If you walked into a room with 84 adults, chances are two of them have been in prison. One out of 42 adults in the United States has been incarcerated. 2.3 million people serving time behind bars outnumber the residents of the fourth largest U.S. city. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many if its own citizens.” The U.S. has locked up more people than any other country (Paleaz, 2013). Are prisons in the U.S. doing what they were intended to do? Out of the millions of lawbreakers confined, how many are getting reformed, learning new trades, completing degrees or refining criminal behaviors? This would seem like a legitimate question, but the real question is, “Who is benefitting more from life in the pokey: are convicts getting the appropriate level of therapy, are state and federal organizations benefitting from the services of privatized correctional institutions or are correctional institutions creating an atmosphere that benefits in enslaving American?
Life in Prison
Were prisons intended to reform felons, to discipline them, to remove them from society or to pad pockets with cheap labor? This question has been kicked around since the earliest modern prisons of the 1820’s. Penologists agree that prisoners should be able to learn a trade and/ or continue their education.
Prison is a complex punishment. Imprisonment affects material possessions because of a lack of income while incarcerated. Inmates lose their jobs and end up withdrawing entire life savings unless they were wealthy. The impacts to the life time earning capacity takes a major hit affecting retirement plans. Convicts and former convicted felons often never reach retirement, but end up working b...
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Throughout his novel, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, author and professor Robert Perkinson outlines the three current dominant purposes of prison. The first, punishment, is the act of disciplining offenders in an effort to prevent them from recommitting a particular crime. Harsh punishment encourages prisoners to behave because many will not want to face the consequences of further incarceration. While the purpose of punishment is often denounced, many do agree that prison should continue to be used as a means of protecting law-abiding citizens from violent offenders. The isolation of inmates, prison’s second purpose, exists to protect the public. Rehabilitation is currently the third purpose of prison. Rehabilitation is considered successful when a prisoner does n...
Should prisons in the United States be for profit? How do for profit prisons benefit the United States? Would inmates rather be in private or public correctional centers? What kind of affects does this have on taxpayers? What are the pros and cons of profit prisons? These are many of the questions that are brought up when discussing for profit prison systems. There are different perspectives that can be taken when it comes to talking about for profit prisons. This paper will discuss some of the ways that the United States has started to become for profit and why it has happened. Finally, this paper will give an opinion of whether or not for profit prisons should be dominant over public facilities.
Shapiro, David. Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration. Rep. New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2011. Print.
The idea of prison work programs in America is not a new idea. In 1682, Pennsylvania attempted to utilize hard labor in state prisons but the practice did not come into fruition until 1773. Under the direction of the American Correctional Association, along with watchdog groups, today's prisons operate under high standards. "No single phase of life within prison walls is more important to the public or to the inmate than efficient industrial operations and the intelligent utilization of the labor of prisoners," stated a Federal Bureau of Prisons report in 1949. “This statement is still true today, nearly 50 years later”...
Every civilization in history has had rules, and citizens who break them. To this day governments struggle to figure out the best way to deal with their criminals in ways that help both society and those that commit the crimes. Imprisonment has historically been the popular solution. However, there are many instances in which people are sent to prison that would be better served for community service, rehab, or some other form of punishment. Prison affects more than just the prisoner; the families, friends, employers, and communities of the incarcerated also pay a price. Prison as a punishment has its pros and cons; although it may be necessary for some, it can be harmful for those who would be better suited for alternative means of punishment.
There are many citizen concerns, including the premise that private prison companies lobby governments to increase punishments and penalties to fill their facilities. Mr. Geoffrey Segal writes “It is unlikely that private prison firms are going to sway policy in favor of greater incarceration when such polices are obviously already very popular with the general population” in his online article published also on The Reason on November of 2002, Mr. Segal is the director of privatization and government reform at Reason Foundation. witha B.A in political science from Arizona State University, and a Master of Public Policy from Pepperdine University. The prison system as an industry, according to Randy Gragg privately owned prisons are starting to flourish again, Mr. Gragg is the editor-in-chief of Portland monthly, he wrote the article “A High-Security, Low-Risk Investment: Private Prisons Make Crime Pay” for Harper’s magazine on August 1996 Mr. Gragg is a Harvard University graduate of the school of design, and the national art journalism fellow at Columbia University. The
Incarceration has been the center of the United States justice system ever since the opening of the nation’s first prison. In order to understand how the aspects of the first corrections institutions correlate to later correctional practices seen today. Whether it was temporary or permanent, there has always been some form of detainment for offenders, and they were always held against their will. Imprisonment of offenders in earlier times was done primarily to hold the accused until the authorities determined the offender’s actual punishment. Jails and prisons create a vicious and expensive cycle of crime that usually just end up overcrowding correctional facilities.
When the average person thinks of a prison, what is often the thought that comes to mind? Perhaps an environment of reform is envisioned, or maybe a place for punishment. Maybe someone sees them as modern leper colonies, where countries send their undesirables. It could be that prisons are all of these things, or they could be none. With these ambiguities in the general definition of a prison it is easy to say that the everyday person could have no real critical perspective on what they truly are. That being said, if the average person were presented with Angela Davis’s perspective, and the perspective of many scholars, they may be shocked to learn what prisons truly are. This perspective presents prisons as a profitable industrial complex very similar to the military industrial complex. Like the military industrial complex, in the “prison industrial complex,” investors make large amounts of money off the backs of imprisoned inmates. It is interesting to note how similar these two systems are, with closer analysis; it seems to me as though one may have developed from the other. On another note, the prison industrial complex also appears to have a correlation with the globalization of labor; which makes it possible to assume that one contributed to the development of the other here as well. However, where the prison industrial complex’s roots lie is not as big an issue as the simple question of the morality of the practice. A person can know the history of the issue all they want but the important matter is addressing it.
Harris, H. (2017, March). The Prison Dilemma: Ending America's Incarceration Epidemic. Foreign Affairs, pp. 118-129.
The past two decades have engendered a very serious and historic shift in the utilization of confinement within the United States. In 1980, there were less than five hundred thousand people confined in the nation’s prisons and jails. Today we have approximately two million and the numbers are still elevating. We are spending over thirty five billion annually on corrections while many other regime accommodations for education, health
Private prisons in the United States, came about in the early 1980s when the war on drugs resulted in a mass wave of inmates, which led to the lack of the prison system’s ability to hold a vast number of inmates. When the cost became too much for the government to handle, private sectors sought this as an opportunity to expand their businesses through the prison industry. Since the opening of private prisons, the number of prisons and inmates it can hold has grown over the last two decades. With the rising number of inmates, profits have also substantially grown along with the number of investors. But what eventually became a problem amongst the private prison industry was their “cost-saving” strategies, which have been in constant debate ever
In the essay "Prison "Reform" in America," Roger T. Pray points out the much attention that has been devoted to research to help prevent crimes. Showing criminals the errors of their ways not by brutal punishment, but by locking them up in the attempt to reform them. Robert Pray, who is a prison psychologist, is currently a researcher with the Utah Dept. of Corrections. He has seen what has become of our prison system and easily shows us that there is really no such thing as "Prison Reform"
Shelden, R. G. (1999). The Prison Industrial Complex. Retrieved November 16, 2013, from www.populist.com: http://www.populist.com/99.11.prison.html
Although it may not seem like a major problem to most people in the United States, prisons are becoming overcrowded, expensive to maintain and have little to no effect on the moral discipline of inmates. The current prison system is extremely inefficient and the purpose of prisons has been completely forgotten. According to Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the primary purpose of prisons is to punish, to protect, and to rehabilitate. Not only is there an increase in prisoners, but there is a rise in the number of repeat offenders. Alternatives such as counseling, drug rehabilitation, education, job training and victim restitution must be better enforced and organized. People do not understand the severity of the problem mainly because
Prison was designed to house and isolate criminals away from the society in order for our society and the people within it to function without the fears of the outlaws. The purpose of prison is to deter and prevent people from committing a crime using the ideas of incarceration by taking away freedom and liberty from those individuals committed of crimes. Prisons in America are run either by the federal, states or even private contractors. There are many challenges and issues that our correctional system is facing today due to the nature of prisons being the place to house various types of criminals. In this paper, I will address and identify three major issues that I believe our correctional system is facing today using my own ideas along with the researches from three reputable outside academic sources.