Analysis Of Serving Time The Old Fashioned Way By Dick Boland

The Injustice System

You’ve done it again. Jailed again for the same crime, and no one, not even your family is surprised. You have all the time in the world in prison to think. To think about what you did, to think about what you will do afterwards, and to think about how you let your family down. You want to become a better person and prove everyone wrong, but how can you when there are prison guards whispering threats in your ear, looking at you in the eye with disgrace, and putting you down with cruel words that slither through their lips. This is punishment. Punishment for what you did, and punishment for something you will probably do again. But what if there was another way for you to receive a second chance? What if you had the tools

Between these two articles “Serving Time The Old Fashioned Way”, by Dick Boland and “Reflections From A Life Behind Bars: Build Colleges, Not Prisons”, by James Gilligan, Gilligan makes the most effective argument because he uses real life experiences and sources, as well as offers a solution for prisoners to potentially stop committing crimes.

Dick Boland’s main argument in “Serving Time The Old-Fashioned Way”, is that prisons should be harsher with punishment in order to deter crime. He believes that punishment should be enforced in prisons more because it seems that all prisoners are doing is enjoying luxuries, like watching television and weight lifting. When Boland talks about prisons enforcing certain grooming procedures, he mentions how a group of inmates protested against this by going on a hunger strike. Boland says, “This is good news for taxpayers, who have to feed these morons” (1-2). Boland mentions taxpayers because he feels they aren’t putting their money to good use for these prisons, and he also goes on to call the inmates “morons”, which shows how little he cares about them. The author says he wants harsh punishment and that rehabilitation will not help these prisoners. Boland goes on to say, “Everyone knows how

He uses real life experiences to support what he is arguing such as the fact that he lived most of his life in a prison and can understand what it is really like. Gilligan says, “Neither words nor pictures, no matter how vivid, can do more than give a faint suggestion of the horror, brutalization, and degradation of the prisons of this country” (1). What Gilligan is trying to say is that being there physically in the prisons will help people who have never been to jail understand what is going on and how horrible it is, and he was there to see it all. That is why he says he is so against violence being practiced in prisons because he’s seen its effects and damage it causes. Another real life experience he uses is child-rearing, which he compares to the upbringing of punishment at a young age to the prisoners today. The author explains that, “…children who are subjected to corporal discipline are significantly more likely to subject other people to physical punishments (i.e., inflict violence on them), both while they are still children and after they have reached adulthood” (2). This shows how starting to punish at a young age will only lead to more violence in the future and in order to stop it from happening, there must be a stop to violent