"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.…
Would you believe me if I told you that prisons were originally built to reform prisoners? With they way the criminal justice system works and how high the rates of mass incarceration are, in today's day and age, I, myself, would not believe that prisons were built with a positive outcome in mind. If someone would have told me that in the eighteen hundreds prison were used as a place to reform individuals, I would have given them a nasty looking face full of disbelief. But now that I have this information, the question is, what changed? Why is this method still not being practiced in today’s society? However, while asking these question, I realize that it is absolutely amazing the way things change and how easily things are tainted.…
Supermax prisons are considered effective because they consolidate the most violent criminals and allow for other prisons to function more safely and more normally for both staff and inmates. However the inmates cannot just be consolidated and held to the same standards as regular prisons, as was revealed at Marion in 1980 when the “operation began to show clear signs of the underlying stresses of using this quasi-normal system to deal with such aggressive offenders” (Hickey pg. 164). In response, a new and more sophisticated facility was created to cater to the high-security needs of a prison with extremely dangerous inmates. These newer facilities were created to “control the inmate’s behavior until they demonstrate that they can be moved back to a traditional open-population penitentiary” (Hickey pg. 165). While incarcerated at…
The Federal Bureau of Prisons oversees 114 correctional institutions throughout the United States. Most of them are classified as Minimum to Medium security, Levels I-IV. These facilities house everyday criminals, and only contain a very small number of high-profile, high risk inmates. There are 22 prisons, however, that are dedicated to keeping the most dangerous humans in the country off the streets. These are Super-Maximum Security prisons, or Supermax. They are classified as Levels V-VI, and they offer little more than what is needed to survive; nourishment and shelter. Most offer no chance of rehabilitation, and for some, it’s just the last stop before capital punishment. The evolution of the Supermax prison can be seen the clearest through three facilities: United States Penitentiary (USP) Alcatraz, USP Marion, and Administrative Maximum USP Florence. The first real need for a Supermax prison arose in the 1920’s, during the Great Depression and Prohibition. Crime was rampant, and gangsters like Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly ran the streets. The Ashurst-Sumners Act, which prohibited the interstate transportation and sale of goods manufactured in prisons, had officially ended free-market prison industry. Prison administrators, left with inmates that had nothing to do, latched on to the concept that only through a harsh prison sentence could an inmate pay their debt to society. Prisons transformed from factories to fortresses, with maximum security and minimum freedom. But many could not handle the influx of criminals that rose with the crime rate, along with agitated inmates that incited riots just to pass the otherwise uneventful time. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, newly established in 1930, decided that a message needed to be sent to the American public that the uncontrolled crime surge would not go unchallenged any longer.…
Johnson, R., Dobrzanska, A., and Palla, S. (2005). The American prison in historical perspective. Retrieved from http://www.jblearning.com/samples/0763729043/Chapter_02.pdf…
Unable to get official permission to interview and write about correctional officers, Ted Conover, author of the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, "got in" by applying for a correctional officer position. After training, he and his fellow rookies, known as "newjacks," were randomly assigned to Sing Sing, one of the country's most famous -- and infamous -- prisons. Sing Sing, a maximum-security male prison, was built in 1828 by prisoners themselves, kept at their task by frequent use of the whip. Today, the chaos, the backbiting, the rundown building and equipment, the disrespect and the relentless stress that Conover experienced in his year at Sing Sing show, quite well, how the increase of prisons in the U.S. brutalizes more than just the prisoners.…
This essay is going to show the development with four eras of the correctional system. The four eras that will be discussed with be: 1800, 1960, 1980 and 2000. For each era we will go over the description of the holding or monitoring of the offenders, the treatment and punishment of the offenders and the influences of the particular era on today’s correctional system. The conclusion will discuss the most beneficial era to the correctional system, as well as, recommendations for ways in which the current correctional system could be improved upon.…
History of Corrections -Punishment or Rehabilitation. (n.d.). Retrieved April 7, 2010, from Prisons as Workplaces: http://www.libraryindex.com…
This narrative will illustrate a timeline depicting four eras within the correctional system of America. The eras that I will be discussing are: 1800, 1920-1950, 1990, and 2000’s. For each era, the following items will be described: the history and development, treatment and punishment of the offenders, the description of the holding and monitoring of the offenders. The conclusion will discuss the alternatives to incarceration and the influences of the eras in today’s correctional system, as well as, recommendations for ways in which the current correctional system could be improved upon.…
Correctional institutions emerged gradually from the Big House. In this new era harsh discipline and repression by officials became less-oppressive features of prison life. Correctional institutions did not abolish the pains of imprisonment; one might classify most of these prisons as Big Houses “gone soft” (Seiter, 2011). These institutions offered more recreational privileges such as more-liberal mail, different visitation policies, and more amenities including educational, vocational, and therapeutic programs. Something that promoted peace and more stability was…
Throughout the centuries, both the system and the concept of prison have undergone many radical changes that eventually led to the formation of the prison as we know it now. In the 16th and 17th centuries, prison tended to be a place where criminals were kept in it while awaiting their punishment. It was a place, where criminals were held, rather than a means of punishment. In fact, criminals, at that time, were publically punished, rather than imprisoned, in the most torturous ways such as whipping, and slaughtering. However, in the 18th century, people in charge decided to put an end to these cruel methods of punishing. They came up with new methods of punishing instead of using torture in punishing criminals. In fact, the incarceration with hard labor was the new method of punishing criminals. Thus, the prison itself became a tool of punishment.…
The state prison systems of today were founded on the nineteenth-century penitentiary, which was itself based on the legal reforms of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment (Foster, 2006). Most of the states actually begin with one state prison and now each state consists of more than 20 state facilities the state of Texas consist of 100 facilities. In the beginning of the state facilities they were based on the Auburn model and then proceeded on to have special needs which were woman and the younger offenders. The State facilities also had halfway houses for the offenders that were addicted to drugs and alcohol and these houses helped the offenders through hard times.…
In part 3, Morris (2002, p.171) discusses why prison conditions matter and why penal reformers, including himself, have devoted their lives and travelled thousands of miles to other countries in search of answers to questions that would improve prison correction from what is corrupt or defective. Morris (2002, p.172) suggests human rights are relative to all human beings whether free or imprisoned and he considers prisons as a smaller community within the world. Thus, the infliction of unnecessary torture and pain cannot be justified and therefore must be prevented and eradicated.…
When you think about what has changed between now and the 1800’s there are endless possibilities to mention. Most of the time however these changes have been for the better. When you come across something that hasn’t changed much one can’t help but wonder why. The similarities between institutionalism now and in the 1800’s are eerily similar. “In the 1830’s jail was an all purpose solution for a lot of issues” (Campbell, 2014). Intentional or not I still feel like this is still the case. The people in prison who are confined in solitary either have mental issues, which caused them to end up in solitary confinement, or they made a bad decision causing them to end up in solitary. Whatever the primary mental state of the prisoner, the majority…
In 1790 came the birth of the Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The penitentiary was different than other systems in that it isolated prisoners, “ …isolated from the bad influences of society and one from another so that, while engaged in productive labor, they could reflect on their past miss-deeds…and be reformed,” (Clear, Cole, Reisig). The American penitentiary and its new concept was observed and adopted by other foreign countries.…