Prison Rehabilitation - Essay Example

e United States has become a place where criminals drain the tax paying public while prison culture creates prisoners who have a more difficult time in society once released. This is detrimental to society as it promotes increased recidivism which creates more victims from crimes committed by these same men and women. Because it is in the best interest of politicians to appear hard on crime, and it is not in the best interest of prison officials to experience the painful growth of change, in order to promote real change within the prison system, the public voice has the strongest power in making a difference.

Real social change is accomplished most often when the people rise up and assert their needs over the oppression of established law and government. Examples of this type of change can be seen from the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the non violent civil disobedience of Ghandi and of Martin Luther King to promote racial equality in the United States. When change has a political price that governing parties find too painful to pay, the voice of the people is most often the only recourse in finding a path for creating new policy.

Most often this was done with violence, but the concept of civil disobedience has changed the way in which the pubic can be heard. “Ghandhian conflict knowledge was unique in that it provided a means to struggle with one’s oppressor without the spiraling violence” (Bartos and Wehr 3). However, not all contemporary social uprising and protests are successfully peaceful. In Seattle, Washington during the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 protesters found themselves facing rounds of tear-gas, rubber bullets, and beatings that spilled over into the non-protesting bystanders (Williams 206).

In 1989 student protesters found themselves confronting military retribution. In Tiananmen Square in China a student protest was fired into by the military, creating a massacre that eventually lead to