Conditions and Cultural Implications of the Prison System - Essay Example

? The prison industrial complex can be described as one of the most dangerous aspects of society. While individuals are detained for their legal transgressions, the prison system fails to solve the problem. In fact, prison systems often undermine the very objective for which they exist. In terms of the capacity for prisoners to learn how to become fully functional law abiding citizens, the established criminal justice system by no means rehabilitates its occupants. After discussing background information regarding incarceration rates and the infrastructure, before concluding, I discuss the conditions and cultural implications of the system. Rate of Incarceration The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but incarcerate roughly a quarter of all the prisoners in the world. According to a report released by the Bureau of Prison Statistics, one out of every 32 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005. In fact, imprisonment has become the immediate response to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category "crime" and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages. This system cannot last much longer, it’s stretched to the breaking point. There are too many prisoners for the system to be sustained. The only results are more violence, riots, racism. The system is failing because it was not designed to succeed. The criminal justice system disproportionately occupies people of color in the United States (Abramsky, 2008). According to Angela Davis, “Almost two million people are currently locked up in the immense network of U.S. prisons and jails. More than 70 percent of the imprisoned population are people of color. It is rarely acknowledged that the fastest growing group of prisoners is black women and that Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita.” We can see the impact socioeconomically by examining information from the Department of Justice itself, Irwin and Austin report that "Between 1980 and 1995, the prison population ballooned from 329,821 to 1,104,074--a rise of 235%" (Irwin & Austin, p.1). Zimring and Hawkins write "Never before has a prison system grown by so much in so short a time during a period of political and social stability" (Zimring & Hawkins, 1994 p.83). The incarceration rate in the U.S. increased from 138 per 100,000 in 1980 to 403 in 1995. "We now imprison at a higher rate than any other nation in the world, having recently surpassed South Africa" (Irwin & Austin, p.1). What we clearly see here is that mass imprisonment in local communities is continuing to grow faster and faster over time. The impact of this is astonishing when you consider the amount of individuals and families of non-caucasian decent who are harmed psychologically and physically because of a system clearly designed for the purpose of turning profit under the guise of helping the population. There are now about 1.5 million children in the U.S. who have a parent in prison. According to a report by Marc Mauer, “African American children, 1 of every 14 has a parent behind bars on any given day. Over the course of a year or an individual’s childhood, the figures would obviously be much greater. For these children, the experience of shame, stigma, and loss of financial and psychological support becomes a profound aspect of their life experience. The effect on these communities is compounded by the fact that imprisonment has become an almost inevitable aspect of the experience of growing up as a black male in the U.S. Government figures now show that a black male born today has a one in three chance of spending at least a year in prison at some point in his life. Thus, while children in well-off communities grow up with the expectation that they will go to college, many in low-income communities now grow up with the prospect of doing time in prison.” (Mauer, p.6) To handle the cost of mass imprisonment in the U.S. opted to privatize its prison system. This includes the use of facilities contracted and operated in the War on Terror. This has creates a system where prisoners are at the whim of companies whose sole purpose is to maximize profit. Private prisons often work prisoners to the bone in manufacturing or other jobs either without paying them or paying them only pennies, all in the name of a profit motive. Any bit of cost savings is made by cutting corners in treatment of prisoners and facilities provided. Because the contracting is done in less than free market environments, there is little to no incentive to improve conditions. Corporations, unlike governments, have a vested interest in keeping more prisoners in prison for longer periods of time. They are paid per diem per capita, so they will often keep people in prison for their maximum stay in situations where they would have been paroled much sooner. They also will take in maximum security prisoners into minimum security environments, even against the will of the communities where they set up shop. This presents a huge negative perception being thrown into the midst of an otherwise normal environment. The US prison system is modeled globally, amplifying the impacts. If nothing is done to stop the move toward privatization, Earth will become a prison planet. This privatization has found its way into the international arena through the use of extraordinary rendition by U.S. operatives. This occurs when the government sanctions the removal of detainees from U.S. soil in order to use advance interrogation tactics. Prison is not supposed to be a cake-walk, but we contend that prisoners deserve to have their basic human rights upheld while in prison. The conditions in private prisons have been likened to the experience of prisoners in Soviet Gulags and China’s Laogai system. The continued denial of prisoner’s human rights is demeaning, demoralizing, and ultimately dehumanizing. They are stripped of their personal possessions, given a number, and then their dignity and rights are taken away. Dehumanization should be rejected in every instance because it is the gateway for all atrocities, it necessitates future denials of rights, deaths, and even mass slaughter. It is a small step from taking away the humanity of prisoners to taking away the humanity of a race of people and acting brutally toward them. All evidence indicates that government run prisons have less instance of abuse and are better able to rehabilitate prisoners (Abramsky, 2008). There are more checks and balances in government prisons because they are beholden to voters and pressure from people. Governments are also beholden to constitutional and legal pressures that corporations can and do avoid. Because governments do not have a profit motive, they are less likely to abuse prisoners to gain extra dollars. The prison industrial complex has its roots in a logic that demands more captive bodies for more profit. In the reconstruction period, convict leasing was introduced to make up for the lack of traditional slave labor. In convict leasing regimes, mostly freed slaves convicted of petty crimes were rented out to pick cotton and build railroads. Until 1972 a prison farm resembling a slave plantation was operated in Mississippi. When discussing the impacts that prison systems have had on the cultural development of communities, the most prominent issue concerns the youth. The objective of the criminal justice systems should be focused on the purifying society of legal transgressions. The prison system functions as either a deterrent or a rehabilitative structure. This is because prison teaches criminology. Individuals held behind its bars are perpetuators of illegal actions. Hence they reaffirm that mentality to one another behind bars. The culture of gang affiliated violence is the dominant discourse within the walls of the prison industrial complex. Therefore, when prisoners are released into society, there is a higher likelihood for increased rates of recidivism. Recidivism is the propensity for a criminal to reoffend. This stems from the psychological debates of nature versus nature. Modern studies point to the fact that the environment is much more pervasive when influencing decision making. Hence, when criminology is the most dominant ideology shared by individuals in the prison system, it is likely that they will only think with the same ideology. Unfortunately, ideological thinking is not the only consequence of the criminal justice system. The entire prison system itself breeds more negative emotion and reaction by increasing and enforcing tougher and more intense policies over time. Due to prison overcrowding the policies attack absurd behaviors with sharp repercussions (Abramsky, 2008). As duly noted by Irwin and Austin it “...is attributable in large part to dramatic changes in the nature of parole supervision and the imposition of increasingly more severe conditions of supervision on parolees. Instead of a system designed to help prisoners readjust to a rapidly changing and more competetive economic system, the current parole system has been designed to catch and punish inmates for petty and nuisance-type behaviors that do not in themselves draw a prison term (ibid.).” (Irwin and Austin 1997, p.116) In many facilities it can be found that overcrowding also has a huge psychological impact on the inmates themselves. With harsh policies and tough environments combined with criminal minds all packed together, you have a social backlash so huge it can only be described as appalling. According to a very thorough investigation into a max-prison in California, “...guards routinely stripped young inmates naked and then locked them in their cells for days, education programs were virtually nonexistent, and...many of the large number of mentally disturbed inmates "degenerated" because of a serious lack of appropriate care.” (San Francisco Examiner, March 22, 1998 p.A7) The entire prison system in the United States only shows us that our society has an appetite for masochism. Anyone can make the claim that criminals should be punished and support it with many strong analytical arguments. Hard-pressed are you to find a huge majority in support of the mass crowding of privatized complexes condemning men to living in harsh environments completely in isolation in a pathetic attempt to “rehabilitate them”. Hence why we end up living in a world where the system itself has become the problem, and the ones behind the game have made too much profit to turn the system off and try another route. The American populous is now stuck with an ever increasingly powerful and technologically advanced criminal justice system. The ones barking the orders and pulling the strings on what human action is denoted as a crime does so only with the consideration for how much capital he can create with how much time he can keep him there. A giant game is played with corporations, institutions, and human lives all as the pawns to keep the wheel moving. Unless some matter of intelligent act comes upon the American people to push for a reformation to move as far away from the mundane and obscure policies and measurements taken in the act of incarceration, the system will continue to self-perpetuate and push the population into a state of fear and consent. This idea which sounds somewhat morbid and not all that enticing to swallow, is merely the beginning of growing numbers and statistics that only show signs of further explosion. In conclusion one may grasp by now on their own accord that system of incarceration statistically speaking is based on racial profiling. The self proliferation of the social structure within human nature is unstoppable. The impact of mass imprisonment on local societies and nationwide structures altogether is more than disheartening. Yet in the mass of such negativity only more comes from the actual facilities themselves, both the individual and groups alike enduring sickeningly rough behavior and treatment on all sides. This is a system torn with corruption and built upon a foundation of fire and brimstone, all thats left is to work towards negating the effects brought upon by this quasi corporate-police structure and promote reformations across the board. 1. Abramsky, S. (2008). American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment. Boston: Beacon Press. 2. The Changing Forms in Racial/Ethnic Biases in Sentencing Source: Journal of Research in Crime and Deliniquency; Feb87, Vol. 24 Issue 1, p69-92, 24p Author: Zatz Marjorie S. Documnent type: Article 3. Justice Quarterly Authors: Doolin, Robert K. Source: Federal Probation; Jun2001, Vol. 65 Issue 1, p69, 2p 4. Crime, Migration, and social change in north-west England and the Basque Country, c. 1970-1930 Authors: Walton, John k. Blinkhorn, Martin Source: British Journal of Criminology; winter99, Vol. 39 Issue 1, p90, 23p Docutment type: Article 5. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisprison.html 6. Zimring, Franklin E. & Gordon Hawkins. "The Growth of Imprisonment in California." British Journal of Criminology v.34 Special Issue 1994 pp. 82-103. 7. Irwin, John & James Austin. It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge. 2nd edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co, 1997. 8. Mauer M (2004). Lessons of the "Get Tough" Movement in the United States. The Sentencing Project. , 6. Read More

 

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