Why Are Prisons Still Successful For Helping Prevent Crime?

The concept of the prison as a house of punishment and a place where criminals would be segregated from society is one that emerged later. After the American Revolution, the core social and political climate began to change. Americans began to question the extent to which the death penalty was being issued (Lynch, n.d.). Values, social norms, and political philosophies also changed, and so too did the demographics of the nation. The transformations in American society during the early modern and modern eras led to a transformation of the physical form of prisons and also "their function and their place in American consciousness," (Lynch, n.d.).

Change over time; that is a common theme with everything in the world. The concept of punishment is no different in that regard. In the 16th and 17th century the common view for punishing people was retaliation from the king and to be done in the town square. In what seemed to be all of a sudden, there was a change in human thinking, the concept of punishment changed to a more psychological approach compared to a public embarrassment/torture approach. The following paragraphs will discuss the development of prisons and what in fact gives people gives people the right to punish; as well as the overall meaning and function of prisons. The work by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison will help with the arguments

Throughout the years, the use of imprisonment has varied, along with its influences of society. It is thought that although prisons have been around since the thirteenth century, prisons as we know them now to be have only been around for the last three centuries. The first uses of prisons were not seen as a form of punishment instead they were used as a way of making people do something. People would be held in prison until they paid their debts, or awaiting trial and then leading up to their sentence. McGowen (1995) suggests that from the early 1700s ‘bridewells’ a house of correction have existed, however at that time being used merely for vagrants and drunks. At the end of the sixteenth century there was a shift in punishment to imprisonment, along with this came a new, more humane idea of reform. Criminals would spend their days of prison carrying out hard labour. However after the American Revolution, imprisonment took a step back and there was another change. There was mass overcrowding within the prison service and although the death penalty was still being used it was a symbol of the power of the state. Therefore, an everyday way of dealing with offenders would be transportation to the colonies, being either Australia or America.

Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission)

Those criminals need to be corrected and helped, and then brought back into their societies and Imprisonment is thus not meant to be an avenue for inhumane treatment for members of the community who err in their behavior.

While it’s cheap to put someone on probation or parole, it is expensive to incarcerate a person for a year. It costs $45,000 to house and feed an inmate for one year. “There are approximately 1,325 state prisons and 84 federal prisons in operation across the country today”. (Schmalleger pg 390) If you have 2000 inmates in one prison then that will cost roughly $90,000,000 to support those prisoners for just one year and that is only for one prison. From 1991 to 2007, there was a 37% decrease in the national crime rate and a 62% increase in the rate of imprisonment. The Public Safety Performance Project released a report that predicts the nation’s prison population will rise to more than

In this essay I will be looking at the key developments of the British penal system since the early nineteenth century. I will also discuss how the main objectives of the prison system have changed over this period of time.

In society, there will always be people that take and steal and kill to collect what they feel they deserve. People that behave in such a way need to be separated from the citizens of society that are trustworthy, caring, and helpful in order to prevent the malicious citizens from taking advantage of their productive counterparts. There is no argument that individuals that break the law need to be punished so they know it is wrong. There are many types of punishment, but the one that contains the most people and best protects society from rampant crime is prison. While it is typically agreed upon that prisons are useful and even necessary, but what is typically argued is who should oversee the prisons. There are two main beliefs, the first is that the government should control the prisons to ensure prisoners are treated in the appropriate manner, public prisons. The second viewpoint is that prisons should be run by private companies, private prison, which will help cut costs, because storing inmates is quite expensive. Although each side has valid arguments, neither is largely ideal. Private prisons are not regulated enough and public prisons are too expensive, so the ideal prison is a combination of the two. Private prisons are the base that the ideal system must be molded from and it must be molded by creating several laws. The government must create these laws ensuring the prisons do not purposely return inmates to society with the intentions that

The idea was to make prison a system for corrections, rather than detention alone. These ideas soon manifested in schools of philosophy and criminology were the notion was defended that punishment should be more lenient only at the cost of the greater good and aimed to change the behavior itself. Eventually these ideas gave birth to a new form of incarcerations designed to deter both rise in crime and to reform, based on self-reflection over the prisoner’s choices.

The United States is known for being the greatest country in the world. Land of the free, home of the brave, and leader of the free world, but the United States is actually the world's leading jailer. Incarceration rates have been increasing exponentially in the United States, however the crime rate has been on a steady decline over the last quarter of a century. These increasing number of imprisonments has resulted in the United States leading the nations by highest percentage of incarcerations per capita. The high incarceration rate in the U.S. has negatively affected the economy. As stated by Christian Henrichson “ such as employee benefits, capital costs, in-prison education services, or hospital care for inmates”, it is costly not only for state governments to maintain the correctional facilities, but many are funded by taxpayers. Taxpayers are deluded by state and federal governments by convincing them that if prisons aren’t supported and unfunded, the safety of citizens is in jeopardy due to crime rates increasing and low incarceration rates.

That is why I have decided to give my support to help fund numerous policies that could help not only with the overcrowding issue, but could also help get these individuals the appropriate assistance they need in order for them to get back on their feet. Public policies are the perfect solution. If we could create different policies to help not only inmates, but law enforcement as well then we could reduce a lot of the issues that surround prison facilities. For instance, in the article “Incarceration Nation,” Lorna Collier discusses the Recidivism Reduction and Public Safety Act which would allow inmates to reduce their sentences by participating in a drug treatment and job training sessions (62). This policy alone could help with not only the overcrowding issue by giving inmates a lesser sentence, but it could also help these inmates in the future when they are let out. The drug treatment class would assist drug addicts in trying to better themselves and hopefully stop them from using drugs later on in life preventing repeat offences. This would not only save a lot of income that comes from tax payer’s money that goes to the prison system to incarcerate that individual, but it will also help that individual to get an opportunity at a career. The job training would be substantially beneficial for the inmates to be a part of because it could train them and give them a larger opportunity of getting a legitimate, stable, income for their family. However, this is merely one policy, and look at the effects that it can have on

Private prisons make their money by the number of inmates they have incarcerated. This contributes to prison overcrowding and a high amount of inmates incarcerated for low-level offences.

When it came to prisoners it would have been less costly to have alternative punishments or other treatments that could be involved in the community, but if you incarcerate the inmate then it makes them more likely to reoffend, and by this process it is creating more cost in the future. When it comes to women “Incarcerating women, in particular, increases the social cost of prisons because someone has to pay to take care of the children, and furthermore, when mothers do not care for their children personally, the kids are more likely to become offenders in the future” (Pryce, Vicky 2013 Prisonomics: Behind Bars in Britain's Failing Prisons. London: Biteback , 336 pp). But if we were to invest money into other ideas that would give better

In this world we live in many feel that prisons exist to punish, not counsel, offenders. That may be true that Prisons exist for punishment, but they also have an important contribution to make to reducing re-offending by engaging prisoners in rehabilitation programs and purposeful work. Society is flawed in its thinking that by putting criminals in a place away from society we would be better off. To make it worse I am sure that more that 60 percent of Americans are against social reform because they have made up their mind that once a crook, always a crook. This is flawed mainly because it seems to assume that showing people that what they've done is wrong will always accomplish something, that punishing those who commit crimes

Are prisons effective total institutions or do they more commonly fail in their goal of resocialization? Please compare and contrast how a conflict, a functionalist or an interactionist theorist would answer this question. Finally offer your opinion