ipl-logo

The Role Of Incarceration In Modern Society

264 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: History of prison overcrowding

In Europe prior to the 1600s and 1700s incarceration was mainly used as a means of detaining suspects and citizens for various reasons (Bohm & Haley, 2001). Citizens were incarcerated as a means to coerce payments, contain the spread of disease as well as to teach religious beliefs, in some cases, to change one’s beliefs. Suspects were incarcerated while awaiting trial, punishment, or death. Slaves were also incarcerated during this time as a form of punishment. Individuals endured punishments, that would be considered cruel and unusual in modern society, like being hanged, stoned, as well as beheaded just to list a few (Bohm & Haley, 2001). Prior to confinement being used on a much larger scale, the primary reason for confinement was to
Show More
Related
541 Words | 3 Pages

How would you feel if you were thrown in an American prison in the horrendous state they are in today? Many people are content with the prison system we have. In the essay, “Why Prisons Don’t Work,” Wilbert Rideau, an African American man who was convicted of murder at age nineteen, challenges this complacency with the system and claims prisons do not change the convict from the person they were when they committed the crime. Putting uneducated people who made silly, impulsive choices in jail is not the way to make a community safer. Prisons do not offer good rehabilitation programs for inmates.

Read More
754 Words | 4 Pages

Imagine being trapped in a damp, dark, cage as a form of punishment for something that seems completely out of your grasp. Prisons were understaffed and as barbaric as it gets the people charged with crimes were whipped. The primary cause for their creation was to keep the crooks from harming any people right? Everyone in solitary confinement is treated the same way but not everyone came for the same reason. In fact, mentally ill people were considered to be harsh maniacs which did not receive treatment for a long time.

Read More
1327 Words | 6 Pages

In 2010, historian Heather Thompson published the paper, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History. Within this comprehensive article, Thompson analyzes the social and economic effects of mass incarceration in the last third of the twentieth-century, and explains why historians must take on this important aspect of American history. The three areas she analyzes concern mass incarceration and the origins of the urban crisis, the decline of the American Labor Movement, and the rise of the Right in postwar America. Not only did (does) mass incarceration permanently criminalize individuals in society and deter them from reaching their full potential, it also negatively impacted urban

Read More
553 Words | 3 Pages

Lastly, the early punishment of Exile was used by society in order to banish criminals. The French sent criminal offenders to Devil’s Island, and the Russians used Siberia for centuries for the same purpose. England sent convicts to the American colonies beginning in

Read More
545 Words | 3 Pages

Today’s court and justice systems, as well as our prison system, are flawed and don’t do enough to not only hinder any further crime from occurring, but put those who may cause further complications in our society in jail. In the article “Why Prisons Don’t Work,” Wilbert Rideau, a murderer sentenced to life in jail, explains his reasons and provides evidence on why our prison system is counterproductive. According to Rideau, many of those who are thrown in prison, were convicted due to their unskilled, impulsive, and uneducated actions. Putting these men in prison may seem like a good idea, but there are underlying reasons why prisons don’t work.

Read More
1203 Words | 5 Pages

Abstract: This paper provides an introduction to the social impact of the collateral consequences (the families left behind) of mass incarceration. The reading will include thoughts from sociological perspectives and empirical studies that focus on the consequences incarceration and re-entry have on the striving family left behind. Partners and families of felons suffer from the system in place that punishes, rather than “corrects,” criminal behavior. Collateral Consequences Patience Kabwasa Prof. Laura Howe Soc 231-C21 May 1, 2014 Collateral Consequences

Read More
766 Words | 4 Pages

First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That 's institutionalized.’ A prison should aim at retribution, incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation. I am very well convinced that prison has served its first three purposes by depriving offenders’ freedom, but the

Read More
336 Words | 2 Pages

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.

Read More
1123 Words | 5 Pages

However, as many of these institutions began to change and reform prison sentences, many still viewed punishment techniques as “coercive forms of control” (Wright, N/D, p 318). Even though, prisons are meant to control inmates every movement, they are also abusing that power in separating

Read More
351 Words | 2 Pages

Beside restorative justice, mass incarceration acts as another solution to decrease the amount of crime, yet it should be limited. There has been a longstanding debate over the effectiveness of correctional institutions. Some argue that incarceration deters offenders while others argue that the experience of being incarcerated causes individuals to continue in their life of crime. According to Bruce Western, a professor of sociology and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center, the drastically increase amount of incarceration resulted from problems such as harming prisoners, families, and social groups. He indicates, “Black are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and

Read More
586 Words | 3 Pages

Slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the carceral apparatus are all structural institutions that share a mutual beneficial relationship where each has supplemented and historically progressed into more advanced subtle forms of oppression and racism. Past and current regimes served as social functions with the objective of encompassing African Americans in a permanent subordinate position. In each generation, newer developments of a racial caste emerge with the same objective of repudiating African Americans citizenship. The only thing that has changed since Jim Crow is the language we use to justify racial exclusion (Alexander, 2). These four regimes are genealogically linked because they all advanced and developed from one another.

Read More
135 Words | 1 Pages

I know most inmates get jobs within the jail that pay very little like 20 cents an hour so imagine an inmate barely having enough to purchase some soap or food, then they have to face the challenge of having to pay for their stay? On the other side I also understand the Civil rights side which is the side I 'm going with, although their argument is very weak. It doesn 't necessarily create a barrier to rehabilitation, if anything it just puts a huge strain financially and it could possibly make people never want go back to jail. Lastly whether or not they paid taxes in the past, shouldn 't matter, what matters is if they pay taxes after their incarceration maybe that way the government can get some money back from an inmates ' previous

Read More
90 Words | 1 Pages

a mandatory minimum number of years in prison). The consequences of the United States’ late-twentieth-century obsession with mass incarceration and extreme, inhumane penalties are well-documented. From 1930 to 1975, the average incarceration rate was 106 people per 100,000 adults in the population. Between 1975 and 2011, the incarceration rate rose to 743 per 100,000 adults in the population—the highest incarceration rate in the world—with the total number of people incarcerated in jails and prisons across the country now surpassing 2.3 million.

Read More
186 Words | 1 Pages

Past punishment practices during the colonial era were based on corporal punishment, often public and there is no evidence that it deterred crime. Moving on, reformers decided to change the penal codes focusing on being human, this brought about the changes to barbaric forms of punishment. Implementing the concept of reform brought about the idea of detention first served in workhouse facilities. The first penitentiary was built in 1790 and became an example of incarceration to other European countries. Past punishment practices such as beatings, mutilation and branding were inhuman and futile and none of the practices should be reinstated.

Read More
996 Words | 4 Pages

After discussing in length how the economic effects of confinement annulled themselves over time, he reveals what he believes to be the true goal of this incarceration, to “this proximity which seemed to assign the same homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane”[3]. And that is because, according to classical interpretation- “as for that power….of abolishing poverty, labour……possessed it not so much by its productive capacity as by a certain force of moral enchantment”[3]. And so the prisoner “had the right to be fed, but he must accept the physical and moral constraint of confinement”[3]. Thus, the three Critiques by Kant provide the conditions for the ‘legitimate use of reason’, but for the period of the Enlightenment. Each historical epoch can and will have its own rules of

Read More

More about The Role Of Incarceration In Modern Society

Related Topics

Open Document