Prison Vs. US Prison System

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Throughout history the correctional system such as prisons and jails has been viewed as an effective way to deal with criminals. Even though, the way the prison system operates has changed overtime due to many events and trials that has occurred, it still serve as institution to detain suspected criminal, a home for the homeless, an institution for the insane, and also for a place to repute and cleanse one’s self. One of the most interesting prison cells are the United States and Hong Kong. They both hold a strict prison system but they both have a different type of government system that hugely impacts how their prison system operates. Even though the US prison and Hong Kong share similar characteristics in their prison system, they differ …show more content…

Hong Kong prisons are generally populated with Hong Kong citizens and the mainland Chinese, while Americans prisons consist of the Caucasian, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian populations. So there is less gang activity involved in the Hong Kong prison cells than in the United States. Usually gangs in prison are created due to race differences. And also race plays a huge role in the American prison system because there are more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined according to Antonio Moore in his Huffington Post article. In fact that this so severe that there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system-in prison, on probation, or on parole-than were in slavery" (Gopnik 2013). This comes to show how race plays a huge role in the United States system than in Hong …show more content…

That is, more and more American prisons are being run by for-profit companies. Studies showed that there are 133,000 state and federal prisoners housed in privately owned prisons in the U.S., constituting 8.4% of the overall U.S. prison population. Corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group both combined earn around $2.53 billion in revenue (Thierry, 2017). The United States use their prisons as more of business to make profit than Hong Kong who uses it to control their