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.

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.

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, “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.

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

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.

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.

In America, everyone seems to have a different idea about what goes on behind the grey, dismal walls of prison. For many of us, the idea itself conjures images of coiled barbed wire fences, chains dragging across the ground, somber faces behind rusting bars and those bright orange jumpsuits. These visions come from a variety of sources-- movies we’ve seen, the stories that we’ve been told and our own imagination that is constantly at work. However, the reality of prison life in America can only come from those who have stepped foot inside. Through memoirs written by Danner Darcleight and Ted Conover, I’ve had to reconsider some of these previously held visions of prison life. While Conover writes about the abusive relationship between the correctional officers and the prisons, through Darcleight’s writing we see the rewarding powers of having social life and the hopeful possibility for anyone to attain redemption. The first chapter of Concrete Carnival, by Danner Darcleight, as well as Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover has led me to re-evaluate these previously held visions of prison life, including the relationship between guards and inmates, social systems, and redemption.

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

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,”

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.

The American prison finds its origin in Europe. Like most things American we have adopted and adapted many of our beliefs and customs from our mother land. The punishment of confinement was rare and unheard of in America before Eighteenth century. The English concept of prison and incarceration did not even take root until the late Eighteenth Century (Hirsch, 1992). Now, American’s cannot claim that they invented prisons or the concept of confining criminal offenders within facilities that keep them separate from society. However, they can accredit themselves with championing the concept of prison reformation. Much like its English counterpart the early American prison system, which would one day grow to be an integral part of the expansive American Criminal Justice System, had an ugly and brutal start. Confinement conditions for Prisoners were harsh and unrelenting. Most Facilities designed to house criminal offenders were over populated, under staffed, and lacked necessary resources to support their growing population of inmates (Clear & Cole, 2003). However, over the years, America has made many strives to correct the errors of their predecessors. This paper will detail the early American Prison System and its journey through reformation to become the modern Prison system that we know today.

As compelling as all the three theories involved in the incarceration of criminals are, some hold more merit than others due to the persuasive strategies and points they put across. In this respect, I feel that prison as a school of crime deserves the most merit of the three observed. Low-risk inmates who were not career criminals upon conviction seem to be the most vulnerable candidates to the negative effects of incarceration and recidivism. The prison culture found within every prison results in prisonization affecting every inmate. Misconduct in the sense of definition per institution is nearly unavoidable in some cases. It becomes a matter of not getting caught as opposed to zero engagement. Every person in prison is exposed to enhanced

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.

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.