To kick things off my initial expectation of CLJ 101 was completely wrong. Before the first class I expected this class to be an extremely difficult law school like class where all we are doing is examining law and different theories similar to what aspiring lawyers are doing in law school. My initial belief was quickly blown away as soon as the first class started and Dr. McCarty led us through the syllabus and I found out we were learning more “popular” law where most people can relate to which makes the class more exciting. Once I found out CLJ 101 wasn’t going to be a typical textbook law class I was excited and relieved. Before the course began the only material I really wanted to make sure was covered was the overall impact prison has on people. I was interested in learning about the different prison impacts because in high school I took a basic law class and one of the lessons we learned was how different criminals carry out cime with hopes of ending up in prison. In a lot of cases when a criminal is released from prison the criminal ends up back in prison a short time later because of how hard of a life the criminal is experiencing after prison. Ever since that lesson in high school I have been interested in the different impacts prison has on people and CLJ 101 covered the effects of prison beyond extent. My initial expectations were blown away in this course and I learned way more than I thought I would and have gained a new perspective on the United
This paper discusses three critical issues in the criminal justice system. It touches on the general issues of punishment philosophies, sentence decision making, and prison overcrowding and focused more specifically on the negative effects of each. Highlighted in this informational paper is the interrelated nature of the issues; each issue affects and is affected by the others. Data and information has been gathered from the FBI Uniform Crime Report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Amnesty International, the NAACP Legal Defense
1) Since the injured plaintiff was not wearing a seatbelt, why is Ford being sued for failing to test the seatbelt sleeve?
Before getting into studying the field of criminal justice I learned that my previous knowledge about prisons and prisoners was either completely wrong or very incomplete. My first original belief was that the worst kind of people were in jail. That if you walked into a jail every person that you would see there are the worst of the worst. Another original belief was that if someone was in prison then they did something that put them there. These original beliefs came from the typical sources you get growing up, your parents, school teachers, and peers. Growing up I was taught that prison was where the terrible people went and it’s a scary place that you don’t want to be. But the moment that impacted me the most about prisoners was my senior
In the modern world, competition is the bond that holds society together. Every person can relate to it whether that competition is within a sport, video game, or a court hearing. The Canadian legal structure operates on the adversarial system. Neil Brooks defines an adversarial system as one in “which the parties and not the judge have the primary responsibility for defining the issues in dispute and for carrying the dispute forward through the system” (Brooks, The judge and the Adversary system.p.341-353). Within the adversarial system the judge has less of a role. He’s passive due to his lack of participation in the fact-finding. Its opposing system is the
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.
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.
Which of the following statements concerning the severance of parties charged with a criminal offense is incorrect?
Mental Illness - The prisoner’s moral culpability for his offending is reduced by reason of his mental illness and the objective
At the beginning of the semester our Professor gave a speech on her personal accomplishment and to start she asked us how many of us knew someone who either was or had been incarcerated. Most of us in the class raised our hands in the affirmative, including myself. This may not seem like much in a classroom with roughly 25 students, but it does have some merit. The United States of America accounts for “5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population” (DuVernay, 13th). Within the last year California legislators have introduced Senate Bill 10 or the Bail: pretrial release bill, which seeks to eliminate pretrial detention and bail requirements for accused individuals who meet public safety criteria ("SB-10 Bail: pretrial release", 2017-2018). I argue that SB 10 doesn’t go far enough and should include that low level non-violent first offenders be offered alternative methods to incarceration. A policy such as SB 10 would allow California to serve as a model, reducing the effects of mass incarceration, creating a fairer system and eliminating coerced plea deals.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a massive amount of inmates began fillin up the United States prison systems. This huge rate of growth in this short amount of time, has greatly contributed to the prison overcrowding that the United States faces today. In fact, the prisons are still filled to the seams. This enormous flood of inmates has made it practically impossible for prison officials to keep up with their facilities and supervise their inmates. One of the main reasons why many prisons have become overcrowded is because of states’ harsh criminal laws and parole practices (Cohen). “One in every 100 American adults is behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the world” (Cohen). The amount of inmates in corrections systems, throughout the
As stated above, Lagemann believes in the transformative power of a liberal arts education and believes that it should be available to everyone, including the prison population. She has experienced first hand, the immense value that a prison education program can provide for inmates and wishes to utilize the lessons learned at BPI to benefit all. BPI not only illustrates the effectiveness of a college prison program in decreasing dicividism rates, and ultimately decreasing the financial burden of an exploding prison population, it also highlights the importance of higher education for all and how BPI’s specific approach towards education can help more traditional colleges with their low completion rates.
Judicial precedent refers to the sources of law where past decisions made by judges create law for future judges to follow. An example would be the Donoghue vs Stevenson case, where Stevenson had bought ginger beer, and Donoghue had drank it after their been a decomposed snail in it, however their was no charge because she was not in a contract with
It is common knowledge that the American prison system has grown exponentially in the last few decades. The prison population within the last forty years has risen by two million inmates. Multiple factors such as overcrowding and cost cutting have also decreased the quality of life within prisons by an order of magnitude. With this rising statistic, it becomes increasingly urgent to understand the effect of incarceration on our prisoners and whether the reformation process is actually doing more harm than good.
Throughout the United States there are many different laws among the fifty states that make up this union. The laws are different throughout the states because of the need of the laws. Living in one state and not having the advantages or disadvantages of a law in another state would not be that unfair or unequal. This is true because if you don’t like a law in your state you could always fight it and try to change it or you could always move out of that state and go to one that has the laws that you like.
This year during legal studies, I was able to help out with jacket racket organization, many others and I were able to bag donated jackets together. I learned as a group at the time that we all work fairly well together if we really put our minds to it. I also helped a little bit with the food hamper, Andrea and I were able to unbag the food donations and organize them into boxes as we collected the bags. Near the beginning of the year, the whole legal studies class was able to create a dance routine to warm-up for the Terry Fox run. Personally, I did not create the dance, but I was able to help out for the preparation of the run. In my group, we were able to organize music and many other things like the announcement. For the musical chairs event, I was able to help pull away chairs. At this time, we learned how to think quickly and act based on our given situations. I was also able to count money for the Terry Fox run, this took quite some time. Lastly, I was able to work a few games at the family dance even though I caught a fever.