Jail and Prison
Nicole Jones
CJA234
July 30, 2012
Mitch Jessip

Jail and Prison
Jails hold only about one-tenth of all offenders under correctional supervision, yet admit approximately four times as many offenders each year as all other correctional components combined. Jails are often misunderstood, as the general public regularly confuses prisons and jails. We have all heard someone say something like, “For that crime, I hope the criminal spends years in jail,” although jails are not used to hold sentenced offenders for long terms of confinement. (Seiter, R. 2011).
Jails are the watershed of the correctional system. The U.S. jail is the oldest of the correctional components, initiated well before prisons, probation, parole, or halfway houses. Yet the jail still has a diverse and difficult mission and role. Few offenders won’t pass through a jail as they enter the correctional system. Jails hold a variety of offenders (those who have been arrested, have been detained pending trial, have been sentenced to short terms of confinement for minor crimes, are awaiting transfer to another facility, and are being held administratively for a criminal justice agency). (Seiter, R. 2011).
They may hold offenders arrested for public drunkenness or for multiple murders.
Some jail systems are larger than all but a few state prison systems, and some are extremely small (four or five beds). Jails face unique issues, such as dealing with unknown offenders, managing detoxification and medical problems, and serving the court with security and prisoner transportation. Jails can have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year, or they may have budgets of only a few hundred thousand dollars. Jails may have sophisticated management and professional training of staff, or they may have poor management with patrol deputies with no specialized training assigned to watch prisoners. (Seiter, R. 2011).
The first jails were created in England. The first gaol, as in jails were then called, was ordered by King Henry II in 1166. These jails were used to detain offenders awaiting trial, as crime became a problem between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the jails were then use to house displaced persons, the poor, and sometimes even the mentally ill. These early jails had deplorable conditions of filth, violence, poor food, and little medical care.
After John Howard who was appointed sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773, seen these conditions of the jails he was unimpressed. He visited prisons in other European countries and felt like these prisons could be replicated. He worked closely with the English House of Commons to draft the Penitentiary Act of 1779. This Act created four requirements for English prisons and jails, which were: (1) secure and sanitary structures, (2) systematic inspections, (3) abolition of fees charged to inmates, and (4) a reformatory regime in which inmates were confined in solitary cells but worked in common rooms during the day. The act also detailed the requirements for diet, uniforms, and hygiene for prisoners. (Seiter, R. 2011). State prisons are primarily operated by state governments. Overcrowding is a persistent problem in most state and federal prisons. By the end of 2001, state prisons were operating between 1 and 16 percent over capacity. This makes the prisons more difficult to operate, and puts the health and safety of inmates and staff at risk. The prison systems known today are based on eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment. The Walnut Street Jail was the first “so-called” penitentiary opened in the United States. The most common name for this system of prisons today is the “Department of Corrections.” There are merely more than 1 million men and women housed in the confinements operated by the states. Most of the states started with only one state prison, and now they have grown to as many as 100 in the state of Texas. The type of institution that the states used to start their initial prison on was based off of the Auburn model, and was expanded from their based on the special needs (women and younger offenders) was accepted.
May 14, 1930 marked the birth of the Federal Bureau of Prisons which was created by an act of Congress by President Herbert Hoover. The first U.S. Penitentiary was an old military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; this penitentiary began to house prisoners in 1895. The third penitentiary was the first newly constructed federal prison and was opened in 1902 in Atlanta, Georgia. Institutions were being added one by one and housed just over 13,000 inmates. The now famous federal prison Alcatraz was opened in 1934. Alcatraz was opened against the wishes of the BOP. Bates and his aides in the BOP headquarters viewed Alcatraz as an unnecessary “political stunt”. Prisoners that fall into the medium security group may sleep in dormitories on bunk beds with lockers to store their possessions. They may have communal showers, toilets and sinks. Dormitories are locked at night with one or more correctional officers supervising. There is less supervision over the internal movements of prisoners. The perimeter is generally double fenced and regularly patrolled.

Prisoners in minimum security facilities are considered to pose little physical risk to the public and are mainly non-violent "white collar criminals". Minimum security prisoners live in less-secure dormitories, which are regularly patrolled by correctional officers. As in medium security facilities, they have communal showers, toilets, and sinks. A minimum-security facility generally has a single fence that is watched, but not patrolled, by armed guards. At facilities in very remote and rural areas, there may be no fence at all. Prisoners may often work on community projects, such as roadside litter cleanup with the state department of transportation or wilderness conservation. Many minimum security facilities are small camps located in or near military bases, larger prisons (outside the security perimeter) or other government institutions to provide a convenient supply of convict labor to the institution. Many states allow persons in minimum-security facilities access to the internet.
In a maximum security prison or area, all prisoners have individual cells with sliding doors controlled from a secure remote control station. Often prisoners are confined in their cells 23 hours per day, but in some institutions, prisoners are allowed out of their cells for most of the day. When out of their cells, prisoners remain in the cellblock or an exterior cage. Movement out of the cellblock or "pod" is tightly restricted using restraints and escorts by correctional officers.
Supermax prison facilities provide the highest level of prison security. These units hold those considered the most dangerous inmates. These include serial killers, inmates who have committed assaults, murders or other serious violations in less secure facilities, high-profile criminals such as Theodore Kaczynski, Terry Nichols, Zacarias Moussaoui, and inmates known to be or accused of being prison gang members. The United States Federal Bureau of Prisons operates one such facility: ADX Florence, built specifically as a supermax facility in 1994. United States Penitentiary, Marion was a supermax but has been downgraded to a medium security facility. Utilizing a penal construction and operation theory known as the "control unit" prison, the conditions of these facilities are considered harsh by some human rights watchdog organizations. Inmates generally spend 23 or more hours per day in their cells, with the additional hour spent either in a supervised one-man shower, or in an "outdoor" recreation area, generally a solid-walled pen twice the size of a cell, also used in solitary confinement.

Federal stats released Sunday show that from June 2004 to June 2005 the nation's jail and prison population grew 2.6 percent to 2,186,230. This is more than twice the rate of annual population growth for both the US and the world, according to the US Census Bureau.
The United States has both a greater percentage of its citizens behind bars (0.736%) and more people jailed in total than any other nation in the world. Our incarceration rate of 736 per 100,000 people handily trumps number two, Russia (at about 530/100,000). The next highest ranking western country is the UK, at number 18, with well under 200 per 100,000.
We account for only about five percent of the world’s population, but almost one in four persons incarcerated. In fact, we have "100,000 more persons behind bars for drug offenses alone than the entire European Union has incarcerated -- and the EU is larger than the U.S. by 100 million people."
Ironically, violent crime has been declining steadily since 1994 and is now less than half that rate. We pay a cost for our reliance on locks-and-bars -- societal and otherwise. Economists View points out that the average 2001 cost per state inmate was almost $23,000. It's a little more than that for federal inmates. That's about $55 billion a year. Many argue that much (most?) of that money could be better spent on education, detox, job training.

References

Seiter, R. (2011). Corrections: An Introduction (3rd ed.). : .
State and Federal Prisons. (n.d). Retrieved from http://Bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov
U.S. Politics. (n.d). Retrieved from http://usolitics.about.com