One prisoner that we saw during the lecture told the interviewer that he once he got out on parole, he was going to commit a crime in order to get back into prison. He knew that he would not be able to keep up treatment for his mental illness outside of the system as he did not have support outside of prison. I do not blame him. This sort of situation could easily have been avoided. His threat to commit another crime and his general wishes should have been taken into consideration when he came up for consideration for parole. This particular situation was a great failure on the part of the prison and the parole system itself. Before the lecture, I had no idea that the prisons in Alabama were so bad. Although I generally didn’t believe the people who insist that some prisons are resort-like, I was under the assumption that they weren’t unpleasant to the point of infringing on the prisoner’s rights. What surprised me the most was the description of the filth that is allowed to accumulate in the prisons in Alabama. It seems like common sense that allowing human beings to live in these horrible conditions promote illness. Before reading the articles, I assumed that the practice of …show more content…
The goal for all prisoners is punishment and release. However, this punishment should never be cruel. The current lack of mental health care for the increasing number of mentally ill patients is cruel. Even worse, these problems could be fixed. If there was an increase in funding for trained correctional officers and proper mental health care givers, there would be a great increase in quality of life for the mentally ill in prisons. A general lack of funds on the state level prevents this from happening, so it is likely that the criminal justice system will continue to fail to properly care for these