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The Pros And Cons Of Prisons

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A favorable viewing in the public conscious is a valuable resource and the prison system knows it. In this analysis, I discuss how the prison uses inmates to ensure that prisons are viewed favorably in the public conscious so that they will be maintained. In the first paragraph, I discuss prison tours and tourism and how they construct prisoners as ‘dangerous and in need of the incarceration provided’ so as to distract from the mental or physical harms the prison causes prisoners. In the second paragraph, I discuss how Quicken Loans in downtown Detroit with the help of the prison system, evicted racialized and disadvantaged people from the neighbourhoods of the civil rights movement. In my final paragraph, I draw attention to how intentional …show more content…

This misrepresents the lived experience of prison to those who are afforded access to a tour because it assumes that all inmates are violent, convicted felons when the reality is that only around 18 percent of all offences in 2015 in Canada were deemed violent (Statistics Canada 2016) and 55 percent of prisoners in provincial and territorial jails are being held on remand, awaiting a bail hearing or a trial … [not] because of a conviction” (The Globe and Mail 2015). This means a prison is far more likely to be holding a non-violent person in trouble with the law than a crazed serial killer, as these tours seem to suggest. Clearly, then, the point of these tours is not the present the facts, but to construct prisons in the best light to society. This objective is more clearly seen at the Angola prison festival where the public is invited in every year to celebrate how the worst prison in the United States is now the role model for other prisons (Schrift 2008). This kind of prison tourism uses the light-hearted atmosphere of a fair to construct prisoners “as brutish and dumb... [suggesting] they need taming through incarceration, which Angola effectively provides” (Schrift 2008:33). This ‘alternative rehabilitation’ which Angola provides includes putting untrained prisoners in front of angry bulls, making jest of prison

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