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Essays on prison life
Essays on prison life
How prison actually works
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Essays on prison life
Essays on prison life
How prison actually works
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
According to Benns, the prisoners commonly work in manufacturing for for-profit businesses and in plantations. She explains how the United States has the largest amount of confined people in the world, and the prison rates are increasing every year. Those who are prosecuted for crimes are mostly African Americans. Benns also creates an image for readers to visualize the bodies of individuals, earning a few pennies a day, planting and harvesting crops on a farm owner’s land.
In today’s media, there are a conglomerate of television and internet programming that shows dramatizations and actual accounts of prison life and how inmates interact with one another. Television shows like Orange is the New Black and Oz have garnered much popularity due to each being able to closely “replicate” the setting (bedding, cells, confinement), and overall prison culture. Despite the popularity, the shows remain just as such, entertainment. The media will not be able truly capture the complex organization of the actual prison system, including the management, communication methodologies, the administration, etc. Another similarity between the shows is that the shows’ settings are that of federal maximum security prisons; what about
“The best time to cry it at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help” (Myers 1). Having to clean disgusting floors, “You throw up, you clean it up!” Eating with strangers, sleeping with strangers, going to the bathroom in front of strangers. This is real life, not a movie; this is the real life of being in jail. Steve Harmon, the main character in the novel, Monster, written by Walter Dean Myers, experienced this.
The U.S. prison systems has evolved greatly in the pasts centuries in many ways, but the most critical part where it greatly improved was the security of the facilities, the inmate treatment, and the construction of the building of how stable it is. The first and most important is the security. A prison system has to have a strict security system because without it prisoners can do whatever they want. So, they developed a security system where there are five levels: the higher the level is the stronger it is. Not all prisons do the same security because different buildings mean different levels.
Next, we understand that often the prison administration is just as corrupt as the prisoners that are housed there. This is shown in how the warden was really hands off with the prisoners and allowed the trustees to control the inmates, how his bookkeeper was hoarding and reselling food for a higher profit, and how Huey had a pleasure shack where he and his girlfriend spent most of their time together. Lastly, we find that government is always going to have a hand in prisons, how they are run, and usually have a “scratch my back, I’ll
If one thinks jails in modern-day U.S. society are bad, then he /she should consider exploring the detention facilities of other societies. Societies such as the one in Anthem (written by Ayn Rand) had a detention facility called the Palace of Corrective Detention which had horrible conditions compared to modern American jails. In the modern-day U.S. society people have more freedoms and liberties compared to Anthem 's society. After a close examination of Anthem, it is noticeably clear that the U.S. society is more progressive than the society in Anthem, which is glaringly obvious by contrasting modern-day U.S. jail with the Palace of Corrective Detention in Anthem.
In the documentary film Private Prisons, provides insight on how two private prisons industries, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group, generate revenue through mass incarceration. It is no surprise that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The United States represents approximately 5% of the world’s population index and approximately 25% of the world’s prisoners due to expansion of the private prison industry complex (Private Prisons, 2013). The number of people incarcerated in private prions has grown exponentially over the past decades. To put into perspective, the number of individuals increased by 1600% between 1990 and 2005 (Private Prisons, 2003).
The inner moral compulsion to obey is what drives most social organizations. Sykes (2007) described several structural defects that occurred in the New Jersey State prison. Sykes (2007) argues that power in prison is not based on authority therefore prison officials have to find other means to get prisoners to abide by the rules and regulations. The ability to use force to maintain order on a large scale in the prison is an illusion. According to Sykes (2007), Certain privileges such mailing and visiting, personal possessions, time-off for good behavior etc. are given to the inmate all at once upon his or her arrival to the prison.
By the government allowing corporations to buy, and build new prisons gave that much more of an incentive to keep the prisons flowing with inmates. According to Vicky Pelaez “Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one.” (6) Once you get trapped inside this prison machine they can and will work for cents a day.
developed—the first institution in which men were both “confined and set to labor in order to learn the habits of industry” (LeBaron, 2012, p.331). Although prisons had been designed to enforce and promote punishment, retribution and deterrence, they have also fallen into the conceptual belief that they were in many instances, nothing more than a sweat shop for the socially-undesired. At this point in history, there was very little reform and an immense lack of regulation for prisons or for the proper way they should be ran. Finances. In modern-day calculations, prison labor has been rather beneficial to the U.S. government, bringing in an average of 1.6 billion dollars in 1997.
Contractual workers, detainees, guests, and even staffs take part in getting into jail stash, and they get into the jail premises in possible ways (Blackburn, Shannon, and Pollock 111). It is particularly risky in view of the staff 's inclusion in booty sneaking. There are various manners by which detainees can inspire staffs to do the assignment of carrying booty. A typical way is the offers that prisoners make as a byproduct of them to offer deliberate administrations for procuring and sneaking stash. For various jail staffs, additional money before the month 's over could be a capable allurement in an ineffectively paying activity.
Thesis: It is very important for the sake of Americans tax dollars that we change the way that prisons are run and increase the productivity of inmates so when they are released from jail they are ready to be a productive member in society and have the confidence to achieve new goals. Introduction: Day after day, millions of inmates sit in jail doing nothing productive with their lives. We are paying to house inmates that may not even have a good reason to be there. For example, drug offenders are being kept with murderers and other violent offenders.
The issue of prison overcrowding has been an increasing in America. There are about 2.2 million Americans in jail or prison. The number of people in prison have gotten so large that about one in every 100 adults are behind bars. The increase in inmate population in the United States is a concern to me because some of these people have committed non-violent crimes or have drug related crimes. These people should be placed in rehabilitation centers or be counseled about drug distributing.
People may say that prisoners must pay an unreasonable amount for cost to go get supplies in prisons or how that maybe prisoners can’t help support their families or pay doctor fees. In contradiction to this, those prisoners are already being cared for and they get all the necessities to live such as a good shelter, food and clean water. Duwane Engler, a former prison inmate who worked at a goat cheese farm within the prison says “When you're in prison, you have to work anyways. If you're in a maximum facility, you're going to do work... These guys actually get out, they have a purpose, and they make more than 60 cents a day.".
The prison-industrial complex is a corrupt political system that consists of overpowered politicians whose sole ambition is exploiting poor, uneducated, and under-privileged Americans to make money. Although, it wasn’t initially the purpose when Rockefeller started the war on drugs, but he started something bigger than he could’ve imagined at that time. The prison system has been proven to be ineffective, and costly waste of resources. However, it probably won’t be abolished due to the cash flow that it brings to some of the largest corporations in the