Walking Into Correctional Facilities

"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.

Prior to visiting the prison, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was nervous but also excited to see how everything operated. I had never been to a jail or a prison prior to this field trip. I was expecting to see one big building surrounded by high fences and coiled barbed wire. Once inside, I was expecting to see people dressed in orange doing various activities, much like in movies and television shows, even though I knew these weren’t true.

Before the 1820s, most prisons resembled classrooms where inmates lived in large rooms together like a dormitory. The newer prisons of the era, like New York’s Auburn Prison, shepherded men into individual cells at night and silent labor during the day, a model that would prove enduring. Women at Auburn, however, lived in a small attic room above

Four concrete walls, a steel bed, and a sink to soak the unclean clothes in as well as an insignificantly compact restroom. Welcome to solitary confinement where the lights always stay on and there’s always room for just one, you. When we think about solitary confinement we probably think of a killer or rapist getting what they deserve. What we don’t see is another human life being psychologically destroyed. Some of these prisoners have been in solitary confinement from a couple of years to decades. It is true that these are not honorable or peace keeping men, but a human life being tortured by solitude is a torture no one deserves.

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   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are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

Conditions inside the prison were no better. For starters, many of the prisoners were those who had committed menial crimes. Worse so, many were war heroes, back from Vietnam who couldn’t find a job and thus had to go about other illegal means to stay alive, and thus were thrown in prison. Attica prison in particular was famous at the time among prisoners for having the most horrific treatment of their inmates. Guards did whatever they could both legally and illegally to keep their prisoners in perpetual fear and discomfort. The prisoners were not just treated like children, but as animals. The one thing prisoners treasure the most is their contact with the outside world. It keeps them sane and allows them to remain in some type of contact both with their families as well as with what is going on outside the prison walls. But, guards did whatever

Most of us won’t really live for a minute behind the walls in order to be empathetic with the prisoners and that’s probably the reason we normally don’t feel a thing even if we read the inner life of the American prison (Gopnik, 2012). Adam Gopnik (2012) describes the life as “ not that of lock and key but that of the lock and clock.” Time frozen behind the walls and electronic securities with panic, paranoia and

After listening to and or reading the transcripts of Locked Down: Gangs in the Supermax by Michael Montgomery, one gets a glimpse of prison life, sociological issues inmates and staff face, and the subculture of prison life faced by staff and prisoners alike on a daily basis. However, instead of delving completely in to the situational circumstances of prisoner life, it is more important to understand the history of this Supermax prison and why it was constructed to begin with. Further, it is important to understand the philosophy of the need for the Secure Housing Unit, which is the most secure and isolated portion of Pelican Bay Prison.

Hassine begins his narrative as he is entering prison but this time as an inmate. Prior to his incarceration, Hassine was an attorney (Hassine, 2011). Even then as an attorney, the high walls of prison intimated Hassine (Hassine, 2011). As Hassine was being processed into the system, he expressed how he systematically became hopeless from the very prison structure itself as well as because of the intimidation he felt by uniforms. Prisons of the past actually had a goal to aid individuals through rehabilitation by instilling new values in order to correct the wrongs that one may have committed during their lifetime but today this is no longer true. . Hassine draws colorful depictions of how dim and unfamiliar a prison can be in which instills fear in an individual soon as he or she

Have you ever noticed anything that is exactly like something else? No, me either! But as a criminal justice student, I’m being forced to compare one of the things that we’ll probably see in our everyday life. That one thing is the difference between two jails. As we were visiting the two different jails I noticed a lot of things that were different like building, the security, the visitation area, the prison area, the holding cells, the work rooms, there were a lot of things that were different. So I’ll like to take the time to tell you about three of the things that stood out to me.

Foremost among them was a former prisoner who had served nearly seventeen years behind bars. This consultant made us aware of what it was like to be a prisoner. He also introduced us to a number of other ex-convicts and correctional personnel during an earlier Stanford summer school class we co-taught on "The Psychology of Imprisonment." Our prison was constructed by boarding up each end of a corridor in the basement of Stanford's Psychology Department building. That corridor was "The Yard" and was the only outside place where prisoners were allowed to walk, eat, or exercise, except to go to the toilet down the hallway (which prisoners did blindfolded so as not to know the way out of the prison). To create prison cells, we took the doors off some laboratory rooms and replaced them with specially made doors with steel bars and cell numbers.

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.

Consequently, I believe my thought process not only started with law enforcement officers, but also ended there as well. There was not mention of what happened in prisons such as their conditions or even the social construction that occurs inside. There was no news cast or school discussion on the impact of America’s prison systems on the defiant individual. Therefore, their wellbeing was not my concern. I did not pay attention or care to notice the individual that was arrested once those cuffs were on. It was a symbolic condemnation of their guilt, and it was one that I believed should be displayed in an even more radical

It was December of 1959, my mom and dad had died from a “fatal” car accident, or at least that’s what the detectives had said. I had been packing all my personal belongings for a week now, since I had no other family to live with except my Aunt, but she had made it clear that she didn’t want to take care of an extra child, since she already had five. Therefore I would be going to a boarding school for girls. I would only have to stay there for two years since I was sixteen and would be going off to college after I graduate. My aunt would be the one picking me up to take me. She made it crystal clear that she loved me very much and that as soon as Sammy, my cousin graduated, there would be an extra room and I could come live with her and the kids. After the long drive since the school was about three hours away and all she talked about was how sorry she was for me, I was glad I had arrived at this school. I was expecting it to be a nice, girly, bright school. But I didn’t see any of that. I saw a dark stone building with vines and overgrown grass covering the walls and sidewalks. My aunt gave me a sorrowful look and gave me a tight hug. I smiled, waved, and watched her drive away. Maybe it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I looked up and saw on the Stone that the word “Radley asylum” was engraved in. I looked at it strangely and wondered if I was at the wrong place. I continued to walk and before I could even knock, the door opened by itself. I had chills going down

An additional observation that I noticed is that once we moved locations, the correction officers completely changed their attitude from impolite to being content. They displayed a sense of openness and tranquility recognizing that we, the outside students, will not be able to enter the outside unit anymore. It is pleasant to observe that their mindset has changed since being in the actual prison, they displayed assertiveness and power towards all the inmates. Nevertheless, I will soon come to terms and accept the location change with the intentions of learning about gender and sharing our opinions with the inside students. Moreover, the new location does appear colorful and uplifting. There are painted images along the walls such as waterfalls, rainbows, and overall an idyllic scenery which is presumably