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Criminal Justice Race Class Gender

Foucault called prisons "complete and austere" institutions because of the way they function in society. A prison is complete because it completely strips from the inmate basic rights and liberties, freedoms, and also humanity. One of the central features of a prison is surveillance, to monitor the activities of the individuals at all time. As such, the prison functions as a complete and total observer and controller. The prison is also austere because of the inherent restrictions on the lives of the inmates. Especially when the prison aims to reform the "criminal," the activities imposed as summarily austere. A prison reflects the punitive nature of the criminal justice system. A complete and austere institution is also systematically exploitative. For instance, the prisoner may be found performing labor to serve the state (or the private entity in charge of the institution). Moreover, a complete and austere institution is one that uses the inmates as if in a grand social experiment to study criminality and criminal justice. Prisons have become so entrenched in society that they can be called "self-evident," viewed as irreplaceable and inevitable and therefore proposed politically as being beyond reform. Once a person is placed into a prison, his or her entire identity...

The subject therefore changes from the very act of being inside.
2. Prisons for women have evolved over the past several centuries as the fields of sociology and criminal justice have become more aware of gender differences in human behavior and experience. Whereas women had once been sanctioned in ways other than prisons, believed to be morally superior to men and therefore more able to be reformed through factors like religious indoctrination, modern women's prisons function in ways similar to male prisons. Women's prisons function slightly differently due to the general tendency for women to commit crimes that are nonviolent in nature. Therefore, the role of a prison as keeping society "safe" from criminals does not apply as much to women's prisons as much as for men's prisons (Pishko, 2015). Yet women's prisons have also been neglect in attending to the specific needs of female inmates or paying attention to the fact that incarceration for nonviolent crimes may have a deleterious effect on the ability of the women to rehabilitate or strengthen their communities.

3. The trend toward mass incarceration and punitive…

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References

Foucault, M. (1975). Complete and austere institutions. Retrieved online: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/heike.schotten/readings/Foucault,%20Complete%20and%20Austere%20Institutions.pdf

LaVigne, N.G. Mamalian, C.A. Travis, J & Visher, C. (2003). A portrait of prisoner reentry in Illinois. Retrieved online: http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/410662-A-Portrait-of-Prisoner-Reentry-in-Illinois.PDF

Pishko, J. (2015). A history of women's prisons. JSTOR Daily. 4 March, 2015. Retrieved online: http://daily.jstor.org/history-of-womens-prisons/
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