The Treatment Of A Prison Sentence

Transgender people are discriminated against due to a variety of reasons. We will look at how being transgendered in prison affects their right to health care, how health care laws are changing for people who have transgender identity disorder (GID) and how the Eighth Amendment is

Discuss: The tension between rehabilitation and punishment in an incarceration setting. What happens when one is emphasized over the other? Is it possible to strike a balance?

Prisoners that are incarcerated go through many hardships during the course of their sentence. The mistreatment that inmates in prison encounter is unjustifiable in many cases. Amongst the inmates mistreated, transgender prisoners are challenged in many ways with abuse, misconduct, and discrimination. Transgender individuals are people who do not identify themselves with the gender that was assigned at birth. The high-risk profile of being a transgender inmate in prison strikes for deep concern and something needs to be done.

Imagine being a woman in a men’s prison. For many prisoners, this is the case because most state court correctional decide to sentence transsexual women in transition inmates based on sex assignment, not their identity. Within most dominant U.S. cultures transsexual women in transition are defined as those whose sense of gender is so absolutely opposed to their sex assignment at birth that they individuals desire to live exclusively as the opposite sex, undergo hormone treatments to align with the opposite sex, and sometimes undergo surgery to match their sexual organs with their gender identity (Stirnitzke 291). Often people are

Transgendered people in America have made many great strides since the 1990s. They have encountered violence, lack of health care, and the loss of homes, jobs, family and friends. There have been many phases of the struggle of being transgendered in America over the years. The current phase we must be in now is equal rights. There are many variations of discrimination against the transgendered community. In our society we simply do not like what we do not understand. It is easier to discriminate than to try and understand. We are all created different and we should appreciate our differences. The change must come by addressing the views of the public. There is much justification in the unequal rights of transgendered peoples. The Human

Statistics have proven that incarceration alone is a monetary pitfall and does not deter the cluster of non-violent drug related crimes in this country. We need to create an alternative habilitation pattern for these offenders including an assessment of their mental health, specialized life skills training, and occupational employment assistance: in some cases, in lieu of incarceration and in others, in conjunction with incarceration. Ask yourself these questions: What affect would this type of intense program have on the recidivism rate? Would we be saving tax-payer dollars by producing graduates from drug rehabilitation programs instead of housing repeat criminals? To

More and more people in Britain are being sentenced to jail time: this is a fact. In 2004, there are currently over eighty thousand inmates.[1] (Peter Reydt, 2004 / Scottish Executive, 2003) Crime is on the increase but our prisons are already overcrowded. Consequently, new prisons will be required to accommodate prisoners. Where will the money come from to pay for the construction of new prisons?

The pro-SRS party argues that the denial of sex-reassignment surgery to trans inmates, who are in medical need of the procedure, is a direct violation of the inmates’ eighth amendment rights. The Eight Amendment reserves all inmates the right to adequate medical care and the protection from “cruel and unusual punishment”. Inmates who suffer from gender dysphoria can suffer from symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and even self-mutilation if they do not receive proper treatment in a timely manner and the prison systems have exploited this greatly. There have been cases where trans inmates do end up

There is not a plethora of research on the transgender inmate population. Brown and McDuffie (2009) report 750 transgender prisoners were in custody in 2007. The only reason this population is last on the list of importance is because of the limited population. Transgender inmate population pose one of the most challenging legal questions to the DOC. How far does the DOC have to go in providing medical, psychiatric, or surgical needs to those inmates who enter the correctional facility as transgender (Brown & McDuffie, 2009). There has been some successful litigation that has addressed these issues with inmates who have been diagnosed with gender identity disorders (GID). Brown and McDuffie (2009), suggest California has some of the most “comprehensive directive” that allows inmates to continue or initiate “cross-sex hormones for appropriately diagnosed inmates” (p.288). Ultimately, the transgender population pose a real threat to the correctional environment, such as, safety issues and predatory behavior by other inmates. One area of concern for transgender inmate population, because it is such a relatively new population, there are not a lot of facilities medically equipped to care for them properly (Brown & McDuffie, 2009), a lot like the elderly inmate population. This population is as equally at risk of being violated as any of the other special

The US prison system is famous for its notorious inefficiency. While not being the largest nation in the world, America has the largest prisoner population, surpassing countries such as India, Russia, and China in both inmate population rates and numbers of inmates per 100,000 people. As it stands, there are over 2,100,000 incarcerated prisoners, with over 7 million being supervised as part of their probation period (World Prison Brief, 2015). According to McLaughlin, Pettus-Davis, Brown, Veeh, and Renn (2016), the total burden on the US economy for maintaining the prison system, including the social costs, exceeds 1 trillion dollars a year. US prison population began growing exponentially ever since the adoption of the so-called “War on Drugs” policy, declared by President Nixon in 1971, which was an attempt to curb the flow of drugs flowing into the country through the Mexican border. While this effort proved to be a failure on its own, it also significantly contributed to the increase of prisoner population in the US.

It has been about six years since I last saw my cousin, who will remain anonymous, and unfortunately, the last time I saw him, it was through a thick sheet of bulletproof glass, talking over a telephone, in the county jail where he was being held during sentencing. I regret to say that this was not the first time I had seen him “behind bars”. As a matter of fact, I cannot even remember the last time I saw him when he was not wearing an orange jumpsuit. I know that when I was young, I always got picked on in school and he was the only person who stood up for me. He protected me and loved me the way only your favorite

In 1973, New York State passed the first harshest statewide anti-drug law in the country. Named after New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the Rockefeller Drug laws required a mandatory lengthy prison sentences for all felony-level drug and possession offenses. The intent of lengthy prison sentence was meant to deter drug abuse and drug crimes. Between 1970s and 2000s, the Prison population tripled from 11 percent (12,579) in 1973 to almost 35 percent (70,154) in 2008 (DCJS, 2011; Feinblatt, Berman & Foxx, 2000). The overcrowding of prison in response to drug-related crime created a new opportunity for reformers to find alternative ways in treating drug offenders instead of placing them in prison. As drug courts began to grow exponentially during the 1990s, advocacy groups led the charge in coordinating efforts to lobby efforts in reforming the Rockefeller sentencing. In 2009, under Governor Paterson, the State legislature enacted legislation that shifted away from mass incarceration towards a public health model.

America; the land of the free and the home of the brave. Free, that is, until you break one of America’s many laws and are convicted and sentenced to incarceration in the prison system. Depending on the severity of the crime, one might be sentenced to either a minimum, medium, or maximum security prison.

Sexuality and gender identity issues have had a long history in the fields of mental health and public policy. There has been much debate surrounding the inclusion of issues related to gender and sexual identity in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual since its initial stages of development (Drescher, 2010). Debates in this field of interest have been fragmented between several stakeholders (Ehrbar, 2010). This fragmentation has created complications in the process of developing United States policies that are inclusive of individuals with gender identities that do not match the gender to which they were assigned at birth. Specifically, policies surrounding gender reassignment surgeries have been difficult to develop and

Our society tends to jump to conclusions and make assumptions of prisoners. Despite what they have committed and how severe it may be they are still human. We look at them as if they are inhumane because they are in prison. They still deserve some of the rights that they had before being convicted. I’m not saying that I am okay with the crimes they have committed but I am okay with them having a little more of their basic rights.