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Prison Gangs

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Prison Gangs
The American system of justice should punish criminals correctly and when in serious need, the reform system should take over and punish them severely. The system of criminal justice in America is used to deal with crimes it cannot prevent and criminal it cannot deter is not a consistent system. It was not designed or built in one piece at one time. Its philosophic core is that a person may be punished by the government if, and only if, it has been proved by an honest and intentional process that he or she has violated a specific law. Around that core layer upon layer of institutions and procedures, some carefully constructed and some improvised, some inspired by principle and some by resource, have accumulated. Parts of the system magistrates' …show more content…
Most prison gangs do more than offer simple protection for their members. Most often, prisons gangs are responsible for any drug, tobacco or alcohol handling inside correctional facilities (Garbarino 50). Furthermore, many prison gangs involve themselves in prostitution, assaults, kidnappings and murders. Prison gangs often seek to intimidate the other inmates, pressuring them to relinquish their food and other resources (Garbarino 59). Also, prison gangs often exercise a large degree of influence over organized crime in the "free world", larger than their isolation in prison might lead one to expect. Violence due to drugs has caused uproar within the community of the jail cells and thus caused “War on Drugs”. Drugs lead to both massive increases in the prison population and high profits for drug trafficking. Larger prison gangs have consciously worked to leverage their influence inside prison systems to control and profit from drug trafficking on the street. This is made possible based upon the logic that individuals involved in selling illegal drugs face a high likelihood of serving a prison term at some point or in having a friend or family member in prison (Garbarino 63). The War on Drugs also led to large numbers of drug addicts serving prison terms, providing gangs with a significant method of asserting control within prisons, by controlling the drug

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