Regina Galindo America's Family Prison Essay

"Count!" The prison guard yelled on a brisk Saturday in Maidens, Virginia. I watched as the prisoners lined the walls of the James River Correctional Facility. While the majority of my friends spent their Saturdays enjoying pizza and ice cream with their family, my Saturdays consisted of being in a prison visitation room. My father was serving a thirty year sentence for distributing crack cocaine. As the years went on, I began to look forward to seeing the barbed wire and prison guards. I knew that in the midst of the penitentiary environment, I would at least be able to see a father figure for a few hours.

For the past centuries, women have been fighting for their rights, from their right to vote to equal rights in the workplace. Women resistance is the act of opposing those in power, so women can have a voice in the world. Women in prison are often overlooked. In the 1970s, the women prisoners’ rights movement began, and it is still going on today. The number of incarcerated females is rapidly growing compared to men. According to Victoria Law, a prison rights activist, she stated that the percentage of female prisoners increased 108%. This struggle is significant because women in prison are being silenced; they are the most vulnerable people in our country (Siegal, 1998). Women prisoners have the highest rate of suicide because they are

The epidemic of mass incarceration affects many families within the United States. The problems of mass incarceration have been echoed far and wide, but it was not until recent years that the issue has been acknowledged, let alone fully addressed. Authors such as MK Asante and Bryan Stevenson, and filmmakers such as Ava Duvernay, have all discussed mass incarceration and its common threads such as the collapse of family structures, damage to mental, physical, and communal health, amongst other lasting impacts. Despite the commonalities, each artist takes on a different perspective on the issue and presents it in a different light.

Women have been fighting for equal rights for decades. And, as of a result of this, have gained many equal rights. But are those rights just supposed to disappear when a woman gets incarcerated, and at what price does it cost that woman, to get her rights back, or does she ever get them back? The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and with each year the percentage of women that make up that rate, are growing. According to Statistics on Women Offenders- 2015. (1997), “Since 2010, the female jail population has been the fastest growing correctional population, increasing by an average annual rate of 3.4 percent”. It also states that, in 2013, women made up 17% of the jail population, and 25% of probation population in the U.S. Not only have these numbers been steadily rising, but of those incarcerated, approximately 77% are likely to reoffend (p.1). This has risen quite a concern in society today. Why is there such a high chance that incarcerated women will likely reoffend? At a micro level, is it the fault of the woman? Or, a larger issue at the macro level, with society, laws, policies, and loss of the most basic rights that every citizen should be entitled to? According to Pinto, Rahman, & Williams. (2014), incarcerated women need help meeting individual needs when they are released, such as, reducing drug or alcohol use, finding a job, health issues, as well as help in dealing with the impact of

In her defense, going in the prison has its own ethical concerns, and her status as female researcher does not fit into the prison environment –where she can experience emotional and perhaps physical danger. Ultimately, she implemented the sociological approach by disclosing narratives to get as close to first-hand experience as possible, while maintain research

Careless inmates leave as careless felons. In the memoir, A Place to Stand, the author Jimmy Santiago Baca understands the challenges of prison. Baca didn’t have much of a good life growing up; in and out of foster homes, getting into trouble and winding up in jail, but something good came out of all of that. Baca went through many positive transformations which are conveyed in his poems, “I am Offering This Poem”, “Who Understands Me but Me”, and “Immigrants in Our Own Land”, which were accomplished by his ability to teach himself how to read and write.

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

Joining wide social occasions with his own specific understanding as a detainee, John Irwin develops a capable and sensible outline of the enormous city confine. Not in the smallest degree like imprisonment workplaces, which keep sentenced gangsters confines on an extremely essential level tie got people not yet charged or arraigned any affirmed wrongdoing. Irwin battles that as opposed to controlling the unfriendly, keep trances and undermines these individuals, ingraining newcomers to the riffraff class. All in all, Irwin addresses the issue of prison change and the matter of social control requested by society. Reissued over a quarter century its shrouded scattering with another foreword by Jonathon Simon, The Jail remains a phenomenal record

“The United States has the biggest prison population in the world--we incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, even though we are only 5 percent of the world’s population.” (Kerman 299) One of the main issues dealt with in the novel is the subject of the United States’ ever-expanding prison population. It is evident that far too many Americans are sentenced for ridiculous amounts of time, and for petty crimes that hold little to no true law-enforcement reasoning behind them. In the book, Kerman acquaints herself with a variety of inmates jailed for menial felonies, from political protesters, to drug-offenders, to money-launderers, turned respectable business women charged with a decade-old crime, like

You are there 23 hours a day, day in and day out, year in and year out. When leaving your cage, you are subjected to a dehumanizing strip search which includes a genital and anal probe, and then handcuffed. You are completely under the control of prison guards who carry pepper gas and long, black batons.” Jim Bencivenga, author of the article, “Inside looking Out”, published by the Christian Science Monitor, can concur with this inmate’s experience by stating, “What the public gets for its money is a mean, ugly place that controls, limits, and dehumanizes.” Taken from the perspective of an author and an inmate, it is apparent that the prison system can be a nasty place to be, which can have a psychological toll on an inmate, and creates a greater reason for a prisoner to seek a sort of escape from it all when they may have nothing; such as art. Most of the inmates claim that the art they create is just a way of expressing themselves and they are not worried about the profit, like James Allridge from Axtman’s article for example. Allridge says, “My art allows me to give back something

“Prison City, U.S.A.,” by Jill Rothenberg, is an article that explains the effects of the prisons of Cañon City on the prison workers and the citizens of the town. The prison workers have a couple different views of their job in the prison. Some view it merely as a good source of income and a promise of a pension after retirement or as a job that must be dealt with by someone. Even in the bad situation of one of the worst prisons in America, some guards see their job as a way of help society in restructuring the habits and morals of the criminals as they prepare them for their return to normal life. The central theme of this article is the effects of the prison on the lives of those who live around and work

The movie Attica starring Morgan Freeman and Charles Durning took place on September 9, 1971, at the prison known as “Attica State Prison”. Inmates of the prison took control of the d-yard and took 38 guards as hostages after their continuous peaceful and respectful efforts did not work out in their favor. The prisoners fought for months protesting their reasonable inhumane living conditions such as asking for better food, better living conditions, better health care and sensitivity training for guards just to name a few. In this movie, we investigate the rebellion and the oppression, revealing the institutionalized injustices of the inmates and the aftermath of the whole event.

and unjust treatment, something Weiwei is very familiar with. His artworks have moved away from purely a method of self-expression, rather they are a catalyst for global change. Contemporary art, from his perspective, requires and sometimes creates, an audience devoted to liberty; presenting his work in a prison, is evidence of this mindset. Weiwei reminds us to think critically. Although many of the countries in which the prisoners represented in his works come from are now ‘free nations’, we cannot forget a time when this did not apply; the works are held at a notorious, former jail in America proves this. In addition to this, the fact that a work about liberty is held in a prison is ironic in

The definition of a prison in Google states, “a building in which people are legally held as a punishment for a crime they have committed or while awaiting trial,” but is a true prison? Although places seem free, the people can be truly trapped through the lack of ability to express oneself. Without the capability to express oneself people feel stifled, cut off from the world around them, resulting in them feeling locked up. Through the use of opposition as a metaphor for imprisonment in The True Prison, Ken Saro Wiwa, the author, describes that a true prison is a lack of freedom of expression.

It has been a long time since I have seen the TV series Prison Break, but I remember enough of it to complete this paper. Throughout this quarter we have talked about many different topics that show how the American correctional system works. There were some topics that were shocking to see and learn and then there were some topics that were familiar as they were shown in movies and TV series. There have been times when some topics were shocking as it was hard to believe because coming from India I never thought things that were shown in TV series could be true. For me, they were more of a fictional, but I guess there were true and when I watched this show I was like 16 to 17 years old. In the TV series,