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The american prison system essay
The american prison system essay
Prison Effects in the Era of Mass Incarceration
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In Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing journalist Ted Conover, who has a background in anthropology, goes undercover as correctional officer in order to examine the US prison system. The central problem to this analysis is that is inherently subjective because the author is documenting his experience from the lens of the guard. In such a polarizing and negative power dynamic a singular perspective shows a severely inadequate representation of what occurs at the institution and the circumstances that allow it to perpetuate. This failure is evident in the author’s personal transformation from the beginning of the book to the end. His writing becomes desensitized and begins to see prisoners as increasingly evil. Although this type of first hand journalism is admirable and provides interesting anecdotal evidence it will never be able to fully examine the precise and intricate social, economic, and political conditions that are the root cause of the injustice that is our criminal justice system. Conover begins his investigative journey as he goes through the training required to become a prison guard. The process that each potential guard has to graduate from highly resembles that of which the military uses. Perfectly made beds, matching uniforms, roll calls, shooting practice, and psychological tests are all engrained into the schedules of potential guards. When this realizations strikes the author he says, “It dawned on me that I had reported to boot camp.” The emphasis on uniformity and discipline clearly showed the correlation those who controlled prisons saw between the prisons and warzones. The rhetoric is nearly identical as well, as evidenced by the “sergeant” who states,” The gray uniforms are the god guys, and the green uniforms are ... ... middle of paper ... ... by the end of the book believes the inmates are prone to violence and his sole purpose is to maintain order among a dehumanized group. It is far-fetched to ask someone like Conover to become a convict but I do believe that their perspectives would be insightful. In writing the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Conover undergoes a transformation as a correctional officer in order to expose the problems within our prison systems. The reader learns a lot about what is taking place in prisons right now and what it is like to be a guard, but in sum what one must foremost take into account is that this is not how prisons how they have to be. There are social, political, and economic realities that have constructed this system and in order to dispel them it is more beneficial to understand these factors rather than one man’s experience in a place of power at one prison.
The jobs of correctional officer are some times overlooked. Correctional officers are playing a huge role in society because they need to perform important tasks. A correctional officer’s job is not easy and can become very stressful at times. Correctional officers are required to enforce and keep order, supervise inmates, help counsel offenders, search inmate cells for contraband, and also report on inmate actions. Correctional officers need to contain power over the prisoners in order to enforce the rules of the prison, or else the prison will not function correctly. In the book, Conover says, “The essential relationship inside a prison is the one between a guard and an inmate…the guard, it is thought, wields all the power, but in truth the inmate has power too” (Conover, p. 207). In the book, the importance of power the prisoner’s hold can be seen through the sudden increase of prisoners, the Stanford Prison Experiment and through the contraband they make.
He then goes on to accurately describe the day to day life of a prisoner while introducing the overcrowding epidemic that is burdening the U.S. prison system. Since Spurlock describes the intake process and day to day life of the inmates in great detail, he effectively uses these strategies to persuade the audience and support his
This paper is about the book 'Behind a Convict's Eyes' by K.C. Cerceral. This book was written by a young man who enters prison on a life sentence and describes the world around him. Life in prison is a subculture of its own, this subculture has its own society, language and cast system. The book describes incidents that have happen in prison to inmates. With this paper I will attempt to explain the way of life in a prison from an inmate's view.
One of the parallel themes of “American Me” is that prisons are far more than warehouses for society's outcasts and baneful. They are, instead, recruiting stations and training camps for future generations of criminals and gang members. “American Me” reveals how a major portion of the crime syndicate came to be hosted from the “inside,” from within the many prison walls of the U.S. Department of Corrections (Baumgarten, 1992).
Without a body man has a mind, but lacking a sound man then man has nothing. That theory is the basis behind why psychological warfare is successful. However, problems arise when psychological warfare becomes used on the wrong people. Evans D Hopkins, a former prisoner himself, wrote the short story “Lockdown” to discuss the act of prison lockdown and the changed prison system mentality during his jail time. Vivid delivery and style delivers the experience to the naive human who does not understand how prison currently functions. The light shining on prisons though is problematic. Prevalent issues exist through the system change, and lockdowns do not provide assistance to jailors or inmates. A look inside the ineffectual
The stories of the Red Guards remind me very much of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which 24 university students were recruited for a psychological experiment in which half of the group would become a prison guard and the other half prisoners. The young men had rules that they had to live by during the week to two weeks the...
Conover sees correctional officers as multifaceted beings, neither inherently good nor bad, but as common people trying as we all do to behave well in demanding situations. In Newjack, Ted leaves his readers with the sense that for most officers accomplishment is more a matter of controlling the contradictions of genuine sympathy and warranted fury than conquering the kind of sadism portrayed in popular films.
In today’s pop culture, media of all forms portrayals of correctional officers are almost always negative. Correctional officers are portrayed as bad, “meat head” type men. They are depicted as authoritarian, insensitive and without any redeeming qualities. This image of correctional officers is one in which many people believe and think of when they view prison life. These images can be found in films like “Shawshank Redemption”, where guards brutally beat, sometimes to death, the inmates they are responsible for. It is portrayed that the guards do not care about the inmates but instead hate them to the point that most believe they are always harsh and use excessive force. One harsh officer claimed he “wouldn’t piss on them [inmates]
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.
The atmosphere at Winn Correctional Center can be summed up with a single word – unqualified. It affects the prisoners, the rehabilitation process, the staff, and the community. What immediately stood out at Winn was how easy it was to become a prison guard. With no police or guard background, reporter Shane Buster, began receiving calls a week later for jobs as a prison guard; ending up getting picked up by the nations second largest private prison company, CCA. As stated in part one of “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard, “Private prisons oversee about 8 percent of America’s prisoners. CCA houses at least 66,000 inmates in more than 60 facilities nationwide.” (Mother Jones. “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard: Part One”). The CCA is a big corporation that houses a lot of criminals, but, they only require guards to undergo four weeks of training. This is not sufficient as according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the length of time required to complete police academy training is twenty-one weeks. As proven in the past and today, twenty-one weeks may not even be enough as some cops act incorrectly in many high-stress situations. Four weeks is nothing close to being ready to protect and contain
Zito, M. (2003, December 8). Prison Privatization: Past and Present. International Foundation for Protection Officers. Retrieved from http://www.ifpo.org/articlebank/prison_privatization.html
Taylor, Jon. The Prison System Does Not Work . San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1997
“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.
All over the world jails old and new have cost the government and taxpayers billions of dollars in supplies for inmates, hospital bills, building funds and more. Prisons are used to help society function and the use of making an example of those who commit crimes to deter others from doing the same. The use of punishment can be put into five different categories, retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and utilitarianism.Each prison has had its up’s and down’s, and its fair share of mistreatment and rebellion. Each jail has its fair share of famous and outrageous criminals but the two jails being analyzed have held the most notorious gangster in America in the 1920’s until his untimely death in 1947 and the 89 - 93 backpacker
In the history of corrections, prisons have undergone drastic changes in punishment, policies, structures, and conditions which have all been deemed more effective than its precedents. In prior prison systems, inhumane conditions were existent because cruel and unusual punishment were more predominant than rehabilitation in today’s society. Prisons were cruel and torturous while disregarding prisoner rights and rehabilitation strategies. Earlier prison systems administered punishments that were extremely harsh in nature including flogging, mutilation, humiliation, branding, etc. It is important to understand the historical development of the prison movement in the United States in order to understand how prison systems have since evolved.