Separation Exists Between Society And The Penal System

Although the United States composes a mere five percent of the world’s population, it holds twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners (13th 0:01-0:05). In recent years, mass incarceration, or the practice of arresting vast amounts of people, has become a relevant issue within the United States. As rising amounts of individuals, primarily minorities, are arrested, for both serious and petty crimes, government spending on jails and inmates has undergone a drastic increase as well. The large sum of money that has been directed toward correctional facilities has initiated a great amount of controversy, as many believe that it should be used to cover the rising cost of education instead. Since the majority of inmates are currently minorities,

Like Angela Davis, I believe that the prison system needs to be abolished. The prison system which is a significant part of punishment is incompetent and deeply flawed in the United States. Prison system reform needs immediate attention while abolition permanently will require time. Nietzsche’s theory of punishment explains how punishment come about in society and Davis’s critique of the prison system helps back my argument that the prison system needs to be abolished.

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   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are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

Prison reform is an issue that has been a concern for a long period of time. The problems that Angela Davis brings up throughout her book are only some of the problems with the prison system. Whether it be the influence of corporations on prisons and legislators, the role that racism plays, or the safety of the prisoners. Her solution to these problems is the abolition of jails and prisons by creating policies that will reduce the number of people sent to prison. This would destroy the prison system as the main concept of punishment. The ways that she aims to do this is by providing physical and mental care to everybody, demilitarize schools, and change the justice system to one based around reconciliation rather than retribution. I find myself to agree with many of the concerns that she lists and believe her argument to be somewhat convincing. However, I do not believe that a complete abolition of prisons is what is necessary to fix the prison system. This paper will explore the concerns that she voices in her argument, how convincing I find them, and what I believe to be the flaws in her conclusion.

Over the past few decades, the United States has witnessed a huge surge in the number of individuals in jail and in prison. Evidence suggests the mass imprisonment policy from the last 40 years was a horrible catastrophe. Putting more people in prison not only ruined lives, it disrupted families, prevented ex-prisoners to find housing, to get an education, or even a good job. Regrettably, the United States has a higher percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is increasing exponentially. The expense produced by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. Although people are incarcerated for a number of reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. By researching mass incarceration, I hope to get society to understand that incarcerating an individual not only effects the family, but we will look at the long term consequences on society and how the United States can remain safe and, at the same time, undo much of the damage that results from large-scale imprisonment.

inmates cannot read, they also are less educated than their fathers had been (Nealy, 2008,

Even when people do terrible things, such as Carter, who received the death penalty because he was accused of rape, I still feel that our prison system does nothing to help these people become better citizens, but rather only pushes them towards more corruption. In prison, the atmosphere does very little to promote rehabilitation, which I believe is something that all prisons should focus on the most. If the people in prison are not taught how to return to society as improved citizens, but are rather sent to a place where their personalities become more corrupted, the system will continue to be stalled. This is where Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative can help because they are fighting against mass incarceration, which tries to prevent unreliable convictions and excessive

“Beginning in the 1970s, the prison population began swelling, climbing steadily through 2009. Now, this nation imprisons more of its residents, 2.2 million, than any other.The United States jails a quarter of the world 's prisoners, although it contains only 5 percent of the world 's population. The statistics are sobering for a republic that celebrates justice, fairness and equality as the granite pillars of its democracy. (Walsh, 2016).” The underlying foundations of America 's mass-imprisonment arrangements are tangled ever, legislative issues, social clash and imbalance. It 's a pretzel-rationale maze, and to fathom it or even disentangle it, investigators say, will require clearing, head-on changes. However, those early endeavors in the long run exploded backward, Hinton said, throwing “ "low-income youth — whose families are on welfare, who live in public housing projects, who attend urban public schools, and who have family members with arrest records — as potentially delinquent." ( Walsh, 2016). With regards to the criminal equity framework, examiners say that lessening imbalance essentially would require an update of the country 's sentencing framework, better preoccupation and avoidance programs, jail changes, more successful policing arrangements and preparing, and complete support for previous detainees attempting to shape stable lives. The prison system is unfair because of the mass incarceration of blacks, the war on drugs, the population and the prison

The United States Criminal Justice System has been what most citizens ask for a reform, but we’ve seen little to no change through the years. Currently, our country has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of the total prison population, meaning that we have the highest incarceration rates in the world and it’s been increasing through the past years. The United States of America in 1974 had 100 out of every 100,000 people incarcerated; today, roughly 700 out of the 100,000 people are prison (Madden, 2015, p,14). Mass incarceration has been one of the biggest problems in our Criminal Justice System and one of the biggest issues to be solved. American citizens have has several

Confined prisoners, many of whom are later released at the end of the sentence, are excruciated with a new behavioral deficiency as a result of their time in solitary confinement. This can dangerously affect social orders/groups and it can prompt higher rates of recidivism among these prisoners. As for a psychological aspect, any human contact is critical capacity for keeping the faculties in place and when that human contact is banned or denied, inmates can lose their capacity to work appropriately. Now and again prompt themselves to inflict self-harm as well as harm others in the population. Only one could imagine what this isolation could do to a

There are many books that I have read since I have been in school throughout the years, but none of the books asked a question like Angela Davis’ book, “ Are Prisons Obsolete?”. When I read the title it did not get me thinking about the why’s and how’s because I thought I had the answer right away, the answer I thought I had was that prisons are necessary. That answer was with me until I started to actually read her book and understand that it took more to comprehend Davis’ thinking in writing the book than just answering the question that was on the cover. Davis wrote the book for the people that care about what the government is doing and those who want to do something about it, but it is also for those who happen to pick up the book for

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,”

Whether guilty of crimes or innocent, our incarceration system is an issue that many activists rally around in terms of its success and promise in correcting and rehabilitating criminal behavior. So, to read letters and hear the voices of those who are living on the marginalized edges of our society, but who rarely have a voice in the issue that’s being nationally rallied around, is an uncommon circumstance that should be noted and have more attention and action drawn to. Their desire to educate themselves within the confines of a prison wall is real and heard by those of us who take time to spend their weekday evenings in the bottom of a church basement, sorting through donated books, and reading literary wish-lists of those who are incarcerated.

Education programs in correctional facilities is not a new idea in our society. The idea of implementing these programs in prisons has been around as early as the 1700s. Correctional education programs today consist of two basic types of programs — literacy development and vocational training. Literacy development is focused on improving inmate’s reading and math skills while vocational training is more focused on inmate’s ability to gain skills they can use in the workplace once they are released. However, these programs were unheard of in the 1700s. The sole purpose of education programs during this time was to teach inmates how to read. These programs in the 1700s only focused on inmate’s ability to read because it allowed them to understand

Throughout the ages, society has relied upon the criminal justice system to serve and protect them. While societies have changed and criminal justice systems have evolved, the basic needs and wants of the communities have stayed the same. The criminal justice system strives to develop innovative approaches to integrate itself in the community while keeping an even balance of administrating justice and providing resources to keep people from harm.