...Ex-convicts do not live an easy lifestyle in prison, however, when they reenter society, they have even bigger struggles to face. In the outside world ex-convicts do not face the intimidation of other convicts, but rather disrespectful and pessimistic attitudes from employers. Ex-convicts are immediately judged and labeled based off of their rap sheet. What these employers seem to forget is that, these ex-convicts are people trying to make a living as well. Jeremy Travis, President of Criminal Justice at John Jay College, and Christy A. Visher, Director of The Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies (CDAS) at the University of Delaware, performed a study on prisoners and their needs to adapt back into society with more ease. In their article, Travis and Diaz 2 Visher touched upon the previously mentioned idea, “Individuals returning home from prison have been shaped by their offending and substance abuse histories, their work skills and job histories, their mental and physical health, their prison experiences, and their attitudes, beliefs, and personality traits.” (Travis, Visher pg 91) Travis and Visher are not specifically referring to employers, but that is where most discrimination on ex-convicts occurs simply from the section on the work application that asks if one has ever had any trouble with the law. Any person who has to check that box must feel discouraged in some way. One may argue that having an ex-convict in their work place will cause uneasy tensions...
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...ATTITUDE OF EMPLOYERS, TOWARDS EMPLOYING EX-PRISONERS AND EX-OFFENDERS AS PERCEIVED BY HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGERS IN ORTIGAS PASIG CITY Prepared By: Ms. Marilyn Dimaculangan CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM AND ITS BACKGROUND INTRODUCTION It is well known that employment is an important need of most individuals; it provides income, social connection, and feelings of societal contribution and self worth. What may be less well known are the barriers to employment faced by those with criminal record, the challenges faced by employers in hiring ex-offenders and what can be done to facilitate employment opportunities as record numbers of people transition from incarceration to the community. A great number of employers are reluctant to hire individuals with a criminal past citing lack of skills and work history, untrustworthiness, and fear of liability for negligent hiring, among other things. Employers use of criminal history background checks over the past decades and they are less willing to hire ex-offenders that any other advantaged group. Their willingness to hire ex-prisoners varies according to the industry and position, the type and severity of offense committed by applicant and work experience since release. Employers are not always consistent in what they say versus what they do when it comes to hiring former offenders and prisoners Jail is a synonym for prison, especially when the facility is of a similar size as a prison. As with prisons, some jails have different wings for...
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...element in prison life throughout England and Wales for many years. It is when “prisoners and their families receive assistance and support from the prison and probation services and voluntary agencies to help them prepare for life after prison” (Justice, 2002). The objective is to hopefully lead prisoners towards recidivism, which will hopefully return ex-offenders to normal life, employment and housing. Criminological and social research done by Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) identified the following factors to be what influenced reoffending. These are; education, employment, drug and alcohol misuse, mental and physical health, housing, financial support, debt and family networks. The aim of this essay is to...
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...empirical research materials providing evidence on the success of prison educational programs in reducing the return to prison rates. First and foremost, in Michigan, the Prisoner Education proponents have expressed the importance of educational programs for the ex-convicts while being incarcerated in reducing the rate of recidivism as documented by Brunton-Smith and Hopkins (2014). The primary goal of several prison education programs is to offer behavior correctional lessons while providing instructions that will help refine the convicts’ behavior to meet the behavioral norms of the general public. Skills are incorporated into the prison educational curriculum which is made up of basic skills of literacy and essential...
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...Rehabilitation Hector Rodriguez Jr CJA/492 December 3, 2011 Professor Jeffrey Newton Rehabilitation When one thinks of rehabilitation they refer to fixing something, such as when you are injured. You get rehabilitation to help you fix or strengthen your injury. When we look at corrections rehabilitation is fixing a person’s mind set. Showing them what is acceptable behavior and what is not. So when we look at this type of rehabilitation we want to reeducate someone to understand that criminal behavior is wrong. Rehabilitation has been around for a while, as early, as the 1800’s in prison. The prison was trying to succeed in showing the prisoners through labor and the use of discipline to show prisoners proper behavior. Early doctors and psychiatrist found that criminal behavior was a disease. They did studies that showed a certain person of a center genetic makeup, height, weight hair and eye color. These findings would be the description of a criminal; it would be found to be false. The true era of rehabilitation from the 1950’s to 1970, in the beginning it was not taken serious and was not part of the curriculum. There was nothing defined to give direction to state facilities and there was no guidance on how to develop a program. The first type of a rehabilitation program was penology; it was a scientific method to punish people. James V. Bennett believes in the individual treatment of criminals in the penal system based on observations and perceptions...
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...Are prisons effective total institutions or do they more commonly fail in their goal of resocialization? Please compare and contrast how a conflict, or a functionalist theorist would analyze this part of the criminal justice system. Resocialization is a process in which a person released from prison or another institution re-enters society as a changed individual. The question, however, is: How effective are our “total” institutions in re-socialization? When looking at the evidence, it is clear that the prison system often falls short in this area. The prison system is a correctional method in which inmates are confined and have limited rights. However,...
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...The amount spent on prisons has increased 700% over the last four decades and amount is on an upwards trend. This is placing a huge burden on taxpayers, paying about 39 billion dollars a year to fund the United States prison system (Godard, 2016). Rehabilitation programs can effectively bring the amount of money spent on prisoner, since they will deter their maladaptive behaviors that got them convicted in the first place. However, very little money is spent on rehabilitation programs. In fact, of the $43,000 spent per inmate in California only 5 percent goes to fund rehabilitation programs (Ocregister, 2013). Rehabilitation will be getting prisoners out of the prison system faster. This will benefit the economy as prisoners are costly. In...
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...Employment Upon release employment is one of the greatest immediate needs for offenders returning to their communities. Research shows that many offenders have difficulty finding employment upon release. The majority of ex prisoners have difficulty finding employment because they have few job skills (Davis et al., 2012). Recently released offenders frequently face difficulties finding employment due to the collateral consequences arising from the stigma attached to their criminal records. For instance, Keena and Simmons (2015) reported that former prisoners are legally barred from a growing number of jobs and that employers are often unwilling to hire them for unrestricted jobs. Furthermore, the authors added that employers willing to hire...
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...Life After Prison Pamela Nichols Everest Online Jennifer Dunn Composition II - 6 J. Katarzyna Woronowicz / for msnbc.com J. Katarzyna Woronowicz / for msnbc.com Randall Countryman, 40, applied for 90 positions before getting a five-week temporary assignment Do you know someone that has been in jail or prison for a long time? Do they have a plan when they get released? Do they have a job waiting on them? Do they have a place to live? Find a place to live, a job to support themselves and their families is one of the biggest things that an ex-offender will have to face when they are released. This is the problem that most inmates have to think about upon release. Some may not have someone in the family that they can turn to. There are those that don’t have a safe place to go to, so they have to worry about can I go there and not get back into the same trouble that got me put into jail in the first place. Ex-offenders should have more opportunities to have jobs, housings, and to more places to get habilitation service if needed. Finding work is hard work in the reentry process for many reason. There are many places that programs that are made to help them to come back into society and also help with finding jobs. But some of these work programs do not make finding a job easy. So the problem is that some overcrowded prisons currently house more than 25...
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...A Life Given Back Beneath the truly horrible statistics for rates of reoffending there lies a discourse that society refuses to engage in – how do we welcome ex-cons back into our daily lives? Unfortunately, this is a question not many people want to answer. We need to not turn our back on these human beings, but give them a chance; an equal opportunity to live their life free and among the people, while feeling a positive presence that they too can be normal, law abiding citizens. We all, broadly, detest those who hurt us or the things that are important to us. Prisoners are accepting of the fact, that as a group they are never going to be popular or even regarded valuable among the general population. That they can arouse such strong feelings is occasionally surprising to me, given that most people only know prisoners through the medium of media stereotypes or what the read about in the newspaper. With a growing majority of states now making a criminal record public information, ex-convicts are effectively being branded for life. This information is made public, and not much thought is given to what this may mean to the ex-convicts. Also, the negative effect this can have on their lives really isn’t fair; especially if they are living as law abiding citizens now. Much of this information is easily accessible through the internet or from a number of private services. Politicians point to the cases of murderers, terrorists and serial rapists as the frightening menace that such...
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...depression. After a few days, he was checked on and went through another round of psychological testing, which showed his mental state had returned to normal. Before he was released, he said to the other prisoners during the next count, “You can’t leave. You can’t quit.” These outbursts sent a chill into the prisoners and reinforced the feeling of truly being imprisoned. Over the next few days three more people had to be sent home due to emotional...
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...Many ex-felons who want to change cannot move on with their lives after being released from prison. One of those reasons is because they have a hard time finding a job after being released. The system makes it harder for them. Some felons go in at a young age, most times so early that they do not even achieve a high school education. Felons are unable to vote causing the system to remain against them. Prisons are placed far away from society. After being released ex-felons usually return to high crime rate areas. Most ex-felons have a hard time moving on with their lives, after being released from jail because they have multiple factors working against them. “Men and women who have served extensive prison sentences…are not only left with little or no social support but also clearly marked by the criminal justice system as potentially threatening repeat offenders". (Moore 783) What Moore is saying in this quote is that the justice system marks these ex-felons as a criminal for life, making it hard for them to find employment. The system is designed to offer no help to these...
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...population of prisoners does the United States house? * The United States has 5% of the world’s population, and 25% of the world’s prisoners. 4. How much does it cost U.S. taxpayers per year, to incarcerate prisoners? * It costs the U.S taxpayers more than 63.4 billion per year to incarcerate prisoners. 5. When did the explosion of incarceration begin? What were the reasons for the explosion? * The explosion of incarceration begin in the early 1970s. The reasons were drug use. 6. How many people are incarcerated for drug offenses? * In 1971 fewer than 40 thousand people were incarcerated, but now more than half a million are incarcerated for drug offenses. 7. What is the percentage of ex-prisoners that will be back behind bars? What is the time period? * More than 50% of ex-prisoners will be back behind bars, within 3 years. 8. What are some factors that may have contributed to the decrease in crime rates in New York? * No one can really explain exactly why it could be the change in the economy, change in drug use. One factor that will decrease the crime rate in New York is increasing the size of the prison systems. Conduct additional outside research and answer the following questions: 9. Explain what community-based corrections is. * Community-based corrections are sanctions imposed of convicted adults or adjudicated juveniles that occur in a residential or community setting outside of jail or prison. They are generally...
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...Introduction The prison system in America has been a constant issue of mass-incarceration, a lack of rehabilitation, and a rate of reentry that far exceeds that of any other nation, yet this problem’s escalation has done little to bring it to the platform of reformation. The prison system has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars, and a majority of these citizens are completely unaware of the needlessness of the costs with which they are burdened. With 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., Americans cannot afford to continue to turn a blind eye to the economic issues presented by the current prison system (Council of Economic Advisors 3). Due to prison growth, an increasing incarceration rate, and a lack of rehabilitation and...
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...RELEASE FROM PRISON Name: Institution: Course: Submission Date: Abstract This paper offers a detailed explanation of the terms mandatory and supervised release from prison. It further outlines the institutional goals these terms meet by releasing prisoners early to serve the last portion of their sentences within the general population. Mandatory Release Mandatory release entails releasing prisoners from their institutions after serving their full sentences. For prisoners who show good behavior and efforts during their confinement period, the institutions grant them early release. However, individuals imprisoned under the Youth Corrections Act are often set free not later than two years before their mandatory release period (Tree.com Inc., 2011). Prisoners including those guilty of violent crimes when released early are unlikely to commit crimes. Mandatory release is effective in making prisoners improve their behavior. By rewarding well-behaved prisoners, other prisoners are unlikely to commit offenses in jail against other inmates or guards. The institutional goal of mandatory release is to institute good behavior in prisoners, inspire participation and rehabilitation of inmates. Older prisoners and inmates imprisoned for non-violent offenses are eligible for mandatory release program. Supervised Release Supervised release is often served after a prisoner is set free from a jail institution by a probation...
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