...Penitentiary Ideal and Models of American Prisons Name Institution * The penitentiary was a stepping stone in the evolution of the prison. The penitentiary, however, was the first attempt to use confinement as the punishment itself. In England, one of the first models for the modern prison was intended to provide a place of penance for prostitutes. No matter where most of us live in the world the modern day penitentiary has some philosophy and design history thanks to such British thinkers (philosophers) as John Stuart Mill (Utilitarianism) and those who took some of his writings a step or two further: Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Robert Malthus. This radical experiment was based on principles of separation from the moral contagion of their former lives, religious contemplation, and rigid structure. * * The state can respond to crime in a number of ways; together, the responses of the criminal justice system constitute one set of possible actions. The American Prison Association changed its name to American Correctional Association. This name change reflected the growing role of probation, parole, and other non-institutional methods of supervising and helping criminals. But symbolically it gave prisons a new mission: rehabilitation. Prisons offered an unprecedented number of programs designed to change the behavior of men and women in prison-to turn their law-breaking behavior into law-abiding citizens...
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...An Investigation of Gang types and Prison Misconduct” - Ruddel, R., Gottschall, S. (May 5, 2011) To date, there has been very little scholar investigation towards the different types of gangs in Canadian penitentiaries, and their unique contributions to prison misconduct. Gangs in the correctional system are one the biggest problems facing correctional staff and administrators. Does every gang pose the same threat towards the Canadian correctional system? This study is an attempt at comparing the various gang members admitted into the correctional system between January 1, 2006 and August 31, 2009. It examines the offence-related characteristics of 1,636 gang members compared to 1,649 non-gang member counterparts. The 5 distinct types of gangs studied are: Aboriginal, Asian, street, outlaw motorcycle (OMG), and traditional organized crime (TOC). This study revealed that there are, in fact, distinct characteristics to each gangs conduct in the correctional system: Aboriginals have highest misconduct, highest rates of previous incarceration; street gangs were similar in violence but had less previous prison sentences; OMG had lower involvement in violent offences, but had longest sentences. Aboriginal gangs being the most violent, then Asian and street, followed by OMG gangs and TOC as the least. The closer examinations of these security threat groups (STG) suggest that the correctional system should imply different strategies to counter prison misconduct with gangs. Instead of...
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...programs, and service for managing criminal offenders. 2. What is the mission of corrections? To protect society accomplished through a combination of surveillance and control of offenders, rehabilitative services, and incapacitation during the services of a prison sentence. 3. Describe the operation of the Walnut Street Jail as the first American prison. Walnut Street Jail was one of hard labor, strict discipline, religious study, and solitary and silent confinement. 4. Describe the differences in the Pennsylvania and the Auburn systems. The Pennsylvania System known as the separate and silent enforces inmates not to see or talk with each other meaning less production from inmates, which was very expensive to operate. More staff was needed. Impossible to keep inmates from talking. Only 2 states decided to keep this system (New Jersey & Rhode Island.) Auburn system also knows for silent but was able to congregate, meaning criminals were allowed to work together but was not able to interact before or after working. During the first half of the ninetieth century, most American prisons practiced the Auburn System. 5. Explain how the Irish penal system contributed to the development of the reformatory Era of prison operations in the US....
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...The number of offenders reentering society from prison and jail is steadily increasing yearly. States are diligently working to identify methods to help offenders successfully reintegrate into society. Some initiatives available in Harris County, TX include prison education programs, life and job skills training and counseling services. This paper focuses on the educational opportunities available for offenders in Harris County, TX. The education opportunities are structured to assist offenders with incarceration related factors and attempts to help offenders with successful reintegration with family, the community and society as a whole. I will discuss several educational initiatives available to offenders and how these initiatives correlate to our text. Harris County, TX . On March 12, 2004 the CEA unanimously voted to grant accreditation to Harris County Sheriff’s Office Inmate Education Program. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office became the first county jail in the U.S. to receive the Correctional Education Association (CEA) accreditation for its Inmate Education Program (Albers, 2006:15). This recognition sets Harris County Sheriff’s Office to a high standard to be compared with. The educational facility is located on Crites Street in Harris County which opened in 2003. The Inmate Education Program began in 1973 as a way to offer qualified offenders an opportunity to obtain an education to prepare for life after prison or jail. Since its inception, the program created...
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...period; where inmates do religious service and work to correct themselves, the correctional system has evolve in major ways since then. The differences of the Pennsylvania system and the Auburn system are discussed. One of these systems allows inmate interaction, while the other does not. Also, how the court systems expedite or increase labor force to deal with increase workload is elaborated. History of Corrections Corrections The United State court system is unique to other countries because of the way they deal with criminals. Non-violent criminals are given the opportunity to correct themselves and ingrate back into society; they are not just imprisoned or put to death like other countries such as China. Correction is defined as “the range of community and institutional sanctions, treatment programs, and services for managing criminal offenders.” (Seiter 2011) The United States prison/jail have been dealing with overpopulation issues for quite sometimes, it has come to the point where it is only possible to incarcerate violent offenders for a long period of time because of resource issues. The system had to develop alternative sentence or punishment for nonviolent offenders. The system developed correction programs to ensure that the offenders are punished, but are also rehabilitated to be functional members of society again. The process is known is reintegration, defined as “a belief that after offenders complete their treatment inprison they...
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...been constantly changing since the 1930s. From rehabilitation, (1930s to 1950s), to reintegration, (1950s to 1970s), to punitive, (1970s to 1980s), ways of sentencing criminal offenders have transformed immensely. Why is this a big topic of interest? Why should the people care about where the correctional system is headed? Corrections are a major part of the American culture and research over the past should be used to see what can be done to help corrections for the better. This paper will discuss the reasons why corrections have moved from a rehabilitation model to the punitive model and how that has affected the sentencing practices. Then it will discuss the possibilities for the next era of corrections and why...
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...The importance of any correctional facility’s physical plant to the fulfillment of particular objectives has been long recognized. Historically, correctional facilities have been the architectural expression of competing philosophies of incarceration of the time. In the 18th century, when incarceration was instituted as the primary form of punishment in western societies, the prison itself became the means of punishment. As the prevailing punishment method, early purpose-built correctional design reflected punitive patterns reproducing ideals of enforced solitude and intimidation. Prison reform movements at the end of the century and beginning of the 19th century were also followed by reform-oriented design concepts, with the “separate and silent systems” (Pennsylvania and Auburn models respectively), being two of the first architectural manifestations in which the design of the prison building and the availability of space became a factor impacting the reformative potential of the offenders through isolation and labor, therefore including separate cells and larger spatial configurations where prisoners could work together. Although today’s goals of incarceration have little in common with those of centuries ago, with few exceptions, the architecture of incarceration has remained largely standardized...
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...inadequate linkage between organisations and services People with complex needs require a comprehensive range of services, delivered across organisational boundaries, with clear assessment processes, access routes and pathways through services. Both overseas and Australian experience indicate that case management is ideally targeted to individuals who are likely to receive the most benefit i.e. those with complex needs requiring intense management from a range of different organisations, as this is where case management is deemed most cost effective. Therefore, the focus of many integrated care projects is on service coordination as a way of integrating care management and creating care pathways through the system. The move towards models of integrated care is an effort to manage the labyrinth of the healthcare system that has become increasingly complicated as additional services and funding streams have been introduced to encourage innovation, change traditional healthcare practices and address gaps in service provision. However, the delivery of services to people with complex needs is the responsibility of many different healthcare...
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...Criminal Justice System will be explored. The data discovered suggests that the legislation was enacted for political reasoning, without the consideration of underlying causes of criminal activity. Furthermore, rehabilitation treatments have shown to lower recidivism, and are used to stress the importance on investigating the root cause of criminal behaviour. Finally, the restorative justice model is adopted to promote the sense of moral wrong in the individual’s crime. A Retreat in the CJS 3 In recent years, the Canadian government has been working on implementing a stricter justice system. The omnibus crime bill C-10, was enacted in order to achieve this measure. The act consists of a concept in which includes harsher sentencing, mandatory minimums and a zero tolerance policy. This legislation attempts to put victims first, instead of defending the rights of offenders. What the government has failed to distinguish is that crime rates in Canada have been decreasing gradually over the past decade. In addition, the new legislation does not seem to address the rehabilitation and reintegration matters of offenders into society. In fact there is no evidence in which suggests that the bill was enacted according to any underlying causes of...
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...There are five goals of incarceration, they are: punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restitution. Seiter describes the goals as follows: Punishment is the infliction of pain or suffering. Deterrence is a goal focused on future actions (or the avoidance of certain actions) by both individuals and society. Incapacitation is a goal that reduces offenders’ ability of capacity to commit further crimes. Rehabilitation means to prepare them for a crime free and successful life. Restitution is making right by repaying society or victims for the wrongs done by offenders (Seiter, 2011, pg 17). “The expectations that society has for the criminal justice system is to punish and rehabilitate individuals who commit crimes. Punishment and rehabilitation are also two of the four acknowledged objectives of the criminal justice system, with deterrence and incapacitation being the others. In the United States, punishment has always been the primary goal to achieve when dealing with individuals who commit acts of crime. Many theorists throughout history have argued which is more effective, punishment or rehabilitation. The effectiveness of punishment and rehabilitation has been analyzed to see the effects on victims and offenders and also the social and fiscal impact on our society. The Classical School of Criminology has proposed that punishment is used to create deterrence and the Positive School of Criminology uses the practice of rehabilitation to reduce recidivism...
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...Rehabilitation Pap CAJ: Introduction to Corrections . Rehabilitation Paper The goal of rehabilitation came during the middle of the twentieth century when corrections adopted a medical model, in which crime was believed to be the result of an underlying pathology of offenders that could be diagnosed and treated (Seiter, 2011). Offenders were considered sick and in need of treatment to prepare them to return to the community as productive, law-abiding citizens. Correctional agencies implemented a variety of treatment programs to improve offenders and to provide them with the tools necessary to be successful members of society (Seiter, 2011). The need for rehabilitation of offenders was emphasized by the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, which noted a need for “substantial upgrading” of the correctional system and its reorientation “toward integration of offenders into community life” (Seiter, 2011). Throughout the years, many processes have been created to form the rehabilitation process of criminal justice. This process has reached out to many offenders and their families by allowing them to return to the community as changed individuals. Rehabilitation has many different process, but most, if not all have been proven successful in returning offenders to the community as changed individuals (Seiter, 2011). Rehabilitation is defined as a return to a previous form. In criminal justice, rehabilitation...
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...behavior modification was introduced in the Walnut Street Prison, the system of secondary reinforcement so widely used in today's prisons. Each prisoner was given fair pay for his/her labor. The prisoner was debited for the cost of maintenance, and an additional sum was deducted for the prisoner's share of tools. The prisoner was also required to pay the costs of the trial, as well as a fine to the State. If there was a balance against the prisoner at the time of expiration of sentence, the person was retained until it was liquidated.”(Takagi, n.d) Incarceration in the United States is one of the main forms of punishment for the commission of many offenses. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the highest prison population in the world. When researching the American Correctional System there is a lot of information to cover, such as the types of offenders in the system and the different levels of security. How do the United States correctional system compare to Canada’s correctional system? In the American correctional system there are varying levels of security ranging from minimum security to high security prisons. “Prisons are operated on the basis of care, custody, and control. Prisoners are classified by security level or type of crime as well as by custody level and privileges earned by good behavior, but prisons are only classified by security level. A maximum security prison tends to put the cellblocks near the center of the facility...
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...Mitigating Prison Violence Cynthia Evans CJ522: Comparative Correctional Systems June 17, 2014 Mitigating Prison Violence Violence in prison systems remains to be a persistent problem among enforcers and inmates alike. Not only does it compromise inmate safety and institutional security, it distorts the purpose of prison systems as penitentiary systems meant to discourage criminal behavior. Adding to this complication, the problem is present in nearly all prison systems worldwide, with some systems more prone to it than others. In America, homicide inside jails and state prisons has remained relatively low in recent years at 3 per 100,000 on average (Mumola, 2005). The same cannot be said for Brazilian prisons, however; in 2013 alone, around 60 inmates were killed in Brazilian prisons, and three others died through decapitation and heavy mutilation at the beginning of the year (Cawley, 2014). Violence in prison systems is by no means limited to physical violence or individual assaults. In the first place, “violence in prison” is a broad category, which involves a range of situations and actions from certain parties, with violence as their common factor. It may involve riots, mutinies, and individual assaults. It may also, in fact, be taken to mean any form of violence—usually physical and/or sexual—done by inmates to fellow inmates, or prison staff to inmates. For example, while physical violence is an all-time low in American prisons, sexual violence is on the rise there...
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...Walker cites the National Academy of Sciences stating that rehabilitation is “any planned intervention that reduces an offender’s further criminal activity (Walker 251).” Walker breaks down rehabilitation models into two groups, the new and the old groups. The new groups that Walker suggests may have some positive hope are reentry programs, and drug courts. The old groups include probation, parole, and other reintegration programs. Worrall has a similar definition of rehabilitation, stating that “rehabilitation consist of a planned intervention intended to change behavior (Worrall 40). He similarly assesses several of these programs and reaches similar conclusions as Walker. Drug courts are specialized courts that focus on substance abuse. Generally offenders are offered the chance at skipping prison or jail sentences if they successfully complete a substance abuse treatment program (Walker 275). Walker assesses drug courts, when they are well managed and designed carefully, as being promising as possibly lowering recidivism (Walker 277). Worrall reached similar conclusions, stating that while much of the research into the effectiveness of drug courts has suffered from design limitations, they have shown reductions in recidivism (Worrall 168). Reentry programs try and take a fresh look at sending prisoners back into society after revamped educational and counseling programs (Walker 363). Unfortunately there is not a lot of evidence that these programs reduce recidivism rates...
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...Walker cites the National Academy of Sciences stating that rehabilitation is “any planned intervention that reduces an offender’s further criminal activity (Walker 251).” Walker breaks down rehabilitation models into two groups, the new and the old groups. The new groups that Walker suggests may have some positive hope are reentry programs, and drug courts. The old groups include probation, parole, and other reintegration programs. Worrall has a similar definition of rehabilitation, stating that “rehabilitation consist of a planned intervention intended to change behavior (Worrall 40). He similarly assesses several of these programs and reaches similar conclusions as Walker. Drug courts are specialized courts that focus on substance abuse. Generally offenders are offered the chance at skipping prison or jail sentences if they successfully complete a substance abuse treatment program (Walker 275). Walker assesses drug courts, when they are well managed and designed carefully, as being promising as possibly lowering recidivism (Walker 277). Worrall reached similar conclusions, stating that while much of the research into the effectiveness of drug courts has suffered from design limitations, they have shown reductions in recidivism (Worrall 168). Reentry programs try and take a fresh look at sending prisoners back into society after revamped educational and counseling programs (Walker 363). Unfortunately there is not a lot of evidence that these programs reduce recidivism rates...
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