preview

Incarcerations: Difference Between Jails And Prisons

Decent Essays

In the United States there are “2,300,000 people are in jails or prisons today. Incarceration is one of the most common forms of punishment in the country for those who choose to commit crimes. This number includes those who are jailed for a short period and are released on probation, as well as those who are doing time for the rest of their lives. (soapboxie, 2016).
Around the United States are many different jails and prisons like federal, state, county, town and city, but what is the difference between prison and jail? The jail is the “holding area for the inmates that are waiting to be in court” (soapboxie, 2016) and prison are the places “where all the inmates that already have their sentence will serve their crime” (soapboxie, 2016). …show more content…

These categories are maximum, medium and minimum custody. The maximum-security prisons are the ones where they buildings have high fences, with gun towers and different fences between the cement fences for make it harder to the inmates to escape from prison. The maximum-security prisons have some characteristic like “secure cells, armed guards and technology such as electric perimeters, laser sensors, electric locking system, metal detectors, X-ray machines, video surveillance”. (schmalleger, 2016). All this security helps to decrease the rate of inmates that attempt to escape from prison. In the maximum-security prisons we found the more dangerous inmates or the inmates that are waiting for their death row. Most of the inmates spend more of the time in their cell. They have probably like one or two hours to do some activities outside their cell, a perfect example of this are the inmates that wait the death row” they spend most of the time in their cell, they are highly surveille, even when they take a shower they have guards for close supervision” (schmalleger,

Get Access