Reflection Paper On Correction

“Prison’s not a nice place to be. Those people are not in there for singing in the choir” (Todd, n.d.). Before I started this semester here at FAU, I considered myself pretty up to par on the goings on within the Correctional System; I had taken several classes that covered the basis of what Corrections was about, and I believed that I knew everything I needed to know. So when I realized that I needed to take a Corrections course for my major, I believed that I would pass it would ease. I was, of course, ‘corrected’, pardon the pun. My viewpoint for the entire correctional system was a very narrow, very biased based on my previous experience and the news circuit that circled around it. However, after spending three months in this class, I

I knew that sometimes these women had babies in prisons, but I had never really given it any thought as to what happened. I believed these woman to not be guilty, per se, but they needed to be helped with their problems (i.e. drug addiction, prostitution, and so on). After taking this corrections course, and my women studies, I had my eyes opened to some of the horrors (and some of the treasures) that women face in the correctional system. Women in prisons and jails have to deal with prejudice, sexual harassment, and ill-treatment. Though they are sometimes afforded the luxury of having a day-care center on site that they can stay with their children in the first fragile years, but in most cases, their children are taken and sometimes they are never seen by those mothers again. This was something that had never crossed my thoughts before, something that I had never bothered to think about. My opinion has changed completely now given facts and evidence, and this subject is something that I talk about a lot in my discussions in my other classes, and even outside of

I usually thought about it in an abstract way, or one in which I thought that the prisoners ‘deserved’ it. That is what I believed as I first entered the doorways of the Corrections classroom, though I never made my opinions known. However, it had only taken one class for my entire outlook on the subject to change. Solitary confinement is a terrible place to be for any prisoner, no matter what people consider their crime. It is a place that could drive a person insane, the deprivation of human contact and, if fully analyzed, could be seen as sensory deprivation. Four white walls in a tiny room, with or without a window, only getting the feeling of the bed, floors, and walls (if they are not given the luxury of a book), and so on. If these conditions were forced upon a person who had never committed a crime in their life, it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment, almost inhumane. But for a prisoner, it is just par for the course. It is seen as a punishment for being bad as a criminal, this punishment normal for the prisoners even. It only gives harm to its victims, and can be seen as a deterrent, if it did not drive people crazy (or maybe that was what the correctional system was going