Criminalization Vs Incarceration Essay

597 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The effects of overcrowding prisons

America’s criminal justice system is like both a large, complex, machine, and a revolving door; one cogwheel turning another, and a never ending cycle for many of its entrants. The effects of prisonization play a huge role in the final destination of this system – the penitentiary, by shaping inmates lives while inside, and changing them forever should they be fortunate enough to be released. In order to get a better understanding of prisonization, one must have a through description of what it is, how it can turn the rehabilitation efforts of incarceration upside down, and how it can contribute to further criminality amongst current and former convicts. Once a person has been convicted of a crime, especially in which a serious offense has occurred, chances are they will be sent to one of the countries many jails or prisons. From this moment forward, the effects of prisonization begins to take hold of their day to day lives, playing with their emotional and physical well-being. By definition, prisonization is …show more content…

Regardless of the offense, these inmates all go through some degree of prisonization, with more extreme cases being seen in medium, maximum, and supermax prison settings. Due to overcrowding issues, these inmates are often finding themselves mixed together regardless of offense, allowing the more violent offenders to assert their dominance over the general population. By allowing this to happen, inmates that would otherwise be considered less of a threat would be left fending for themselves, having to go above and beyond what they would like to do to defend themselves. The negative influence of the more hardened criminals negates the efforts by correctional staff to rehabilitate other minor

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Lockdown By Evans D Hopkins

    731 Words  | 2 Pages

    Many changes are made inside the justice system, but very few have damaged the integrity of the system and the futures of citizens and prisoners. Although the story seems to focus more on lockdown, Hopkins clearly identifies the damaging change from rehabilitation in prisons to a strategy of locking up and containing the prisoners. To the writer, and furthermore the reader, the adjustment represented a failure to value lives. “More than 600,000- about 3 times what it was when I entered prison, sixteen years ago. In the resulting expansion of the nation’s prison systems, authorities have tended to dispense with much of the rehabilitative programming once prevalent in America’s penal institutions” (Hopkins 157). The new blueprint to lock every offender in prison for extended sentencing leads to an influx in incarcerated people. With each new person

    Read More

  • The Rise of America’s Prison Empire

    1930 Words  | 4 Pages

    When envisioning a prison, one often conceptualizes a grisly scene of hardened rapists and murderers wandering aimlessly down the darkened halls of Alcatraz, as opposed to a pleasant facility catering to the needs of troubled souls. Prisons have long been a source of punishment for inmates in America and the debate continues as to whether or not an overhaul of the US prison system should occur. Such an overhaul would readjust the focuses of prison to rehabilitation and incarceration of inmates instead of the current focuses of punishment and incarceration. Altering the goal of the entire state and federal prison system for the purpose of rehabilitation is an unrealistic objective, however. Rehabilitation should not be the main purpose of prison because there are outlying factors that negatively affect the success of rehabilitation programs and such programs would be too costly for prisons currently struggling to accommodate additional inmate needs.

    Read More

  • The Flaws of Incarceration in America

    1359 Words  | 3 Pages

    The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for a number of reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. The ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system is caused by mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism.

    Read More

  • Beyond Bars

    2133 Words  | 5 Pages

    The book titled Beyond Bars: Rejoining Society After Prison offers invaluable lessons of how both men and women may successfully depart prison and return to society. The book was written by Jeffrey Ross and Stephen Richards, both of whom are college professors and criminal justice experts. The population of prisons across the United States has increased dramatically in recent decades despite overall crime rates decreasing during the same time period. Approximately seven million American people are in some form of correctional custody. Between the years1980 and 2000, America’s prison population increased by 500 percent. During the same time period, the number of prisons grew by 300 percent (Ross and Richards, xii). Close to 50 percent of people admitted to confinement have previously served time, exemplifying that the criminal justice system “recycles” inmates through the system again and again (Ross and Richards, xi). Unfortunately, many convicts simply do not remember how to or are ill-equipped to return to society once their sentence ends. Ross and Richards, through their valuable lessons within their book, seek to lessen the problems that ex-prisoners may face when released from prison.

    Read More

  • Mass Incarceration Essay

    2012 Words  | 5 Pages

    The United States of America has the world’s highest incarceration rates, for several reasons. The United States of America doesn’t necessarily possess any unique strict laws in comparison to other countries of the world, yet we still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. More federal level and state level prisons are built in order to control and hold more prisoners because most are reaching its full capacity. The United States of America’s “crime rates” increased about 40 years ago when there became a new focus in the areas of crime. The President of the United States of America at the time Richard Nixon used the term “a war on drugs” in order to shed light on public health due to substance abuse. Initially, these policies created

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Incarceration

    956 Words  | 2 Pages

    Incarceration is a sanction of sentencing and is defined as confinement or imprisonment of a person following conviction of a crime. Incarceration forces an individual to be segregated from society because of their behavior and the crime that was committed at the time of arrest. The purpose of incarceration is to rehabilitate. The main focus is to deter an individual from committing a crime, and making it less likely for those who serve time in prison to recommit crimes after being release. Other focuses on incarceration are simply for punishment

    Read More

  • Reforming the U.S. Prison System: Rehabilitation over Incarceration

    1766 Words  | 4 Pages

    Prisons and correctional facilities in the United States have changed from rehabilitating people to housing inmates and creating breeding grounds for more violence. Many local, state, and federal prisons and correctional facilities are becoming more and more overcrowded each year. If the Department of Corrections (DOC) wants to stop having repeat offenders and decrease the volume of inmates entering the criminal justice system, current regulations and programs need to undergo alteration. Actions pushed by attorneys and judges, in conjunction current prison life (including solitary confinement), have intertwined to result in mass incarceration. However, prisoner reentry programs haven’t fully impacted positively to help the inmate assimilate back into society. These alterations can help save the Department of Corrections (DOC) money, decrease the inmate population, and most of all, help rehabilitate them. After inmates are charged with a crime, they go through the judicial system (Due Process) and meet with the prosecutor to discuss sentencing.

    Read More

  • Punishment of Offenders

    1029 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the year 1980 we had approximately 501,900 persons incarcerated across the United States. By the year 2000, that figure has jumped to over 2,014,000 prisoners. The current level of incarceration represents the continuation of a 25-year escalation of the nation's prison and jail population beginning in 1973. Currently the U.S. rate of 672 per 100,000 is second only to Russia, and represents a level of incarceration that is 6-10 times that of most industrialized nations. The rise in prison population in recent years is particularly remarkable given that crime rates have been falling nationally since 1992. With less crime, one might assume that fewer people would be sentenced to prison. This trend has been overridden by the increasing impact of lengthy mandatory sentencing policies.

    Read More

  • Mass Incarceration Essay

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    According to the Oxford Index, “whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, or hyper incarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.” It should be noted that there is much ambiguity in the scholarly definition of the newly controversial social welfare issue as well as a specific determination in regards to the causes and consequences to American society. While some pro arguments cry act as a crime prevention technique, especially in the scope of the “war on drugs’.

    Read More

  • Pros And Cons Of Reform Vs. Punishment

    1601 Words  | 4 Pages

    For many years, there have been a huge debate on the ideal of reform versus punishment. Many of these debates consist of the treatment and conditioning of individuals serving time in prison. Should prison facilities be a place solely to derogate freewill and punish prisoners as a design ideology of deterrence? Should prison facilities be design for rehabilitation and conditioning, aim to educate prisoners to integrate back into society.

    Read More

  • Models of Corrections

    1627 Words  | 4 Pages

    “The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.

    Read More

  • The Problem Of Overcrowded Prisons

    1229 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although it may not seem like a major problem to most people in the United States, prisons are becoming overcrowded, expensive to maintain and have little to no effect on the moral discipline of inmates. The current prison system is extremely inefficient and the purpose of prisons has been completely forgotten. According to Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the primary purpose of prisons is to punish, to protect, and to rehabilitate. Not only is there an increase in prisoners, but there is a rise in the number of repeat offenders. Alternatives such as counseling, drug rehabilitation, education, job training and victim restitution must be better enforced and organized. People do not understand the severity of the problem mainly because

    Read More

  • Issues in Corrections

    851 Words  | 2 Pages

    Prison was designed to house and isolate criminals away from the society in order for our society and the people within it to function without the fears of the outlaws. The purpose of prison is to deter and prevent people from committing a crime using the ideas of incarceration by taking away freedom and liberty from those individuals committed of crimes. Prisons in America are run either by the federal, states or even private contractors. There are many challenges and issues that our correctional system is facing today due to the nature of prisons being the place to house various types of criminals. In this paper, I will address and identify three major issues that I believe our correctional system is facing today using my own ideas along with the researches from three reputable outside academic sources.

    Read More

  • Private Prisons Pros And Cons Essay

    1265 Words  | 3 Pages

    Despite being one of the most developed countries in the world, America has the world’s highest incarceration rate (Bruening). Although some countries report misleading statistics of their prison population, and many simply do not have the resources to track and deal with criminals, this statistic is still shocking. So what’s wrong with the prison system? The biggest problem with prisons is the rehabilitation system. In the modern world, the main goal of prisons is to reform as many prisoners they hold as possible in order to eventually return the prisoners safely to society.

    Read More

  • Rehabilitation Will Reduce Crime

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    The correctional system punishes offenders by sentencing them to serve time in jail or prison. Others forms of punishment include being sentenced to probation, community service, and/or restitution. Jail is a locally operated short-term confinement facilities originally built to hold suspects following arrest and pending trial (Schmalleger, 2009). A prison is state or ...

    Read More

More about Criminalization Vs Incarceration Essay

Open Document