Questions about the Judicial and Penitentiary System - Assignment Example

Final Exam CJ521-01 Critical Issues in Corrections September 13, 2009 Final Exam Discuss prison litigation and its impact on corrections. Include in your response key areas and amendments for discussion and your stance on these key areas. Discussion of this issue must begin with the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995. This act created a sort of parallel system of justice of the millions of people who are in American prisons. Some people believe this is unfair: but that is what corrections is all about: punishing the guilty. However, a main area of discussion and a real problem in my opinion is that this act also extends to those who are being detained in prison before being charged or before being convicted. This aspect is especially troubling as these people are prisoners in name only. They have not been convicted of anything and deserve the full protection of the law, unlike convicted criminals. This part of the act should be amended to prevent detainees and unconvicted people from being treated as convicted criminals under the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act. One of the most unfair aspects of this legislation (according to its critics) is that it requires prisoners to first make their complaint through their prison (aka through the warden and the administration) before the suit or issue can be dealt with in court. The PLRA amendment to §1997e which required prisoners to exhaust the internal grievance processes of their prisons is controversial to some people, but acceptable to be me. In other words prisoners do not have a right to bring their complaint directly to court, it must first be filtered through the system. I personally don’t have a problem with this idea as prisoners give up many of their rights when they are convicted of a crime (including the right to vote), and they can indeed still access the legal system even if it is a little more difficult. 2.What is your understanding of jails and why they are necessary? Support your response. There are many reasons why jails are required. The main reason, in my opinion, is to protect society from the worst of the worst. I don’t believe much in treatment programs and half-way houses (nor do I especially believe prisons are effective at rehabilitating criminals), but the thing that prisons are good at is keeping dangerous people away from vulnerable people in society. They also are a deterrent to criminals. If you commit a crime you know you will be sent to a very unpleasant place and have mobility and freedom stripped from you. This sends an important message that we as a society are serious about tackling dangerous crime. We are willing to deter it by suspending the constitutional rights of people convicted of serious crimes: they will have their lives seriously stigmatized and circumscribed by the prison system. Jails are necessary to keep order in our society. If we did not hire guards and build big walls, we would be overrun by dangerous offenders. No elected government can allow that to happen to its most vulnerable citizens. The trend towards supermaximum prisons mentioned by Pollock is significant (Prisons, 113). Why would such prisons be being built if not to protect people from increasingly dangerous prisoners? 3. What are the purposes of treatment programs and are they necessary? Present some of the advantages and disadvantages of treatment programs. Treatment programs are designed to rehabilitate prisoners. Criminals are often motivated by substance abuse problems that dominate their lives. They steal and injure people so that they can get another fix. For some people, the solution to this problem is simple: treat the prisoners for the abuse problems. These programs sounds nice, but they rarely work. Their success rate is low. These programs can be useful if the criminal really wants to change, but they are ineffective if a criminal is ordered to go to a treatment program as part of their sentencing. Few people can change if they don’t want to change in the first place. Treatment programs on themselves also rarely work if the person in question does not have a strong support network. If he or she is all alone it will be very difficult for them to stay strong. Additionally, treatment programs are very expensive to administer. They can be part of the solution but are not a silver bullet. Some advantages of these programs are as follows: if the prisoner really wants to change, they may be useful; they employ a large number of people; they allow the government to say they are working to rehabilitate prisoners; they provide a gateway that family members can also use to try to help prisoner. Some disadvantages are as follows: the programs rarely work; they can be exploited by prisoners; and they are expensive. 4. In your opinion, what are the key issues facing the future of corrections. Please elaborate. The key issue for the future of corrections regards how many people should be put in prison. We as a society need to decide once and for all if we are going to fully embrace the crime control model. The way I see it, in the criminal justice system there are two opposing modes of looking of how to deal with criminals. The first is the due process model. The gist of this model is that an individual can never be deprived of basic human rights no matter how horrible a crime he or she has committed. Even to put someone in prison is to take away the criminal’s inalienable right to liberty and there must be many appeals and a thoroughly scrutinized process to ensure that everything is done by the book. At its heart the due process model would rather see nine guilty people on the street than one innocent person in prison. The end result of this mode requires many hours of painstaking work by humans checking and rechecking evidence and the court case moving very slowly through the system. The second mode of looking at criminal justice is the Criminal Control Mode. This system puts a high value on locking up guilty people. It focuses on protecting citizens from criminals as quickly as possible. Under this system more money is spent on policing and deterring and prosecuting criminals as quickly as possible so that the police and prosecutors can move on quickly to the next batch. If an innocent person is caught in the net, that is a tragedy, but what is important is that many bad guys got caught too. For the most part, however, the Crime Control Mode believes that the police are almost always right and there is probably a very good reason someone was arrested by them. When examining new technologies in the fight against crime it is important to keep both of these modes in mind. The key is to strike a middle ground between the two. Criminals do have rights but if we allow them the right to not provide DNA samples, we may be unable to charge them with additional crimes the sample might prove they committed. If we compel people who are simply suspects in a crime to give biological samples, we may be treading on constitutional rights. Always it is important to find a happy medium. Read More