Analysis Of Concrete Carnival, By Danner Darcleight And Ted Conover

What once was used as a means of rehabilitation has now became a corrupted institution based upon the societal norms of the 21st century. In the novel, “Are Prisons Obsolete” by Angela Davis, she emphasizes the underlining problems faced within modern day prisons. More specifically on how the reformation of these prisons have ultimately backfired causing the number of imprisonments to sky rocket drastically. Which results in the concept of the prison system being a lot more harmful than helpful to the prison-based communities nationwide.

Prisons hide prisoners from society. “If an inmate population is shut in, the free community is shut out, and the vision of men held in custody is, in part, prevented from arising to prick the conscience of those who abide by the social rules” (Sykes, 1958, 8). The prison is an instrument of the state. However, the prison reacts and acts based on other groups in the free community. Some believe imprisonment

Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV.   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison.   Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.

The distressing experience of operating as a prison guard in such a notorious penal facility as New York State’s Sing Sing Penitentiary is one that is unlikely to be desired by one not professionally committed to the execution of prison uniformity. However, the outstanding novel written by Tom Conover illustrates the encounters of a journalist who voluntarily plunged himself into the obscure universe of the men and women paid to spend the better portion of their lives behind prison barriers. In Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Conover creates a noteworthy document resonating personal emotional occurrences that nonetheless suggest the cultural sensitivity of a true prison guard. From the standpoint of our studies

Ted Conover’s book, New Jack, is about the author's experiences as a rookie guard at Sing Sing prison, in New York, the most troubled maximum security prison. He comes to realize that being a correctional officer isn’t an easy task. This is shown from the beginning when he is required to attend a 7 week training program to become a correctional officer. He comes to realize what inmates have to endure on a daily basis. Throughout his experience into a harsh culture of prison and the exhausting and poor working conditions for officers, he begins to realize that the prison system brutalizes everyone connected to it. New Jack presents new ideas of prisons in the United States in the ways facilities, corrections officers, and inmates function with

Conover’s purpose in writing this book not only to share his experience as a correctional officer but to also help readers get beyond the stereotype of the brutal guard seen on television and rumors but to see correctional officers as individuals, offering us a chance to understand

After reading the book I have gained a new understanding of what inmates think about in prison. Working in an institution, I have a certain cynical attitude at times with inmates and their requests.

Hassine begins his narrative as he is entering prison but this time as an inmate. Prior to his incarceration, Hassine was an attorney (Hassine, 2011). Even then as an attorney, the high walls of prison intimated Hassine (Hassine, 2011). As Hassine was being processed into the system, he expressed how he systematically became hopeless from the very prison structure itself as well as because of the intimidation he felt by uniforms. Prisons of the past actually had a goal to aid individuals through rehabilitation by instilling new values in order to correct the wrongs that one may have committed during their lifetime but today this is no longer true. . Hassine draws colorful depictions of how dim and unfamiliar a prison can be in which instills fear in an individual soon as he or she

More specifically, the focus was on the patters, as well as characteristics staff and inmates involved (Sorensen et al., 2011). The research consisted of 79 coded incident reports, involving Texas corrections staff, who had been seriously assaulted, over a 14 month period (Sorensen et al., 2011). It was determined that serious assaults were reasonably infrequent, yet the characteristics and indicators of what led to attacks were delivered (Sorensen et al., 2011). Both of these articles aid in the process of indulging into the hardships that corrections officers have dealt with. The physical conditions and assaults are two of the undesirable aspects that are undeniably attached to such a career, as the next section will exemplify.

Within this paper, you will find a comprehensive review of the United States prison system, and why it needs to analyzed to better support and reform the people of this country. I plan to persuade the other side (politicians and society) into seeing that the way the prison system is now, is not ethical nor economical and it must change. We have one of the world’s largest prison population, but also a very high rate of recidivism. Recidivism is when the prisoners continuously return to prison without being reformed. They return for the same things that they were doing before. So, this leads us to ask what exactly are we doing wrong? When this happens, we as a nation must continuously pay to house and feed these inmates. The purpose of a prison needs to be examined so we can decide if we really are reforming our inmates, or just continuing a vicious cycle. What is the true purpose of prison besides just holding them in a cell? There must be more we can do for these hopeless members of society.

In the book NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing, the book discussed the life of a guard. Most people feel that the guards are bad guys in the criminal justice system and with the politics of the criminal justice systems there are many assumptions of the way in which the stereotype of prison guard’s life should be. The author Ted Conover explains first hand on the experiences behind the scenes that many guards experiences throughout their careers that is an untold story of the truth in the prison system. Conover was curious about the subculture of the prison guards’ duties and wanted to know the truth about if the assumptions that most have about the prison guards is truthful. Conover entered the Academy with many other young men and a few women who wanted good jobs with security. The training was modeled after boot camp for the military. Those who had been in the military fared better than those who had not been so initiated. Once Conover crossed the training hurdle, he was tossed over to Sing Sing for his first assignment.

When we do research on daily prison life, we come across two typical but less than ideal situations: either social imaginaries cloud our judgment or information provided by the prisons themselves hide certain weak or bad aspects that they do not want to make public. We can also find information on TV, but most of the time it either exaggerates or minimizes the facts. In order to obtain more reliable information, we have to have access to people who are working or have worked in this institution, and such will be the sources of this essay. We will be describing and giving examples of prison violence according to three types of violence: sexual, physical and psychological violence.

In today's modern society prisons are seen as a dirty, old, and scary place where those who have committed crimes go to spend time depending on what crime they committed. The idea behind prisons is that no one will ever leave because of all the actions taken in order to avoid a prison break, but in actuality prisons are more easy to break out from than people think, due to the psychological aspect or how guards treat the inmates, food, and how big or small the prison may be.

The prisons are unreasonably overcrowded due to mass incarceration in the United States; consequently, it is costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year to sustain this “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality, not to mention the millions of lives, of offenders and the families that are left in the communities, that have been affected in a negative way (Clear 1). The sad thing is that, since the end of 1974, over 34 million human beings have been processed through America’s criminal court system and close to 24 million children have been traumatized by the loss of a parent or even worse, both parents (Drucker 44). The growth rate of prisons, for close to a century (1880-1975), stayed

And it appears particularly to matter these days within the second decade of the twenty-first century in America because the nation’s “guts square measure screaming” for Associate in Nursing finish to unequal treatment within the justice system and also the history of mass confinement and with it the restriction of wealth, jobs, and investment in African yank life. In “cell song” the poet makes something “good come out of prison” by finding a way to “twist the space with speech,” thereby breaking the grid of surveillance and losing a ray of free will: “Come now, Etheredge, don't be a savior; take your words and scrape the sky, shake rain on the desert.” (Knight ,p . 9) In ‘Hard Rock Returns to Prison’ an ode to an inmate who repeatedly brings the fire of autonomy and free will into the prison, allowing the other inmates to see themselves by the fire’s light rather than by the light of the “smooth operation of the prison,” which “takes precedence over the needs of the individual” (Knight, p.