With the increase in prison population, and less money to work with, the correctional system is in dire need of a revolution. Since the prison system was established religious groups have always been willing to help inmates. In today’s society faith based programs have taken the lead in establishing prison rehabilitation and re-entry into society. Faith based programs provide economic benefits, reduce recidivism, and reduce crime. This work looks at several faith based programs in the prison system but focuses specifically on a study done by The Life Learning Program.
The US prison population in the past 40 years is increasing in order to combat crime. “Today more than 1 in 100 adults are in prison or jail nationwide” (Henrichson 2012). For tax payers, the amount spent on prison has quadrupled. There are over 1.5 million inmates incarcerated in all 50 state prison systems. The average spent by tax payers in one year for one inmate is $31, 286. The cost per inmate state to state ranges from $14, 603 in Kentucky, to $60,076 in New York. About 95% of offenders are released back into society and 2/3 of them will mostly likely be repeat offenders. This is a daunting statistic that requires a motive to search for new avenues that can provide inmate moral change. The United States has implemented religious education to prison inmates since the rise of corrections. Now you find the majority of inmate population attending religious faith based programs, which are leading the way in rehabilitation and re-entry in jails and prisons.
There have been a large number of budget cuts in recent years that have caused programs in the correctional system to decline. Volunteer faith based programs have established its role in the correction system w...
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...tion of women. Gilligan's research of women, In a Different Voice (1982), resulted in a model of stages of moral development based on responsibility and care for self and others rather than on justice.”(Swanson 2009).
Moral development is what is right or wrong according to society’s values. Justice is the core principle of moral development, yet, justice is not the only thing needed for moral development. Responsibility and care for each other are characteristics that build moral development (Swanson 2009).
The second theory used is the faith development theory. Swanson uses Fowler’s famous work done in 1981 on faith development, which shows that faith is naturally embedded in all human beings.
“He distinguishes religion from faith in that religion is thought of as cumulative traditions and faith as the quest for meaning. Fowler (1996) provides a more detailed
We imprison seven-hundred-fifty prisoners per one hundred-thousand citizens, almost five times the earth average. Around one in every thirty-one grown-ups in the United States is in the penitentiary, in prison or on supervised release. District, state, and national disbursements on corrections expenses total to around seventy billion dollars per year and has raised to forty percent more over the past twenty years. http://www.newsweek.com/ The current corrections specialists have started to support that notion. Even though we comprehend that criminals must take accountability for their actions, we also realize that we can no longer just turn out heads at their disappointments. The individuals that derive out of our penitentiaries, prisons, municipal programs and out from beneath our direction are our creation, and we have to take some responsibility. Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) Hankoff, Leon D. "Current trends in correctional education: theory and practice." International Journal of Offender Therapy & Comparative Criminology Apr. 1985: 91-93. Criminal Justice Collection. Web. 12 June 2016.
When envisioning a prison, one often conceptualizes a grisly scene of hardened rapists and murderers wandering aimlessly down the darkened halls of Alcatraz, as opposed to a pleasant facility catering to the needs of troubled souls. Prisons have long been a source of punishment for inmates in America and the debate continues as to whether or not an overhaul of the US prison system should occur. Such an overhaul would readjust the focuses of prison to rehabilitation and incarceration of inmates instead of the current focuses of punishment and incarceration. Altering the goal of the entire state and federal prison system for the purpose of rehabilitation is an unrealistic objective, however. Rehabilitation should not be the main purpose of prison because there are outlying factors that negatively affect the success of rehabilitation programs and such programs would be too costly for prisons currently struggling to accommodate additional inmate needs.
The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for a number of reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. The ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system is caused by mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism.
Shrum, H. (2004, September). No Longer Theory: Correctional Practices That Work. The Journal of Correctional Education, 55(3), pp. 225-235.
The past two decades have engendered a very serious and historic shift in the utilization of confinement within the United States. In 1980, there were less than five hundred thousand people confined in the nation’s prisons and jails. Today we have approximately two million and the numbers are still elevating. We are spending over thirty five billion annually on corrections while many other regime accommodations for education, health
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the year 1980 we had approximately 501,900 persons incarcerated across the United States. By the year 2000, that figure has jumped to over 2,014,000 prisoners. The current level of incarceration represents the continuation of a 25-year escalation of the nation's prison and jail population beginning in 1973. Currently the U.S. rate of 672 per 100,000 is second only to Russia, and represents a level of incarceration that is 6-10 times that of most industrialized nations. The rise in prison population in recent years is particularly remarkable given that crime rates have been falling nationally since 1992. With less crime, one might assume that fewer people would be sentenced to prison. This trend has been overridden by the increasing impact of lengthy mandatory sentencing policies.
It is undeniable that mass incarceration devastates families, and disproportionately affects those which are poor. When examining the crimes that bring individuals into the prison system, it is clear that there is often a pre-existing pattern of hardship, addiction, or mental illness in offenders’ lives. The children of the incarcerated are then victimized by the removal of those who care for them and a system which plants more obstacles than imaginable on the path to responsible rehabilitation. Sometimes, those returned to the community are “worse off” after a period of confinement than when they entered. For county jails, the problem of cost and recidivism are exacerbated by budgetary constraints and various state mandates. Due to the inability of incarceration to satisfy long-term criminal justice objectives and the very high expenditures associated with the sanction, policy makers at various levels of government have sought to identify appropriate alternatives(Luna-Firebaugh, 2003, p.51-66).
In the essay "Prison "Reform" in America," Roger T. Pray points out the much attention that has been devoted to research to help prevent crimes. Showing criminals the errors of their ways not by brutal punishment, but by locking them up in the attempt to reform them. Robert Pray, who is a prison psychologist, is currently a researcher with the Utah Dept. of Corrections. He has seen what has become of our prison system and easily shows us that there is really no such thing as "Prison Reform"
Freedom in any society is a condition that is directly correlated to the compliance of society’s rules, regulations, and laws. This right afforded to citizens under the constitution is surrendered by those who choose to disregard and trample on the set of standards and behavior needed for a society to maintain order and avoid anarchy. When loss of freedom is the tool used to punish this segment of society, prisons become the instrumentality used to carry out the various freedom restrictions under the law for each individual. Citizens who find themselves incarcerated in prison will be exposed to an entirely different environment than those in free society. In addition, there is a psychological impact on those being reintroduced into society after having completed long-term sentences, an impact many believe contribute to the high recidivism rates in the United States. The criminal justice system with all of its connected inner workings may not address all of the concerns inside and out of our current prison system, but just as we have improved on our prisons from the past, we will continue to improve and implement new techniques and design precise programs in our future prisons.
Solitary confinement is based on a Quaker belief that inmates isolated in cells with only a Bible would use the time to pray for forgiveness and find their place and meaning in life (Sullivan; 2006). While solitary confinement in the twenty-first century isn not based on the founding Quaker belief, the basic principals still apply. Hoskins, a researcher, says “In one sense, solitary might seem especially conductive to the sort of moral reflect that might lead to reform. The extreme isolation of such units, after all, offers prisoners plenty of time (in fact, little else) during which they might choose to contemplate the wrongness of their acts” (Hoskins; 2013). Researcher, Suedfeld, argues that in conjunction with a “rehabilitative system”, convict isolation can lead to the development of “non-criminal lifestyles”. It has also been argued that by separating women from other women, who may help us confirm or deny our identities, time in isolation can help women, and men, to discover who they really are and what they can give back to our society (Long;
Sung, L. G.-e. (2011). Rethinking Corrections: Rehabilitation, Reentry, and Reintegration. Thousand Oaks : SAGE Publications.
Every civilization in history has had rules, and citizens who break them. To this day governments struggle to figure out the best way to deal with their criminals in ways that help both society and those that commit the crimes. Imprisonment has historically been the popular solution. However, there are many instances in which people are sent to prison that would be better served for community service, rehab, or some other form of punishment. Prison affects more than just the prisoner; the families, friends, employers, and communities of the incarcerated also pay a price. Prison as a punishment has its pros and cons; although it may be necessary for some, it can be harmful for those who would be better suited for alternative means of punishment.
In today’s modern western society, it has become increasingly popular to not identify with any religion, namely Christianity. The outlook that people have today on the existence of God and the role that He plays in our world has changed drastically since the Enlightenment Period. Many look solely to the concept of reason, or the phenomenon that allows human beings to use their senses to draw conclusions about the world around them, to try and understand the environment that they live in. However, there are some that look to faith, or the concept of believing in a higher power as the reason for our existence. Being that this is a fundamental issue for humanity, there have been many attempts to explain what role each concept plays. It is my belief that faith and reason are both needed to gain knowledge for three reasons: first, both concepts coexist with one another; second, each deals with separate realms of reality, and third, one without the other can lead to cases of extremism.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a massive amount of inmates began fillin up the United States prison systems. This huge rate of growth in this short amount of time, has greatly contributed to the prison overcrowding that the United States faces today. In fact, the prisons are still filled to the seams. This enormous flood of inmates has made it practically impossible for prison officials to keep up with their facilities and supervise their inmates. One of the main reasons why many prisons have become overcrowded is because of states’ harsh criminal laws and parole practices (Cohen). “One in every 100 American adults is behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the world” (Cohen). The amount of inmates in corrections systems, throughout the nation, sky-rocketed to 708 percent between 1972 and 2008. Today, there are about 145,000 inmates occupying areas only designed for 80,000 (Posner). Peter Mosko, “an assistant professor of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice” (Frazier) stated, “America, with 2.3 million people behind bars, has more prisoners than soldiers” (Frazier). There have been studies that have shown “there are more men and women in prison than ever before. The number of inmates grew by an average of 1,600 a week. The U. S. has the highest rate of crime in the world” (Clark). Because of this influx in inmates, many prisoners’ rights groups have filed lawsuits charging that “overcrowded prisons violate the Constitution’s 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment” (Clark). It is clear that the United States corrections system needs to be reformed in order to eliminate this problem. Prison overcrowding is a serious issue in society due to the fact it affects prison ...
2nd ed. of the book. USA: Penguin Books, Ltd. [Accessed 01 January 2014]. The Prison Reform Trust.