Ossining Correctional Facility

The CCI penitentiary in South Carolina is one of thousands of prisons where their intentions are to make a profit, and to handicap the African- American male. That’s the more controversial topic, not the horrendous penitentiary conditions. The concern some Americans have are ,why so many blacks being placed in prisons. American prisons are not constructed to rehabilitate an inmate. Prisons are essential for our society, but they have become vast business, for private owners. Of course, killers, and any individual that commits a heinous crime should be placed in jail. Many people sympathize with the person who is trying to prove for his family by selling drugs, to make ends meet. They should have lighter punishments in the eyes of many. The laws are systematize to where the black male never achieves his full potential as a father, provider, and a positive representative to society. The educational system in black communities is making the circumstances unfavorable, and the legal system is repeating the sequence of events. America was not intended for Africans to become America civilians.

Social process theories view deviant and criminal behaviors as evolving mechanisms learned through societal interaction. Social development theories view deviant and criminal behaviors as part of a maturational process. The process involves numerous perspectives including biological, psychological, and social, that all occur simultaneously as the individual progresses through life. In this paper the author will examine what different social process’s there are and how they support Pelican Bay State Prison: War Zone. The author will also provide different social issues associated with this prison system. In addition, the author will provide, if any, possible ramifications for social policy change?

Elam Lynds (1784-1855) was the first warden of Auburn, New York prison and creator of the Auburn system. Lynds was also a pioneer of prison inmate labor and believed in hard work, which in return will help inmates obtain useful skills they could utilize after release (Kania & Davis, 2012). From a financial standpoint, “Prison labor may be used to generate revenues to support the operations of prison environment” (Doss, Sumrall III, &

On February 9, 2015, the American corrections class and I went on a tour to the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. Georgia State Prison at Reidsville is the fundamental greatest security office in the condition of Georgia. Found on Georgia Highway 147 in unincorporated Tattnall County, outside of Reidsville, It is a piece of the Georgia Department of Corrections. The current fantastic structural planning incorporated a strip by Julian Harris titled Rehabilitation portraying exchanges and occupations. Many redesigns were made. The mission of the prison was to “Ensure public safety by effectively operating a safe and secure facility while housing medium general population, mental health and problematic male adult offenders incarcerated in the Georgia prison system”.

Visiting the Prairie du Chien Correctional Facility was a truly eye opening experience. I could go on all day about the things that I saw, heard, and learned. Immediately following the experience, I called my mom to tell her all about it. She really doesn’t understand what is going on in the system, which is frustrating for me, so I talked to my Grandpa instead, as he seems to know a little more and be more open to new information and ideas.

Before the 1820s, most prisons resembled classrooms where inmates lived in large rooms together like a dormitory. The newer prisons of the era, like New York’s Auburn Prison, shepherded men into individual cells at night and silent labor during the day, a model that would prove enduring. Women at Auburn, however, lived in a small attic room above

The way special housing units work in prison is that inmates spend 23- hour lockdown in single- cell housing. Inmates have very limited movement within the facility with constant video surveillance (Segregation and solitary: Necessary Evils?).When they are allowed visitation they can only communicate with their loved ones through thick glass with no physical contact whatsoever. This is the average experience for inmates in the SHU. It

What the correction officers considered security and correction was the prevailing theme that created the environment of degradation and dehumanizing living conditions. Typical life for roughly 2,243 inmates consisted of fourteen to sixteen hours a day in overcrowded cells, minimal working wages of thirty cents a day with no further employment training, over regulated activities, censored reading and media materials, and the right to free choice was nonexistent. When it came to hygiene, inmates had no privacy when using toilet areas, commode needs where insufficient, and showers were permitted only once a week. Meals did not meet nutritional standards, clothing was poor and scanty, and medical services were offered in an uncaring manner. Visitation was extremely strict, family and friends were seen through mesh screen which were preceded and followed by strenuous strip searches of the inmates. As well, there was no significant programming to prepare inmates for society; Attica did not offer any career training, psychological and mental assistance, nor drug rehabilitation. Collectively all these conditions led to the unbearable environment that was made even more dehumanizing, due to institutional and social racism. The Attica prison population in 1971, was fifty-four percent Black, thirty-seven percent White, and approximately nine percent Latino with an all-White correctional staff. Racism was prevalent, it was customary self-segregation among inmates, job assignments were based of color, and discipline was unfair between prisoners and officers due to racial hostility. A common relationship between officers and inmates would include ill feelings of hostility, distrust, and prejudice. White officers from rural areas of New York, only had three weeks of training, and minimal contact with improvised Blacks and

Even though the prison was improving its conditions, they did not think about expanding even more. The purpose of the prison was to rehabilitate inmates through solitary confinement and with the overcrowding, it was impossible. With the overcrowding, prisoners began to fight each other and caused violent outbreaks. Soon it became unhealthy, dirty, and unsafe for inmates. In the end, the jail failed due to poor architecture and lack of staying organized. About 30 to 40 inmates were being placed in one room where they would all have to seep on the floor. It failed to focus on their goal which was to keep prisoners separately so that they could self-reflect. Later, the Eastern Pennsylvania Prison was built to replace the Walnut Street Jail. A prison in which also put their inmates in solitary

One of the first prison systems was called the Pennsylvania System. The ideology of this system was used in the Eastern State Penitentiary in the early 1800s. This system had very definite ideas on how a prison should be organized and managed. The operation of this prison was based on the following 5 general principles (Clear, Cole, & Reisig, 2006):

American prison system incarceration was not officially used as the main form of punishment in United States (U.S.) until around the 1800’s. Before that time criminals were mainly punished by public shaming, which involved punishments such as being whipped, or branded (HL, 2015). In fact, President Lincoln codified the prison incarceration system in the Emancipation Proclamation that indicated no slavery would take place in America unless a person was duly convicted of a crime (paraphrased) (White, 2015). In this era prisons were used more as a place where criminals could be detained until their trial date if afforded such an opportunity. However, one of the main problems with this idea was the fact that the prisons were badly maintained, which resulted in many people contracting fatal diseases. Yet, according to White (2015) unethical and immoral medical experiments were also conducted on inmates’ leading to health failures. Moreover, because everyone was detained in the same prisons, adolescent offenders would have to share the same living space with adult felons, which became another serious problem in that adolescent were less mature and could not protect themselves in such environments

In their observation of the Auburn Prison in New York, they found that the use of solitary confinement and subjecting the inmates to complete isolation had serious negative results, in which Beaumont and Tocqueville noted that solitary confinement did not reform and rather killed (Panzarella & Vona, pg 287). As a result, solitary confinement lost much of its popularity over the next couple of decades and later reemerged with the establishment of supermax prisons in the late nineteenth century. Supermax prisons, which is short for maximum security prisons hold the most dangerous convicts using the methods of isolation and solitary confinement to primarily control and direct them. Inmates in maximum security prisons are held in isolated cells for years or even decades as they serve their sentence. In her University of Michigan Journal of law Review, Solitary Confinement, Public Safety, and Recidivism, Prisoner Rights advocate Shira Gordon states, “Unlike the nineteenth century, correctional administrators in modern prisons do not implement solitary confinement for rehabilitative purposes. The goals of modern solitary confinement are simply to incapacitate and assert control over prisoners: the warden and

The Auburn State Prison was built in 1816, occupied in 1821 and soon after became the model for succeeding American prisons. Quaker thinking, in that "repentance for one's wrongs was best attained through private contemplation, which was facilitated by the penitentiary concept", influenced the Auburn prison. (Carney,

Auburn prison opened a new wing to their facility. It was built in a cell system to replace

day and night. There was a lot of debate about the two systems. People who