources who provide precise information based on other studies. The second article, “ Are California Prison punishing inmates based on their race” was published in ProPublica in April of 2013, by Christie Thompson. Thompson has written several articles mainly on prison issues in the United states, not limited to immigration, and criminal justice topics. Her work has been published in several outlets such as The Atlantic, New York Times, NPR in addition to ProPublica. Thompson was the recipient of the George Polk award for Justice reporting in 2016. In this article Thompson does an analysis and breakdown of California prisons coding system that is used to separate ethnicities, and medical complications, that led to lawsuits. This “color-coding” system includes six different colors, these colors are placed at the top of the inmate cells as a way to know the ethnicity of the person occupying the cell(Thompson). State and Federal courts have ruled against the system a number of times. There has been reports of at least 5 jails in California using this same color- coding system. Prison personnel have made claims that this system helps to keep race- based violence to the minimum and prevent assaults/thefts. This claim was in response to a lawsuit, however legal advocates argue a different claim, stating this system sounds much like “ segregation days”(Thompson). Federal officials backed up these arguments conveying this “ color-system” was flawed, and inequitable way for inmates to be kept. “California overcrowding was contributed to race- based lockdowns”. Subsequently, the color-coding system was “ severe enough to constitute cruel and unusual punishment and required the state to cut its prison population”. Thompson provides another lawsuit claim, that had an analysis conducted limited physical exercise for inmates. In this lawsuit, an inmate complaine>