Prison Failures

Yolanda Valentin a 21-year-old prisoner, born as Daniel Valentine, looks and sounds much like a woman if it wasn’t for her sex assignment. After being placed in a cell with two male inmates, Valentin was repeatedly abused. She informed correctional officers of the continued, brutal sexual violence her cellmate was putting her through. The prison system did not respond to her. After all, from their point of view Valentin should have opted for solitary confinement to protect herself from the general population of male inmates. In solitary she would have sat quietly, by herself, for 24 hours in a cell made explicitly for violent prisoners. Valentin, a transsexual inmate in transition, asks herself constantly: “A lot of times I wake up, and I look around at my surroundings, and I see all these men. I think, ‘What am I doing here?’”(Baus).

There are three models of prisons that have been prominent in American since the early 1940’s: custodial, rehabilitative, and reintegration. Each model is designed differently based on its overriding goal, and this affects the physical design, policies, and programs that are implemented within each of the models.

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   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are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.

Throughout history into today, there have been many problems with our prison system. Prisons are overcrowded, underfunded, rape rates are off the charts, and we as Americans have no idea how to fix it. We need to have shorter sentences and try to rehabilitate prisoners back to where they can function in society. Many prisoners barely have a high school education and do not receive further education in jail. Guards need to pay more attention to the well being of the inmates and start to notice signs of abuse and address them. These are just a few of the many problems in our prison systems that need to be addressed.

Law enforcement officers are authorized by federal, state, and local lawmakers to arrest and confine persons suspected of crimes. The judicial system is authorized to confine persons convicted of crimes. This confinement, whether before or after a criminal conviction, is called incarceration.

In 2011, I spent time serving in prisons with a church organization who’s goal was to change the systemic problems within the prison system. This caused me to examine all aspects of inequality and oppression that disproportionately affects people of color.

Question: Discuss the history of the prison system in the United States. Be sure to identify the various stages that the American prison system has gone through. Also identify what problems were present with each stage as you see them.

The American Prison framework is coming up short us as a country. As exhibited by Brain Kincade the American restorative facilites framework is monstrous. The American Prison is enormous to the point that it's reviewed turnover of $74 million obscurations the GDP of 133 countries. The greater part of it needs to do with the way the American true blue structure works and how it has changed over the traverse of the most recent 40 years. The country detain masses has quadrupled to 2.2 million in which it has amplified all through the last a30 years. The American Prison is higher for blacks and Latinos more than whites. The miserable part is that numerous people in these therapeutic workplaces are moms, fathers, sisters, kinfolk, young women and

In the United States today, 4.7 million citizens—more than two percent of the adult population—are deprived of the right to vote because they have been convicted of a felony. Of these, 1.7 million have completed their sentences and are no longer under any form of criminal justice supervision.1 I shall argue that disenfranchisement of offenders who have completed their sentences is morally wrong, and that enfranchising all offenders—even those in prison—would be good social policy. Arguments about felony disenfranchisement are often framed along the lines of classical liberal and classical republican theories of citizenship, and I will follow this practice. The standard classical liberal argument for disenfranchisement of convicted felons is

The base of the U.S judicial system is founded on justice and truth, yet there are flaws in the legal and prison systems. People go to prison for crimes they commit then released. They often come out angry and likely to repeat a crime again. To avoid a repeated offense, U.S prison system should implement an assimilation program, to ease convicts into society. So that assimilation is even more successful prisons should offer vocational education programs to inmates, to obtain working skills, benefiting them for the future once they are released.

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, millions of Americans are convicted of a crime and incarcerated every year. Almost 23,000 of those inmates have up until now been housed in private federal prisons. On Thursday, August 18, the United States Department of Justice declared its plans to end the use of private prisons due to their inherent lack of safety and effectiveness. The Justice Department’s inspector general released a report that reached this conclusion, citing several examples of chaos within private prisons and the consequences that ensued. One notable example was the riot that occurred in May 2012 at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi after 250 inmates protested poor food and medical care, resulting in

Due to the “war on drugs”, prison overcrowding is becoming more and more of an issue, putting a strain on not just the law enforcement but our society as well. America has been implementing a “war on drugs” policy since the early nineteen – seventies. Since the creating of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973 under Richard Nixon, then the Office of National Drug Control Policy under Ronald Reagan in 1988, the United States has found themselves in an endless war and in constant debt huge amounts of money.

The Unites States of America’s prison system is a flawed mess. To open the eyes of our government we must first take a stand against unlawful government decisions, and show support for the greater good of society. What are our own tax-dollars paying for, what are the flaws in the justice/prison system, why is overcrowding in prisons causing tension, and what are ways our society and government can rebuild the system that has been destroyed over the years? Most criminals in prisons are not a danger to our society because they commit crimes just to use jail as a shelter, causing the overcrowding of prisons and wasting away of what we really should be paying for.

Are prisons effective total institutions or do they more commonly fail in their goal of resocialization? Please compare and contrast how a conflict, a functionalist or an interactionist theorist would answer this question. Finally offer your opinion

The criminal justice system views any crime as a crime committed against the state and places much emphasis on retribution and paying back to the community, through time, fines or community work. Historically punishment has been a very public affair, which was once a key aspect of the punishment process, through the use of the stocks, dunking chair, pillory, and hangman’s noose, although in today’s society punishment has become a lot more private (Newburn, 2007). However it has been argued that although the debt against the state has been paid, the victim of the crime has been left with no legal input to seek adequate retribution from the offender, leaving the victim perhaps feeling unsatisfied with the criminal justice process.