Boot Camp

1402 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Incarceration rehabilitation

Boot Camp

With the ever rising prison population in this country, something has to be done rehabilitate criminals rather than just lock them up. Many feel that the “new” prisons, boot camps are the answer (Champion 1990). I will give a brief overview of boot camp institutions, specifically, about the operation and structure of these, the cost involved with both juvenile and adult facilities, and how effective they really are with regard to recidivism.

Boot camps or shock incarceration programs, as they are also called, vary greatly around the country. At the start of 1997, 54 adult boot camp facilities operated in 34 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, with a total of 7,250 inmates. Most include physical training, hard labor, military drills and ceremonies, and summary punishment (immediate punishments like pushups for disciplinary infractions). Many feel that the rigid discipline of a boot camp promotes positive behavior (Mackenzie and Hebert).

Boot camp programs have the potential to reduce institutional crowding and costs, provided they are large enough. This assumes they target offenders who would otherwise have served a longer sentence in another institution, and keep enough participants from returning to correctional facilities. Some boot camps offer rehabilitative programs such as drug and alcohol treatment, life skills training, vocational education, therapy, and general education classes. Some also provide intensive community supervision after release. For example, New York’s "shock incarceration" takes a therapeutic approach with six months of intensive incarceration in a military style boot camp that also focuses on treatment and developing life skills. Six months of intensive community supervision...

... middle of paper ...

...Justice Research Report presented October 1994.

Jacobs, Nancy, Jacquelyn Quiram, and Mark Siegel. Crime: A Serious American Problem. Wylie, TX: Information Plus, 1996.

Mackenzie and Souryal, "Multisite Study of Boot Camps," Correctional Boot Camps: A Tough Intermediate Sanction, February 1996

MacKenzie, Doris and Eugene Hubert. Correctional Boot Camps: A Tough Intermediate Sanction. National Institute of Justice Research Report presented February 1996.

NCJA. "Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency." National Criminal Justice Association. http://sso.org/ncja/juvenile.htm (Nov. 14, 1997).

Reid, Sue. Crime and Criminology. 8th ed. Chicago: Brown and Benchmark Pub, 1997.

New York DOCS Division of Parole, The Tenth Annual Shock Legislative Report, 1998

Witkin, Gordan. Colorado has a New Brand of Tough Love. U.S. News and World Report, March 1996.

Show More
Related

  • Andrea Kennesy Yates

    900 Words  | 2 Pages

    Schmalleger, Frank. Criminology: A Brief Introduction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc., Publishing as Prentice Hall., 2011.

    Read More

  • The Rise of America’s Prison Empire

    1930 Words  | 4 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Alternative to Incarceration Intermediate Sanctions

    1275 Words  | 3 Pages

    Introduction Alternatives to incarceration have been explored in recent years due to the overcrowding in the correctional system. Intermediate sanctions are one of those alternatives. Intermediate sanctions have long been used in the United States due to the benefits and options that it offers from saving money to reducing overcrowding, but it does, however, have its unfortunate flaws. There are many programs within intermediate sanctions that work, and some that fall behind. Intermediate sanctions are an alternative to the costly prison system, but to what end?

    Read More

  • Juvenile Offenders Recidivism and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

    2841 Words  | 6 Pages

    Drago, F., Galbiati, R. & Vertova, P. (2011). Prison conditions and recidivism. American law and economics review, 13 (1), pp. 103--130.

    Read More

  • Poverty and Crime in America

    3673 Words  | 8 Pages

    Peterson, R, Krivo, L, & Hagan, J. (2006). The many colors of crime. NY: New York University Press.

    Read More

  • Racial Inequalities in the Justice System

    1738 Words  | 4 Pages

    New Century Foundation. (2005). The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America. Retrieved from http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf

    Read More

  • The Negative Effects Of Solitary Prisonation In Prisons

    1427 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although, some prisons do have some rehabilitation programs for the inmates that need it, the therapy sometimes does not help. More than half of prisoners reoffend within at least three years of leaving prisons. Those who reoffend tend to have more severe and more aggressive offenses than previously. A man by the name of Brandy Lee has shown that by having a very strict program in prisons with violent offenders in San Francisco jails reduced the amount of violence in jails. The program also helped to reduce the rate of violent re-offences after leaving the jail by over 50

    Read More

  • Juveniles Should Be Tried as Adults

    2004 Words  | 5 Pages

    Wilson, James and Herrnstein, Richard. "Crime & Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime" New York: Free Press, 1998.

    Read More

  • Theory of the Broken Window

    1610 Words  | 4 Pages

    Muncie, J., and Mclaughin, E. (1996) The Problem of Crime. 2nd ed. London: Sage Publication Ltd.

    Read More

  • Juvenile Recidivism

    3195 Words  | 7 Pages

    Introduction: Recidivism or, habitual relapses into crime, has time and time again proven to be an issue among delinquents, which thereby increases the overall juvenile prison population. This issue has become more prevalent than what we realize. Unless a unit for measuring a juvenile’s risk of recidivism is enacted and used to determine a system to promote effective prevention, than the juvenile prison population will continue to increase. Our court system should not only focus on punishing the said juvenile but also enforce a program or policy that will allow for prevention of recidivism. So the question remains, how can recidivism in the juvenile prison population be prevented so that it is no longer the central cause for increased juvenile delinquency? Simply put, we must create a means of measuring juvenile’s level of risk and in turn, form an effective rehabilitation program that will decrease their risk level for future recidivism.

    Read More

  • Correctional Theory

    2514 Words  | 6 Pages

    Rehabilitation is firmly entrenched in the history of corrections in the United States. Penitentiaries, for example were formed in 1820 with the belief that offenders could be morally reformed (Cullen, & Jonson, 2012, pp. 27-28). In 1870). The National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline documented the merits of rehabilitation (Wines, 1871, p. 457). However, by the end of the 1960s, the United States had experienced several years of discontent within its prison systems which resulted in a national call for prison reform and the development of a disillusionment with rehabilitation (Martinson, 1974, p. 22). In 1966, Robert Martinson was hired to evaluate the effectiveness of rehabilitation, the result of which was his infamous “What Works?” paper, in which he posits that empirical evidence does not support rehabilitation (p. 23). By the mid-1970s, correctional policy shifted from one emphasizing rehabilitation to one emphasizing just desserts/retribution, deterrence and incapacitation (Cullen, & Jonson, 2012, p. 22). The result of these “get-tough” policies, which sought to control crime through strict laws and lengthy sentences, was unprecedented growth in our custodial population, which we can no longer support, either financially or spatially (p. 1).

    Read More

  • America’s Prisons and Their Effects On Society

    1532 Words  | 4 Pages

    Shaw, V. N. (1998). Productive labor: A secondary goal but primary activity. Prison Journal, (78), 186.

    Read More

  • Theatre In Prison Essay

    3107 Words  | 7 Pages

    Prison within the society in America has sharply veered towards the idea of mass incarceration. The Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) is a criminal research group that reports on the quantity of people in the United States that are in the prison system, and in 2014 “PPI reckons the United States has roughly 2.4m people locked up, with most of those (1.36m) in state prisons” (J.F. 1). This number is cause for concern when compared to a study of recidivism released among thirty states in 2005 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) According to BJS, “About two-thirds (67.8%) of released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within 3 years, and three quarters (76.6%) were arrested within 5 years” (BJS 1). The concern is that rehabilitation programs in the United States are not effectively working to introduce an inmate into the general population. The reason inmates are typically repeat offenders is because the United States focuses more on punishment than rehabilitation. While rehabilitation methods do exist, they are not the focus within American prison systems, the ones that do exist are more geared toward manual labor and teaching trades. While this an effective means to teach a skill, this style of rehabilitation fails to address the ideas of empathy, accountability, and effective social interaction. The main focus of prisons in the United States is to maintain order in an inherently hostile environment so that inmates may ‘serve their time.’ The focus should be placed on educating inmates instead of strictly punishing those who are incarcerated.

    Read More

  • Prison Research Proposal

    2603 Words  | 6 Pages

    In final analysis, this research project looks to provide a new way of understanding the current prison situation and its various manifestations. A comprehensive report of how things might be for those closely involved in the punishment and rehabilitation process might enable policy-makers and the public alike to change their ideas and help them perceive what it might mean to be in the position of officers or prisoners. The higher objective of this project will be to bring, through new knowledge, the necessary reforms that could leave both the taxpayer and those in the prison system more satisfied.

    Read More

  • Issues in Corrections

    851 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

More about Boot Camp

Open Document