...Evolution of Life in Prison November 11, 2013 Evolution of Life in Prison The purpose of this essay is to do an analysis on the evolution and perspective of prison life. This essay will explain how the evolution influenced the classification of male and female prisoners over time. Last, this essay will explain how the prison populations in jails compare to the population of prison at the state and federal levels. A person could describe prison life as living with thousands of other men and women, who also have criminal convictions by the judicial system. Prisoners will need to realize that his or her prison sentence is not a vacation; however, it is a punishment for his or her criminal mischief. Some people will not understand the true meaning of life in prison because they will not experience it themselves to pass judgment. As Stanley “Tookie” Williams did say in his Life in Prison book is no life in prison is hard for any individual who has to serve life in prison. Inmates will spend his or her time trying to figure out how he or she can win his or her freedom again (Becnel, 2008). The Evolution and Perspective of Prison Life A convicted felon prison life will change as the nature of the institution itself will change. The 1700s life in confinement is life in jail awaiting trial, sentencing, or punishment. Each prisoner will remain in the same jail together. Those prisoners will sleep in dirty and unhealthy jails. The prisons and jails have epidemics and malnutrition...
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...The Prison System Robert B. Weight II CJS/200 January 19, 2011 Ronald Rucker Even though the system has worked for 220 years, the American prison system is in danger of complete failure on its current course of development because overcrowding, low budgets, and changes in public sentiment are quickly placing the penitentiary system in an inoperable state. The evolution of the current prison system in the United States has had many subtle changes that have lead to the current crisis, but the system has been set up to fail since the beginning. There have been supporters and opponents to the prison system. There have been social movements that have created major adaptations in society’s idea of how prisons and prisoners should be handled. In the end, society faces the issue of not being able to sustain current sentencing practices and maintain the prisons through the increasing prison populations. (Norman Johnston, 2010) In 1790 sweeping reform went through Pennsylvania to change the jail system. Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush led the effort to change the old and corrupt ways of the penal system (Norman Johnston, 2010). The first prison was built in 1790 as a wing of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Gaines, 2006). This prison operated on the premise that crime was caused by idleness, so the best method of treatment for a criminal was silence and isolation to force reflection on the criminal’s wrong doings and work...
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...in 2015 named Muslims in prison? I found out that 60% of Muslims were even though Muslims make up about 8% of the population in 2010 (Markind, 2015). Now I will talk about the statics on hate crimes in the...
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...Crime has existed in the world as long as human beings have walked on it. When there is a crime there must be a form of punishment. A form of punishment must exist when a person commits a crime, he or she must be taught a lesson to prevent the crime from occurring again. To understand how punishment was developed a person must start from the beginning. This essay will discuss the history of punishment, the history of prison development, the comparison of the Pennsylvania system and the Auburn system, and last the impact and involvement of prison labor over time. Before discussing the history of punishment one must know what the” term” punishment means. The “term” punishment can be in numerous ways but each “term” possesses the same meaning. One way of defining punishment is, a penalty inflicted on an offender through judicial procedure (Merriam-Webster, 2012). The use of punishment can be dated back to as early as the 1600s. During that era crime in America was punished based on the English criminal codes (Sieter, 2011). Examples of crimes in the 1600s would be drunkenness, stealing something of minor value, and slander (the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations, which defame and damage another's reputation (Merriam-Webster, 2012)). If a person was found committing any of the crimes previously listed he or she would be known as an offender. An offender would receive his or her punishment at the town whipping post or placed in stocks and pillories. Pillories are said...
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...Essay – Advocating for Adults incarcerated Human rights are for every human; Prisoners are human too. A prisoner is deprived of the human right of liberty though? Essay – Advocating for Adults incarcerated Human rights are for every human; Prisoners are human too. A prisoner is deprived of the human right of liberty though? CHCAD603A – Undertake Systems Advocacy CHCAD603A – Undertake Systems Advocacy Human rights are for every human; Prisoners are human too. A prisoner is deprived of the human right of liberty though? Where is the line when they are deprived of one are they deprived on any other human rights directly or indirectly? This essay explores the issues and basic human rights of an adult who is incarcerated and an analysis of structural, political and social factors which play their part in maintaining discrimination against this group and how they are discriminated against. Issues which affect adults in prison and how these affect the individual, community, society and government policy with examples of issues that have changed and how advocacy has been used to create change. The introduction of policies that have arisen as a result of identified issues and how they relate to Human rights will be another focus in this essay. There is a “Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners” guidelines which are an adaption to the Universal Human Rights charter specifically for those who are incarcerated. An example of this is rule 57 “Imprisonment and other...
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...In today's society, the prisons of America appear to cause more problems than assistance. The country penal system is expensive, overcrowded, and some argue that it is ineffective as well as inefficient. The cost to build, staff, and support these facilities increases dramatically each year. Prisons, which were created to be humane correctional facilities, are currently filled with violence, hostility, and a communal fear. These institutions are meant to control crime by deterrence, incapacitating criminals. This may protect society from potentially dangerous individuals, but these institutions' level of accomplishment is askew. The financial burden attached to the building, maintaining, and staffing of prisons constantly plagues the penal system. During the late 1960s, New York built prisons at a price of $2 million each. Since then, prices have risen dramatically. In 1990, each prisoner required $15,496 to support (“Bureau of Justice Statistics”). A prison containing 2,000 inmates amounts to over $31 million to operate on an annual basis. The United States spends an estimated $60 billion each year on corrections (Prisons in the United States). The operation price is synonymous with the level of security, ranging from the supermax, containing serial killers, to the minimum security, containing drug offenders. Violence is not confined to outside prison walls. In 2005 alone, federal and state prisons reported 885 incidents of sexual violence. Of the aforementioned...
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...Lattesha Kirkland Professor Crawford ENG 101 12 June 2014 Essay 2 Youth are Charge as an Adult In the United States there are a lot of crimes being committed by youth, most of these crimes are serious enough for these children to be charged as an adult. These children are being over charged. They are still children just committing adult crimes. When these youth are tried as adults it exposes these juveniles to state prisons without parole and even execution. In addition, it is over 2,500 child offenders serving life without parole in United State prisons for crimes committed before they 18th birthday. Therefore, youth should not be tried as adults because they are being over charged for these crimes. One reason that youth should not be charged as adults is that it’s just a double standard on these children. These juveniles don’t have full brain development to even know the outcome of the crimes committed. The thing about youthful offenders is that no one seems to care about them. Most people don't like the youth of America, even the good ones can be unpleasant. Combine the feeling they have toward the average teenager with the fear inspired by youth violence, and you have a population that no one wants to deal with. There is a disturbing trend of increasing violence among young people. "Uniformly in our communities, more young people are engaging...
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...inmates and limiting their human contact in prison. From its birth in the late 1700s to its more widespread usage in recent history, solitary confinement has grown to be a considerable tool in the arsenal of the United States prison system’s methods of controlling its enormous prison population, shown by an increase in the construction of “Supermax” prisons, maximum-security prisons with units specifically designated to isolate inmates. With solitary confinement’s recent uptick in usage throughout the United States on both the federal and state level, questions have arisen about its implementation, its effects on the prison population, and its ethical implications. With it becoming apparent that solitary confinement will continue to play a large role in the United States correction system in the future, it is important to explore the answers to these questions. In this essay, we will explore these questions in order to understand solitary confinement more fully. History Defined fully as, “…confinement of a prisoner alone in a cell for all or nearly all of the day, with minimal environmental stimulation and minimal opportunity for social interaction,” (trauma of psychological torture 113) solitary confinement strives to eliminate the stimulus of senses such as sight, touch, and hearing, with the elimination of stimulus and social interaction causing psychological damage to its subject. It has a long history of use in the United States. Its first documented use was at Walnut...
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...When it comes to the prison system, the majority of Americans only know what they've seen in the movies and on TV. They believe that in prisons only the most dangerous and violent offenders end up locked behind bars for decades. For the most part whatever happens to these individuals in prison is off no concern to them. It’s a society of out of sight, out of mind. What people don't realize is that in reality it is a smaller percentage of inmates that are incarcerated that are violent and dangerous. Twenty-five percent are non-violent illegal immigrants, fifty-five percent are non-violent drug offenders, and about five percent are mental patients, and other types of non-violent crime. (Webb 164) It’s those non-violent inmates are the ones that have rehabilitative opportunities and a chance to re-enter society with a fresh start. But when you lump them all together society see’s them all the same, as violent criminals. So there’s no big push to try to get the system to change. We need prison reform to change these views. It’s necessary so that the nonviolent inmates can receive lighter sentences and also be separated from violent inmates so they can be reformed. A majority of these non-violent criminals end up serving equal or longer sentences than those in prison for violent crimes such as rape. That is because the sentencing guidelines, used by the criminal justice system, are very draconic when it comes to drug convictions. It was made this way in hopes of reducing the illegal...
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...A Critical Perspective on Prison Privatization April 6, 2015 A Critical Perspective on Prison Privatization Topic Statement: “Is the privatization of prisons for profit an ethical practice?” The topic of a country privatizing areas of industry is far from a novel idea, especially since the rise of capitalism. With the United States being widely considered the father of capitalism, it is almost expected to see the privatization of a key component of its judicial system, prison, becoming more and more common. Although the underlying function of a prison as a means of social reform has remained constant since its inception in 1750 BCE with the Babylonian Empire, externalities are beginning to influence a change in the governing bodies of penitentiaries (Roberts, 2006). With governments and taxpayers seeing the opportunities for cost savings, countries throughout the world are beginning to employ private operating models for their penitentiaries, with the U.S. being the primary driver of this change (Trivedi, 2014). Framework of the Issue A change in the operating sovereign of a prison, from federal to private, is controversial enough that the effects of this privatization have garnered the title of the Prison-Industrial Complex. The complex is a scholarly attempt to explain the intertwining of the profit-driven agendas of private prison companies and the correlated expansion of the US inmate population. Although cost savings for the government...
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...labeled ‘mad not bad’ according to Lee Bryant, author of ‘Feminism and Crime’. Lee Bryant argues, “The perception that women may be ‘mad’ because they ‘dared to go against their natural biological givens such as ‘passivity’ and a ‘weakness of compliance’ ‘appears to originate from the view that women who conform as pure, obedient daughters, wives and mothers benefit society and men”. (Bryant, 2000) Lombroso’s theory looks at that characteristics of the offender and determines that the female offender often is masculine and her skull is more like a man’s size rather than normal women’s skull size. This essay looks at three key features that distinguish the facts that women are more law-aiding then men by looking at the key characteristic of female offenders, specifically from the earliest theorist of female criminality Cesare Lombroso, statistics in regards to the overall population of...
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...concept of the prison has existed for more than two thousand years. It probably goes back as far in time as practice of cannibalism, where victims had to wait for their turn in contributing to the chief course in the menu of their captors. Examples of prisons can even be found in the Old Testament when Joseph was incarcerated in Egypt. It was not until the 19th century that a clear shift occurred from corporal punishment to imprisonment. As societies prospered and the industrial revolution began, the formal prison system, as we know it today, developed. Throughout most of the world, the correctional system is administered by the state, and it is considered a key function that the government must fulfill: protect its citizens by guaranteeing the state of law while enforcing the judicial system. More than two decades ago, the United Sates and Great Britain began experimenting with privatization of their prison systems, outsourcing the management to private enterprises. Like most privatization issues, this topic has many supporters from the liberal economic philosophy, as well as many detractors that argue against profit seeking enterprises. The discussion promotes themes such as the ethical dilemma of the private sector “administering punishment”, selecting the correct metrics used to evaluate the performance of private sector versus public sector, disputes of what are “just and fair” services that the inmates are entitled to, among others. In the following essay we aim to bring...
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...Introduction There are over 90,000 women in prison in the U.S. today. (WEAP) Between 1980 and 1993, the growth rate for the female prison population increased approximately 313%, compared to 182% for men in the same period. At the end of 1993 women accounted for 5.8% of the total prison population and 9.3% of the jail population nationwide. (NWLC) Although the proportion of prisoners who are women is relatively small, women make up the fastest growing subset of the entire prison population. For this reason, and because male supremacy and sexist justice are so intimately related to this problem, a separate consideration of women in prison is needed. Male privilege and domination, and the protection of that privilege have long been and continue to be central to the criminal prosecution system. In this essay I will consider three main subjects in this regard: Social and economical causes of female violence, what’s the reaction of society and justice system to it, how prison works in this society and what’s its effect on female prisoners? Social and Economical Causes of Female Violence First I will consider social and economical causes of female violence. Who are the women in prison? The profile that emerges in study after study is that of young, single mother with few job skills, a high school dropout whom lives below the poverty level are the most typical women in prison. Seventy-five percent are between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, are mothers of dependent children...
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...Essay No. 1 February 9, 2003 Response to “FBI's Tracking of Muslims Raising Alarm with Some” Have Muslims been treated unfairly in this country? In an essay “FBI’s Tracking of Muslims Raising Alarm with Some,” posted on the Internet on October 6, 2002, Philip Shenon and David Johnston write about how FBI set a surveillance campaign to track young Muslim men they think have terrorist cells inside United States to assist Al-Qaeda. They monitor the suspects’ telephone calls, e-mail messages, Internet use, and their credit card charges. They also dare to monitor the suspects’ gathering places, including mosques. The surveillance program has helped the FBI to arrest dozen of young Muslims in western New York, in Detroit, in Seattle, and in Portland, Oregon since late summer. Philip Shenon and David Johnston, the authors of the article, say that the surveillance campaign is centered in the Detroit, Michigan area because the largest population of people of Arab descent lives there. In the article, the authors report that some Arab-Americans and Muslim groups are not happy with what is going on inside their communities. They have complained about the FBI’s unfair accusation that these young men have some connection with Al-Qaeda. In my opinion, the authors of the article have done a valuable thing to make people aware of these problems. I think that the FBI is not doing a great job. I don’t think it came with a right idea to solve this problem. The FBI’s effort to go after...
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...As young black men in the United States, we are, and should be considered an endangered species. We have three strikes against us, young, black and male and that only encompasses just being born. The numbers are quite alarming when you consider that in 2012, black males ages 15 to 19 were nearly four times more likely to commit suicide, six times more likely to be victims of homicide, and eight times more likely to be involved in a firearm-related death than were females of the same age. When it comes to incarceration, African Americans constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population and are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of their white counterparts. In a black man’s lifetime, one in six black men has been incarcerated at one point in time. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. And when it comes to our youth, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons The numbers are alarmingly disproportionate, and I don’t feel like it is getting better. Although there are many contributing factors that make up these numbers, it is believed that inner city crime prompted by social and economic isolation weighs heavily on the results. When you consider the crime and drug arrest rates, African Americans represent...
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