Penal Citizenship Essay

The author successfully appeals to the reader through ethos. First, he presents himself as an informed person that understands the purpose of prisons in our societies. In line with this understanding, he acknowledges the fact that politicians formulate many laws to secure our societies from criminals. He further acknowledges the fact that, to some extent prisons have achieved their purpose. However, he expresses the need to change this strategy because it does not achieve much as expected. In the process of appealing to the reader through ethos, he presents himself as a victim of prisons. He claims that he was among thirty-one murders jailed in Louisiana back in 1962 for execution or life imprisonment (Rideau Para. 1). By so doing, he draws readers’ attention to his claim because he presents himself as somebody who understands what goes on in prisons.

Part 1 of the book highlights chapter 1 and 2, which talks about politics and the consequences of incarceration while chapter 2 talks about the politics of being punished within the united states, some sub topics between chapter 1 and 2 include problem ownership, philosophies, historic changes with the corrections policy throughout time and the economic impact of being incarcerated. Chapter 2 talks about the process in which politics can affect the outcome on crime and punishment, throughout the 1960s the criminal justice system has changed a lot especially correctional professionals who have brought issues to crime and its political forefront.

In this chapter, Brown provides an overview of the main themes and key arguments presented in the six cases throughout the text and emphasizes the importance of developing a new understanding the role of penal spectatorship in punishment. The main conditions of the failure of the work of punishment—the weak relationship between penal spectators and punishment—are social distance, which creates voyeuristic attitudes towards punishment as it is experienced through the media, prison tours, and the visual accounts of torture in war prisons, social anxieties caused by late modernity, leading to frameworks of blame and the exclusion of minority populations, and potentiality.

Kids can no longer play outside; people lock their doors at night. People fear daily whether they will make it back to their house at night. Some leave in the morning in a suit and tie off to their nine to five jobs, others go off into the streets, trying to make the best they can with what they have. America is the leading nation of individuals in prison, representing almost a quarter of the worlds imprisoned population. Over the years, the number of incarcerated individuals has increased as well as the length of the criminal’s sentence. Sadly, this is a dynamic that is not changing anytime in the near future. According to Yvonne Jewkes in “Punishment in Black and White Penal ‘Hell-Hole,’ Popular Media, and Mass Incarceration,”

Society has long since operated on a system of reward and punishment. That is, when good deeds are done or a person behaves in a desired way they SP are rewarded, or conversely punished when behaviour does not meet the societal norms. Those who defy these norms and commit crime are often punished by organized governmental justice systems through the use of penitentiaries, where prisoners carry out their sentences. The main goals of sentencing include deterrence, safety of the public, retribution, rehabilitation, punishment and respect for the law (Government of Canada, 2013). However, the type of justice system in place within a state or country greatly influences the aims and mandates of prisons and in turn targets

In, “The Caging of America”, by Adam Gopnik explains the problems in the in the American criminal justice system focusing more on the prison system. Some of the struggles that Gopnik states in his article are mass incarceration, crime rate, and judges giving long inappropriate sentencings to those with minor crimes. He demonstrates that inmates are getting treated poorly than helping them learn from their actions. Using facts and statistics, Gopnik makes his audience realize that there is an urgent need of change in the American prison system. The main idea of Gopnik’s article is that the prison system needs to improve its sentencing laws because prisons are getting over crowed. Gopnik’s argument is valid because there is a problem in the sentencing laws that has caused a malfunction in the prison system as a whole.

Yet it also remains largely invisible or misrepresented to many. The penal system exists today because American society allows it, but also because society deems it acceptable. This viewpoint on the acceptability of the current prison begs the question of how an outlet, whether through media, film, literature, or experience, may inculcate perceptions and consequently antagonize material responses. With the American prison system’s often hidden quotidian details and overall existence, representation of it carries the power to easily influence perception and incite action. And the conjoint relationship between representation and action invokes the necessity of representative focus, a requirement to critically analyze and understand this relationship when illustrating a structure such as the carceral system. The way in which prison representation takes form and chooses its emphasis will inevitably vary. Yet it remains that representation may lie at the core of any future movement to reform or abolish the current penal system, just as misrepresentation may lie at the core of any movement to ensure its

Foucault address the changing definition of crime and how power is exerted through the enforcement of punishment. During the monarchy, kings and queens showed their power and authority of the people by determining what punishment someone would receive for their actions. In the current political system, judges and juries are in the position to make these decisions. Judgement is the current system is based on motives and intent rather than on the severity of the crime alone. We care more about the psychological state of the individual and want to be able to change the person's soul to better respect society. The quote below addresses how punishment uses a variety of specializations and how the individual's mental state is molded to fit into standards we have created today.

The penal system is the collective term for the processes and agencies involved in overseeing jurisdictions prisons and community-based programs such as probation and parole. The main aims of such a system is to promote social control and deter deviant and criminal behaviour.

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.

Indeed, once upon a time the incarceration system was set in place with two firm duties: retribution and rehabilitation. When did these institutions, once considered virtuous and just, become the hallmark of inequality? On September 27th, 2015, Pope Francis remarked on a visit to a Philadelphia jail “It is painful when we see prison systems, which are not concerned to care for wounds, to soothe pain, to offer new possibilities,” a moving sentiment that would soon resonate with the American population. Unbeknownst to many listening to his gripping words, ⅓ of the world 's female prison population is incarcerated in the United States. And if the magnitude of that figure does not astound you, maybe the fact that every 1 in 15 American prisoners are black, while only 1 in 106 prisoners are white, will. These statistics reported by Harper’s Index embody the blatant corruption of the American incarceration system and the innate institutionalized racism the U.S has sustained throughout history.

This part of the paper will provide a comparison with a theorist previously discussed in a lecture. The theorist with whom Michael Foucault’s arguments will be compared to is Emile Durkheim. Durkheim sees crime as functional. He says that if there was no crime, all our values would be dispersed--these values are laws. These laws are observed by sanctions and punishments attached to it. However, in order for these laws to exist, there must be a punishment, thus, for there to be a punishment, there has to be crime. Repressive law, according to this classical theorist was based on punishing for the evil doing of the criminal through revenge. Durkheim believes that a crime is not collective and when one goes against the core values of society, one threatens the entire order of society. Therefore, this theorist would agree with Foucault that when disciplining a criminal, he or she should be stripped of their freedom and when

Michael Foucault’s book, “Discipline & Punish, The Birth of the Prison” reflected a philosopher’s viewpoint of the evolution of discipline and punishment. The book was separated into four different parts that would provide a historian with an excellent post modernistic background of the society’s change of punishment, and how these changes affected the cultural society. Foucault’s book discussed how the Sovereign power over the people was changed to the discipline of the people through the use of penal systems. Foucault’s deliberated how these changes created the disciplinary switch from body to mind. The author expanded on these disciplinary changes and encompassed other aspects of the society as a whole.

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

In prisons today, rehabilitation, deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution are all elements that provide a justice to society. Prisons effectively do their part in seeing that one if not more of these elements are met and successfully done. If it were not for these elements, than what would a prison be good for? It is highly debated upon whether or not these elements are done properly. It is a fact that these are and a fact that throughout the remainder of time these will be a successful part of prison life.