The New Black

“What I Learned as a Kid in Jail” is a speech given at a TEDTalk convention to a group of young men and women delivered by Ismael Nazario, a prison reform advocate where he does work for The Fortune Society, a non profit organization. Nazario was arrested when he was just under eighteen for robbery and sent directly to Rikers Island where he spent 300 days in solitary confinement, before ever being convicted of the crime. Nazario’s goal in delivering his speech to a group of younger men and women is to make them aware of the way correctional officers treat younger inmates and how inmates should be spending their time doing productive activities and understanding they do not have to go back to the life they were living. Nazario accomplished this goal by sharing personal stories from his past experiences.

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

In this society, depending on the crime many people may view women in prison as people who should be kept off the streets, such as thugs, gang members, and women who are drug addicts. A big misunderstanding that people have is that they see them as a lost cause. However, through each of these stories you get to know each person and their life stories

Alice Goffman, the speaker in this TED Talk, does a great job reaching out to her audience in a great number of ways. Her purpose in this TED Talk titled, “How We’re Priming Some Kids for College, and Others for Prison,” is to grab the attention of all people, but it is directed towards the younger generations, to show them that they have to work together in order for change to be made. The change would be to work together to help end the problem of mass incarceration; to help completely rebuild the Criminal Justice System. Throughout her talk, Goffman uses examples of logos, ethos, and pathos to reach her audience in an effective way, and to inform them of the problems going on with the United States Criminal Justice System.

women has increased significantly, increasing at a rate double to the rate of male incarceration since 1980 (Covington & Bloom, 2006). Braithwaite, Treadwell and Arriola note that incarcerated women have historically been a forgotten population, and despite the rapid growth of the population, their needs have continued to be ignored (2005). In addition to the stigma that comes with being or having been incarcerated,

Male prisoners also continue to make up the majority of the prison population. However, women prisoner rates have been on the rise and have exceeded that of male growth rates since 1995. In fact, due to the increase of the women prison population, various issues have arisen which require women to be treated differently from men. Such issues correctional facility’s face because of this increase include program delivery, housing conditions, medical care, staffing, and security (American Corrections, 2016). These problems are in part due to the different social and economic differences women are faced with in prison and while preparing for their release back to society.

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.

Piper Kerman, a freelance producer living in New York City with her boyfriend, was incarcerated in 2004 for money laundering and drug trafficking. She tells this story in her memoir, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. Kerman tells her audience about her escapades in her twenties, and her normal life afterwards. But one day she is greeted with two police officers at her door, and things go downhill from there. Kerman is later arrested after a very lengthy court case and taken to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Kerman makes light of her year spent in prison, writing about the different people she met and the experiences she had. Overall, Kerman’s memoir is an easy and fun read

Introduction: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman portrays the experience of a middle-class white woman serving a 13-month sentence in a minimum security prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Being from a different cultural and socio-economic background than most of her fellow inmates, Kerman’s prison experience wasn’t as dreadful as the others. Without directly putting herself in their shoes, Kerman acknowledged to the readers that the guards abused their power towards other inmates; knowing the guards were most likely use to the abuse and neglect and wouldn’t be listened to if they were to report the abuse. The mistreatment that certain women encounter as they get caught up in the system because of racism, poverty, and low-level drug involvement

The Federal Prison System hearing is the meeting that I have chosen to watch. This hearing involves the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and took place on August 4th, 2015 at Dirksen Senate Office Building. Two panels, one including advocates and the other members of the Justice Department, testified on the overall effectiveness of our nations federal prison system. Piper Kerman, the author of “Orange Is the New Black”, made an appearance and shared her experiences in prison.

After reading A Woman Doing Life : Notes from a Prison for Women, I learned a lot more than I thought I knew about the life of women in jails or prisons. Erin George , the main character , gives readers an ethnographic insight on the struggles women face in prison. The hardships women face in prison consist of, and are limited to harsh shakedowns, poor medical treatment, and changes within the prison system that intentionally dehumanizes women inmates. Erin George before prison was a middle class women who seem to live a decent life, she is a mother of 3 and had a great support system within her family. She was happily married until she was convicted of murdering her husband which landed her six-hundred-three years in prison.

Today, “the number of girls and women doing time is utterly unprecedented in U.S. history. In 1977, there were just slightly more than 11,000 women in state or federal prison. By 2004, the number of women in prisons had increased by a breathtaking 757 percent. At the end of 2006, there were 203,100 women in jails, state and federal prisons, plus another 1,094,000 women on probation or parole, for a total of 1.3 million females under some form of correctional supervision. Another 15,000-20,000 girls are being held in juvenile detention.”(CDC 2016). While Euro-American women still outnumber any other demographic group in jails and prisons, African American women are four times more likely to be locked up than their Euro-American

In response to Devon Smith’s review of Whither Justice: Stories of Women in Prison reviewed that her time spent in jail was not simply part of her fieldwork but actual incarceration “as an under trial prisoner.”

America, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 27+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=j026901&v= 2.1&id=GALE%7CA47 0560981&it= r&asid=d577e46b09a103895b2301ed6e50d10c This article wrote by a former inmate who received education in the prison system, shows a completely different point of view that I thought I would never find.

As soon as we got to the hotel, I saw our classmates all run outside cheerfully. I noticed why, it had started snowing. I put my hand out to catch a snowflake. I grabbed Luke’s hand and pulled him across the street to the group of classmates.