Outside Of Prison

The United States needs to crack down on crime and punish criminals to set an example. This is a very unpopular notion that is “backwards” however The United States prisons have not been doing a good job with punishing and rehabilitating criminals. Life is fairly comfortable, free cable, access to educational opportunities and psychiatric counseling in prisons, on average 52% of criminals return to crime. These people that committed horrible acts and need to be separated from society gets a life where everything is paid for and they worry about very little. Before recent time’s people avoided prison because they knew it would be hard. Why? Because it was not nice inside. Today however prison is easier to live in and it’s an easy life.

Prisons are thought of as housing for criminals. This is the place where criminals are sent and become deprived of their freedoms while they serve a sentence for their crime. While this may be true, the original intent of prison was to rehabilitate the prisoners in order to prevent them from doing a repeat offense.

The main idea of a prison is to help rehabilitate offenders and to stop them from relapsing back into a world of crime, but instead prisoners are constantly returning time and time again. We must find a way to incarcerate those who need to be behind bars, and deal with other criminals in a different manner. I believe we should reduce the use of prisons, and rethink our punishment for certain crimes.

Many people believe that the prison system works, but does it really? Many studies and research has been made in order to show that the prison system is failing. Citizens of the United States of America are forced to pay for a system in order to make our country “safe”, however no one seems to inform themselves with the facts. Imprisoning people who break the law does not make them change into a better person, and the cost for having someone locked up is costly. It is evident that our prison system have failed. “47% of offenders leaving prison reoffend will within one year” (Leach). So, why do we keep on sending people to prison?

Aside from the reasons listed above, there is a breakdown of the individual: prisoners learn to function in a system that aims to have total social control, which breaks down their ability to function outside of that system. They are separated from their families and limited in their communication to the outside world. Prisoners in maximum security facilities are restricted from socializing, such as in Pelican Bay, where all meals are eaten in the cells and outdoor time happens in tiny yards confined by 20-foot-high walls (Banks, 2013). These practices all have the effect on the socialization of prisoners who will have a more difficult time returning to society. In a word, they are dehumanized. In such confinement and limitation, they are not gaining soft skills, job training, or interpersonal skills that will help them thrive “on the outside”; instead, they may actually be losing those skills as they adapt to the environment they are in. This in turn exacerbates the problems that may have landed them in prison in the first place, such as lack of socio-economic opportunity, lack of education, anger management problems, absence of respect for human life, and so on. (That said, there are low-security prisons and jails that offer programming of this nature that I will analyze at another time). If we plan on sending millions of individuals back into society after exacerbating root problems that may have led to the initial crime, how can anyone pose the argument that prison protects the public?

The “Prison Industrial Complex” was a term that was used by anti-prison activist within the prison abolishment movement to argue the attendant interest of prison industrialization, and t development of a minority prison labor force (Davis, 2003). This giant prison enterprise is an essential component of the U.S. economy, and has as its purposes such as profit, social control, and an interweaving of private business and government. These giant financial institutions recognized that prison building is one of the fastest growing industries and one of the best stock performers in the United States. The notion that global private cooperation’s currently rely on the prison complex as vital source of profit gives reason to believe that prison privatization trends of both the increasing presence of corporations in the prison economy and the establishment of private prisons connect to the historical efforts to create a profitable punishment industry based on free black male laborers.

Since the 1980s, the United States prison population has quadrupled to 2.4 million inmates; with nearly half of the inmates in federal prison serving time for drug offenses. The majority of America’s general population has been hoodwinked into believing that the prison system helps prevent crime, but the side effects of mass incarceration is like spilling gasoline on a burning car. The side effects of fabricating additional prison complexes for the sole purpose of preventing crime will continue to deem societies ignorance towards our broken prison system. The United States’ prison system is a warehousing institution that is vastly expensive to society and degrading to humanity; oppressive that neither rehabilitates nor protects our society. With the collaborative focus the general population, policy makers and design & construction teams set on making a change, the design and construction field can help heal those affected by the broken prison system.

Nowadays, when criminals are being convicted for acts like murder and other high terror threats, courts and jurors usually try to figure out if there’s a mental problem or disorder that contributes to the criminal’s reasoning. The history and transformation of American prisons since the eighteenth century has widely shaped the conception that an inmate’s sanity and their wellbeing should be taken into account with prison placement. The first prisons, realizations and shifts in the system throughout time, as well as the shift in thought have all contributed to this idea. Although, not all criminal’s mental health has a direct correlation to their crimes, the two go hand and hand when thinking about the incarcerated as a whole.

In a perfect world, there would not be prisons due to the lack of crime. This is not a perfect world, and many of the prisons are overcrowded. The penitentiaries are full with a mixture of violent and nonviolent prisoners. By putting nonviolent offenders in prisons with violent offender increases the likelihood of them being associated with gangs and decrease their availability of getting rehabilitation (Smith-Heisters, 2008). The majority of the offenders are nonviolent and is in prison for drug usage. The federal system was unable to produce the rights given in the 6th and 14th Amendments and medical help to the prisoners getting out on parole because of overcrowding (Smith-Heisters, 2008). “77% of the growth in intake to America’s state and federal prisons between 1978

The United States prison system incarcerates more people per capita than nearly all European countries, and roughly two-thirds of those inmates that are released will be arrested again within three years (Ward et al, 2015). Some facilities have relatively successful programs that cut down on the recidivism numbers. However, the majority of prisons are focused on punishment and make no efforts at rehabilitation. Something in the American justice systems needs to change so that the cycle can be broken. To accomplish this, we can look at the justice system of other countries and try to determine whether such systems would work in the United States.

Overall, a criminal is still a human and deserves to be treated like one. That doesn’t mean letting the go free, do what they want, or get away with anything but, that also doesn’t mean they should be in solitary confinement for years and abused by the prison. If a prisoner could become more involved in the community, they could feel apart of something. Then, the prisoners rights after conviction could be just, unlike it is

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

Question: Discuss the history of the prison system in the United States. Be sure to identify the various stages that the American prison system has gone through. Also identify what problems were present with each stage as you see them.

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)

population. Nationally, every 7 minutes another person enters prison, and every 14 minutes someone returns to the streets. The increase in prison population did not reduce crime(National Criminal Justice Commission 33). In most prisons felons have access to a startling array of creature comforts(Bidinotto 77). If our prisons are such resorts, simply open the gates and see how many run out, and how many walk in(Taylor 85). In conclusion, people should get the death penalty because our prisons aren't punishing them.