The Pros And Cons Of Supermax Prisons

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As we look at supermax prisons they are used to house many violent offenders to mainly keep them away from all other prisoners in solitary confinement like cells for a long period of time and most of them will never be released. The main issue that Schmalleger and Smykla describe is the fact of a mental illness starting due to supermax confinement and where none previously existed in the past (2015). The issue with that is it could get them out of a supermax prison, which I believe that is completely ridiculous because they were already crazy enough to commit the crime they did to get in there. The other ways it does effect the person in prison is that it could lead to a bunch of different symptoms and possibly even suicide from being confined …show more content…

All prisoners are still entitled to their basic human rights while in a supermax prison because they are all still humans and they don't go away. They still deserve that dignity and respect the others in get, even though their rights are often abused by the officers that run these facilities on both state and federal side (Human Rights Watch, 2000).Most of the types of inmates that the supermax prisons hold are the ones that get along with the other prisoners in a general population prison and mainly because they are to violent towards all others. The ones it house per Schmalleger and Smykla are the ones that are too dangerous or chronically violent, the ones that escape or attempt to escape, the ones that prey on weaker inmates, and the ones that try to make a constant disruption in a correctional facility (2015). These are the inmates who will be removed from the general population and placed in these supermax prisons, which is just like living in solitary confinement for the rest of their sentence or possibly life. The ones they do not house are all the rest of the ones that can get along with other prisoners and typically the ones that are just first time offenders for something like beating a correctional …show more content…

That is some of the opportunities I would give them but I do not believe they deserve a whole lot because they are some of the worse criminals and do not care at all what happens to them.I believe that when you go to seek the death penalty you better go in knowing that the person you are trying to charge is a guarantee to get the death penalty. If not you will be just wasting a bunch of time of your attorney general and deputy attorney general, when you go to them for authorization to go through with the death penalty (Schmalleger & Smykla, 2015). We all know that the cost of the death penalty is extremely high per one person on death row that we have to execute. Just in my state of Tennessee alone the trial average for a death penalty sentence is 48 percent higher than what it is for the typical life sentence trial (Tennessee Treasury Report, 2004).When you look into going to trial to prosecute someone for the death penalty it just gets more expensive year after year. The fact is that you have to pay more attorneys, more experts to go over the files, and more time is put into making sure that all things are in order (Chammah, 2016). You are paying multiple attorney's, defenders, judges, clerks, and juries to insure that every detail is covered within