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Mental illness in prisons essay
Mental health in prisons essay (scientific lens)
Mental health in prisons essay (scientific lens)
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Woop woop! Is the common sound heard in Beecher Terrace (housing apartments). There are 2.3 million people locked up in the United States. Kentucky spends about fifteen billion dollars per year incarcerating individuals from Beecher Terrace. Since the 1970’s the number of people locked up in the United States has grown from 300,000 to 2.3 million. Kentucky has been the center of this prison expansion. Charles McDuffie, Christel, Demetria, and Keith Huff all have something in common. Each of these individuals are repeat offenders, grew up or lived in Beech Terrace, and have some type of mental issue.
Charles McDuffie is serving a five-year sentence for burglary. He feels as if he has to turn to drugs for help. McDuffie’s drinking and drug addiction began
She leaves every morning, but never ends up at school. Due to Christel’s absences, her mother has to get a court order called a Beyond Control Warrant so she will not be prosecuted for Christel’s actions. Christel gained an additional charge for resisting arrest after a classroom fight. At fifteen years old, she will have at least six charges against her. Three months before her hearing, Christel overdosed on her mother’s pills. Before her overdose, she wrote a note to God demanding his help to guide her in the right way because she feels that her life is unimportant and useless.
In conclusion, it is known that the system operates from cradle to the grave. Each of these individuals all have the same mindset of “if nobody cares why should I?” Beecher Terrace is a high crime-rate neighborhood, where all the individuals either lived or grew up in. Thus, each person in this documentary can name at least five people that have been arrested, mainly immediate family members. They all have three main things in common which are they lived in Beecher Terrace, they have more than six charges, and they have some type of mental issue that needs to be resolved to better
CNN presents the documentary, Homicide in Hollenbeck, spotlighting gang activity in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollenbeck. This documentary explores the subculture of gangs existing within Hollenbeck from a several perspectives. The people documented include a mother who lost both of her sons to gang violence, a priest that has tried to help rehabilitate gang members, a police officer that has worked in Hollenbeck for five years in the gang unit, and a current gang member. For a conclusion, Homicide in Hollenbeck focuses on a juvenile exposed to gang life on the cusp of decided where they want their life to lead; gangs or freedom. Problems attributed to the high rate of gang activity and number of gangs in Hollenbeck are the high poverty rate, low employment rate, and broken families that make up the majority of Hollenbeck. The crime most discussed, as per the title of the documentary, is homicide The number of gang related homicides has risen even though the criminal behavior of gangs has ultimately decreased in the neighborhood. In order to fight the overwhelming gang presence, the police believe in increasing the amount of gun power on the streets and number of jailed gang members. The priest who runs Homeboy Industries stated that he feels most gang members are just young men who can’t get out of the gang life. With more funds and opportunities, he thinks the problem could be decreased. In the end, the documentary mentions that the FBI has formed a gang center where local law enforcement agencies can share information to gain more knowledge and to better fight the presence of gangs.
This movie was very sad but depicted the many social problems of struggling black communities in the early 1990’s. We learned in Adler, Mueller, & Laufer how criminal behavior as a result of frustrations suffered by lower-class individuals deprived of legitimate means to reach their goals are
Dr. Carl Hart had a very rocky childhood and through his own determination to not repeat the past has gotten to where he is now in life. He comes from a broken family plagued by domestic violence, divorce, and a lack of support while he was growing up. Dr. Hart’s views on; social support, addiction and the physiological effects on the brain, factors to take into account when assessing drug abusers, drug policies influencing discrimination, and decriminalizing drug use are well articulated through his book High Life; in which enabled the audience to have raw reactions to his personal views.
Sixth grade Jodee enrolled at a private academy and the first few months were without incident. Jodee reveled in having friends and tried to do everything right to stay in their good standing. The trouble started when she called her mother to leave a party early. Jodee begged her mother not tell what was going on with the twelve year olds—but they were all caught in the act. Monday morning at school she found her favorite suede shoes floating in a toilet bowl of urine with a note attached—“Bitch, this is just the beginning.” She was cruelly treated, spit at, beaten, and shunned on a daily basis. Her parents were sympathetic to her dilemma and finally forced her to see a psychiatrist. She was placed on medication that made her very sleepy. The psychiatrist said that “kids will be kids and that possibly she was looking for attention from her parents.
Throughout “Chasing the Scream” many intriguing stories are told from individuals involved in the drug war, those on the outside of the drug war, and stories about those who got abused by the drug war. Addiction has many social causes that address drug use and the different effects that it has on different people. In our previous history we would see a tremendous amount of individuals able to work and live satisfying lives after consuming a drug. After the Harrison Act, drugs were abolished all at once, but it lead to human desperation so instead of improving our society, we are often the reason to the problem. We constantly look at addicts as the bad guys when other individuals are often the reasons and influences to someone’s decision in
The CNN Documentary “Homicide in Hollenbeck” described several criminal issues that have affected the Hollenbeck community. The documentary focused on the life of a gang member and recruitment of juveniles within the community. Criminological issues discussed in the documentary includes gang and gun violence, drug sales, homicide and vandalism. Interviews were conducted of personal experiences and opinions on neighborhood issues with members of a notorious gang known as White-Fence gang, police officers and family members who lost their loved ones in the hands of gang violence.
Andrea, her roommate, is seeking treatment from addiction to heroin and self-harm. Gwen refuses to having anything to do with the treatment center and group therapy. She believes she doesn’t have a drinking problem at all and therapy is silly. While still denying she has a problem, her boyfriend Jasper slips her a bottle of pills while visiting her. Gwen and Jasper leave the campus and have a night of partying. Gwen arrives back in her room the next morning clearly intoxicated. Cornell, the director of the rehab facility, confronts Gwen and informs her that she violated the rules of the facility. Gwen is told she is being kicked out of the program and is being sent to jail. She becomes outraged and denies that she has a problem and can quit whenever she chooses. Leaving the director’s office, she goes to her bedroom and decides to take the pills that Jasper slipped her. She ends up spitting out the pills and throwing the rest of the bottle out of the window.
There are too many people incarcerated in the United States of America. The U.S. imprisons 724 people per 100,000. In absolute numbers United States has more of its citizens behind bars then do China or Russia combined. (Gallagher 2008). There are about thousand U.S. citizens that become incarcerated in the prison system in any given week.
...liams (in person) First hand account of drug trafficking, use, abuse, effects, and treatment in a Washington State male correctional facility.
Overcrowding in our state and federal jails today has become a big issue. Back in the 20th century, prison rates in the U.S were fairly low. During the years later due to economic and political factors, that rate began to rise. According to the Bureau of justice statistics, the amount of people in prison went from 139 per 100,000 inmates to 502 per 100,000 inmates from 1980 to 2009. That is nearly 261%. Over 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated and 7.2 million are either incarcerated or under parole. According to these statistics, the U.S has 25% of the world’s prisoners. (Rick Wilson pg.1) Our prison systems simply have too many people. To try and help fix this problem, there needs to be shorter sentences for smaller crimes. Based on the many people in jail at the moment, funding for prison has dropped tremendously.
Drug violators are a major cause of extreme overcrowding in US prisons. In 1992, 59,000 inmates were added to make a record setting 833,600 inmates nationwide (Rosenthal 1996). A high percentage of these prisoners were serving time because of drug related incid...
I am suddenly awakened in the middle if the night by my phone that is ringing with a desperate tone, I answer to hear the dreaded words, “I 'm in the back of a cop car and need you to come get me.” This is just part of what it’s like to live in the house of a substance abuser. In this situation it’s hard to remember that although many
Some people are likely to generalize about the causes of drug related crimes and say that they are simply related to people who do not do any good for our society. However, in certain instances drugs can be used as a source of income for people and they commit crimes in order to facilitate that goal (Nurco, 1998). These people have no way out of their drug lives and therefore may not necessarily choose this life style but are brought up into it.
Center, N. D. (2004, April). Drug Abuse and Mental Illness. Retrieved Febrauary 9, 2011, from Justice.gov: http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs7/7343/7343p.pdf
The link between drug use and crime is not a new one. For more than twenty years, both the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Justice have funded many studies to try to better understand the connection. One such study was done in Baltimore on heroin users. This study found high rates of criminality among users during periods of active drug use, and much lower rates during periods of nonuse (Ball et al. 1983, pp.119-142). A large number of people who abuse drugs come into contact with the criminal justice system when they are sent to jail or to other correctional facilities. The criminal justice system is flooded with substance abusers. The need for expanding drug abuse treatment for this group of people was recognized in the Crime Act of 1994, which for the first time provided substantial resources for federal and state jurisdictions. In this paper, I will argue that using therapeutic communities in prisons will reduce the recidivism rates among people who have been released from prison. I am going to use the general theory of crime, which is based on self-control, to help rationalize using federal tax dollars to fund these therapeutic communities in prisons. I feel that if we teach these prisoners some self-control and alternative lifestyles that we can keep them from reentering the prisons once they get out. I am also going to describe some of today’s programs that have proven to be very effective. Gottfredson and Hirschi developed the general theory of crime.