Summary Of One Day In The Penal Colony By Frank Erikson

For this unit, I decided to read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” The author, Franz Kafka, was an early 20th century middle-class Jew who lived in Prague and wrote mostly in German. The present short story, published in 1919, refers to an unnamed penal colony somewhere in the tropics and focuses on four characters: the commander of the camp, an invited foreign dignitary, a guard, and a victim. The story revolves a twisted idea of justice, where the punishment does not fit the crime, and the condemned does not know neither the charge nor the nature of his punishment. Indeed, justice seems completely irrelevant to the commander who is only fascinated with the torturing as an art and science; the apotheosis of the latter represented with the torturing machine that resembles a CNC router that inscribes the accusation on the skin of the condemned who then dies slowly from bleeding.

In part 3, Morris (2002, p.171) discusses why prison conditions matter and why penal reformers, including himself, have devoted their lives and travelled thousands of miles

The prisons we typically think of in modern American society are distinctly and majorly different from the Stalinist labor camp Ivan Denisovich Shukhov presides in the book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but all prisons have four major purposes. These purposes are retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. By rating the prison camp that Shukhov resided in for 3,653 days, a greater understanding of the negative impact placed on Shukhov can be granted. Before stating how well the specific prison camp followed each of these purposes, I will first go into further detail into what each of these purposes includes in order to provide a rubric when grading the Stalinist prison camp.

Skip Hollandsworth candidly explores the subjects of juvenile crime and sentencing in the electronic long form newspaper article, “The Prisoner”. The purpose of the essay is to inform the reader about juvenile sentencing and to persuade the audience that there are clear problems with aspects of the U.S. prison system. The article is easily accessible to a large audience because it is online. Hollandsworth takes into account that his audience, mostly consisting of Texas Monthly readers, may already have pre-established notions about the topic, so he considers other sides while still supporting his argument. Edwin Debrow, a preteen member of the Crips, committed a murder when he was 12-years old and received a 27-year sentence through the

There are two sides to the story, and it takes demonstration to visualize these points. Economist, Glenn Loury, in his article, “A Nation of Jailers,” portrays the issues among the exclusion of prisoners in society through mass incarceration. By using a variety of rhetorical techniques, he discusses the issue within America and its’ criminal system.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander introduces the idea as to how the modern prison system is used to imprison the African American population in the United States. Alexander seems to believe that the ‘War on Drugs’ has replaced previous forms of racial systematic oppression in the United States, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws. Alexander believes that to amend this form of systematic oppression it is necessary to disregard colorblindness in prison reform and approach modern prison systems as a form of racial oppression and increase affirmative action policies. Even though Alexander makes a valid argument, her identity politic approach seems problematic and antithetical to ending systematic racism in the modern prison system.

In contrast, Hernu’s story “Norway’s Ideal Prison” from One World, Many Cultures talks about the world’s first human “Ecological Prison” on Bastoy Island, Norway. Bastoy Prison is Norway’s largest low-security prison. On the island murders and other violent felons are found, but the guards trust them with knives, chainsaws, and other weapons. “‘I have not had one violent incident here,’ the governor continues. ‘One inmate did managed to escape by stealing a fishing boat one night, and his punishment was to be sent back to a closed prison’” (Hernu 247). Bastoy prison is pretty lenient, and laid back when it comes to prisoners but if you break any of the rules you will be sent back immediately. Frank, a cattle herder said, “‘…For the first time in my life I feel motivated and believe in myself. I really believe I can break my circle of crime’” (Hernu 250). The results Bastoy Prison has produced shows that the “Ecological Prison” does work.

Many of Man's struggles are usually the result of societal standards, control, and punishment. These struggles are present in both One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through setting and internal monologue, both authors depict the effects of the brutalities of communism on Man's spirituality.

In my experience of reading the text, Behind a Convicts Eyes, I have learned many things about prison life. It has in fact changed my perception of what I thought prison life was like. Prison is in fact a fight for survival, and the weaker inmates will be used and abused by the stronger population. To clarify what I mean, many of the weaker prisoners are sometimes expected to pay for protection from other inmates, or they join prison gangs to be safe. According to the text, it would appear that the inmates actually have more control over their existence than I would have thought that they do. When I use this term, I mean it in the sense that the inmates use the system to their advantage, or at

What was at issue was not whether the prison environment as too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power, it is this whole technology go power over the body that the technology of the ‘soul’ - that of the educationalist, psychologists and psychiatrists - fails either to conceal or compensate, for the simple reason that it is one of its tools. (TBOTC, Foucault, pg. 28)

When we do research on daily prison life, we come across two typical but less than ideal situations: either social imaginaries cloud our judgment or information provided by the prisons themselves hide certain weak or bad aspects that they do not want to make public. We can also find information on TV, but most of the time it either exaggerates or minimizes the facts. In order to obtain more reliable information, we have to have access to people who are working or have worked in this institution, and such will be the sources of this essay. We will be describing and giving examples of prison violence according to three types of violence: sexual, physical and psychological violence.

If we heat soil and water for 10 min and let them cool for 10 min, the soil will heat rapidly and cool slowly, because dark colors absorb a lot of heat. When we heated the materials up, the temperature difference for soil was 6.1 degrees Celsius. The temperature difference for water was 2.4 degrees Celsius. When we let the materials cool for 10 min, the difference in temperature for soil was 3.4 degrees Celsius. The difference in temperature for the water was 0.9 degrees Celsius. My hypothesis was partially correct. While the temperature of the soil increased quickly, the temperature of the soil cooled cooled quicker than the water.

This week’s reading focused on prisons. The Society of Captives was written by Gresham M. Sykes in 1958. He conducted a study on a maximum security prison in New Jersey. Chapter 1 focused on the prison and its settings. The author goes into detail about the size of the cells and what the prison actually looks like. He also writes about how the prisoner is no longer seen as man but as a number. My Sunday school teacher visits prisons to teach about the bible. He has commented to me that is exactly how certain correction officers see the prisoners. They are nothing but a number to some individuals. This can lower their self-image (Sykes, 1958).

Being a woman in the Elizabethan era was extremely tough as they were treated as objects and only married men that profited their Father. This has all changed very dramatically since that era.This is shown very well in the texts that we have studied this term. (“The Taming Of the Shrew”, and “Ten Things I Hate About You”). In The Taming of the Shrew, this was very evident as Baptista, the girl's Father, gave Petrucio, a very ostentatious man, a reasonable dowry to try to “tame” Katherina, the extremely opinionated daughter. Ironically, her sister is the kind of woman who would have been considered the perfect bride as she was loyal, quiet and did what she was told. Being male in these days meant that you were expected to have money, influence

When an individual is introduced to the prison life, after violating rules and laws, he or she must come to terms about the journey he or she are about to take behind bars in prison. No one can save them, or do their time for them, and a majority of their freedom has been stripped from them either temporarily or permanently. Prison life deals with all walks of life and is not discriminative toward any race. In this paper I will discuss my perspective on prison life, policies I would enforce an inmate’s need for respect, changes on correctional policy, and why people commit crimes.