Should Jails and Prisons be abolished in the United States? Prisons are usually referred to as correctional facilities in the United States. Their main function is to correct people who have been termed as lawbreakers by a court of law. Imprisonment can be described as the limiting of a person’s liberty as a result of a crime committed or a law broken. Some of the prisons in the United States are for profit, which means that they aim to make money out of the prisoners. Others are purely for justice and do not usually have any monetary implications attached to them. These serve as correctional facilities and help to maintain law and order in a typical US set up.
Despite some of these obvious benefits, I am of the opinion that it would be possible
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For example, most prisoners are not offered medical care while at the prisons. The diet is also sometimes not balanced, and for some of the prisoners who may need specialized medical care, it is not always available. In my opinion, it is not fair to have human beings suffer while these rights could be provided outside the prison facilities. Imprisoning people just to deny them basic medical care makes no sense to me. However, this isn’t always the case. In Arizona a lawsuit settlement was underway between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Arizona Department of Corrections. The lawsuit had to do with the improving of health care, mental health care and dental care for the inmates. The controversy was that people in prison were getting health care when there are people in the world who never committed any crime but don’t have health care. When a person is sent to prison it's like adopting them. The State of Arizona agrees to give them shelter and feed them. They’re responsible for them. They keep them locked away so they can’t harm anyone. They stay locked up for as long as the courts declare. The State of Arizona can't let them die from an illness they contract while behind bars. Doing so would be cruel or unusual punishment, something the U.S. Constitution finds problematic or unlawful. Arizona makes a strong point and …show more content…
However, one key difference exists. Jails are usually rather short term and are meant for crimes that may be considered petty. Prisons on the other hand are more long term and are for crimes that would be considered main (Jails and Prisons, 2011). Given these differences, the life in prisons is usually better than that in jails.
Inmates and repeat offenders will prefer a prison sentence to a jail term. In prison, there are more regular programs, established rules and better facilities. Jail on the other hand is unstable and could only be suitable for a person staying there only a few hours. Long-term people will complain that in jail, it is even impossible to get a goodnights sleep since the place is constantly being opened to let new inmates in and out.
Despite jail being such a short term issue, there are some reasons to object to its existence. One of the main ones is that sometimes people are put there while awaiting trial. This means that they may come out innocent yet still have faced the consequences that they did not
Although community corrections have disadvantages, they have fewer disadvantages than incarceration. These reasons explain why I believe incarceration is less effective than community corrections. Sending offenders to prison isn’t necessarily benefiting the communities. Parole and probation seem to be a lot more efficient in most cases.
Prisons are institutionalized systems that hold people hostage against their will. Many believe that these institutions are fundamental to keep balance within society. Although prison systems are meant to seclude troubled individuals, it should go beyond just containing criminals. The judicial system is responsible for correcting and eliminating future delinquent behavior before they can be effectively situated back into society. In saying this, the court system does not implement these actions within prison systems, failing to fulfil the goals and the function of the prison overall. The U.S elots millions of dollars toward funding for our correctional system, but are unable to reform the basic natural rights and maltreatment within the prison system.
Prison Reform in The United States of America “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” (Nelson Mandela, 1994). The United States of America has more people behind bars than any other country on the planet. The prisons are at over double capacity. It cost a lot of money to house prisoners each year.
Well I am for the idea of prison, but I don't support the way our prisons in North America are being run. These people deserve to be punished! I don't want them to waste our money, get "paid" for television interviews, book rights and all the other goodies that come from doing a crime. And then slapped on the hand saying: "You be a good boy/girl now" and sent them off to a place we call prison, but in reality, some of the prisoners, find prison to be just like a strict camp. I have personally talked to some people who had gotten out of prison a few weeks prior to our talk, and they where telling me how they learned how to make certain crafts, learn how to sow, and many other things.
The number of Americans that are in prison has elevated to levels that have never been seen before. Prisons in the US have always been crowded ever since the first prison was invented (Jacobs and Angelos 101). The first prison in the US was the Walnut Street Jail that was built in Philadelphia in 1773, and later closed in the 1830’s due to overcrowding and dirty conditions (Jacobs and Angelos 101). The prison system in modern US history has faced many downfalls due to prison overcrowding. Many private prison owners argue that the more inmates in a prison the more money they could make. In my opinion the argument of making more money from inmates in prisons is completely unconstitutional. If the private prisons are only interested in making
Overcrowding of prisons due to mass incarceration is among one of the biggest problems in America, mass incarceration has ruined many families and lives over the years.America has the highest prison population rate , over the past forty years from 1984 until 2014 that number has grown by four hundred percent .America has four percent of the world population ,but twenty-five percent of the world population of incarcerated people Forty one percent of American juveniles have been or going to be arrested before the age of 23. America has been experimenting with incarceration as a way of showing that they are tough on crime but it actually it just show that they are tough on criminals. imprisonment was put in place to punish, criminals, protect society and rehabilitate criminals for their return into the society .
We Are Spending Too Much On Prisons Would you believe that America has spent around five hundred billion dollars on prisons? Butterfield: Why are the taxpayers of America spending so much money on prisons and not other effective solutions to stopping crime? American legislation is closed-minded about reducing crime. They believe that prison is the only solution.
When it comes to criminal justice there are several other options to punish someone rather than incarceration, any of these options can be used in place of incarcerating someone based on the individual needs. Does the person who drinks habitually need to go to jail for their fifth DUI, or do they need alcoholism classes? At the same time sometimes incarceration is the only option. Incarceration is a very costly process, and leaves the person who is incarcerated “institutionalized” where all they know is the system, and do not know how to survive outside of it. It is all a cost versus benefit battle.
If Johnny Cash described the sad daily life of inmates in his classic « Folsom Prison Blues », today it’s all the prison system which is feeling pretty blue. Justice simple definition is the law administration. But inside that definition is the implicit comprehension that the law has to be applied even handedly. The concept of law is made to apply to everybody, but actually in America this main principle can be questioned. It is clearly obvious that the judicial system could be better. It takes a very small effort to « peer under the veneer of blind justice »(Bank) . Some argues that prison system is a necessary solution to make our society safer, I would say that justice system has many failures, its effects are so much negative to not be questioned. The
What are prisons for? This is a question that must be asked in order to understand the problems facing prisons. Prisons serve two main functions; separation and rehabilitation. Criminals cannot be allowed to walk around with everyone else without being punished; they must be separated from society. The thought of going to prison helps deter most people from crime. Rehabilitation is the main goal of prison; making a bad person into a good person by the time they are released. These seem like cut and dry functions, but as of late some believe that prisons in the United States have failed in their attempts to separate and rehabilitate.
The correctional system punishes offenders by sentencing them to serve time in jail or prison. Others forms of punishment include being sentenced to probation, community service, and/or restitution. Jail is a locally operated short-term confinement facilities originally built to hold suspects following arrest and pending trial (Schmalleger, 2009). A prison is state or ...
There are many reasons supporting that shorter sentences are better than longer sentences. Firstly, some people who were put into prison could commit a crime just because of impulsion. According to a recent research on China Daily says that about 57% of criminal who were investigated are under twenty years old. And only 10% of them of education are higher than primary school. It means that the cause of their crime are not only from themselves but also from the situation of their family, the development of economics and the degree of the society. Perhaps they commit a crime just because of curiosity, the lack of education. Shorter sentences can give them a chance to turn over a new page . After the sentences, they can get more education. So the motivation should be an important standard to judge a crime.
The origin of the word prison comes from the Latin word seize. It is fair to say that the traditional use of prison corresponds well with the origin of the word as traditionally prison was a place for holding people whilst they were awaiting trial. Now, centuries on, prisons today are used as a very popular, and severe form of punishment offered to those that have been convicted. With the exception, however, of the death penalty and corporal punishment that still takes place in some countries. Being that prison is a very popular form of punishment used in today's society to tackle crime and punish offenders, this essay will then examine whether prison works, by drawing on relevant sociological factors.
Being in prison for life can be a real challenge, the inmates wake up early in the morning and if lucky they can take a shower with cold water. They brush their teeth and depending on the correctional facility the inmates are able to go outside to spend some time to play a sport, do physical training, or just walk and talk with other inmates. The most trusted inmates get jobs inside the facility and some even are able to get into school. Serving life in prison can be really hard, the offender has to get used to doing exactly the same thing each day, eating the same type of food, seeing the same people, walking through the same halls. An inmate will have to get his mind on something else, being in prison can be eternity if an offender thinks
Empires, according to Innis, are large overpowering rulers in the form of a country or a city who have branched out and administer other dependencies—such as the British Empire, who ruled over many countries including Canada, India, and Australia. For Canada specifically, staples—natural resources such as timber and fish—were extracted and exported back to the United Kingdom. Media and Technology, in the sense of empires, refer to the methods by which these empires could spread their rule over other countries—these methods being space- and time-binding media. According to Innis, the relationship between media and empires is that space- and time-binding media were the very reason countries had the power to contact, to invade, to communicate, and to expand