Evolution of Prison Life
What were prisons like, how were prisoners treated and classified through American history -- including prison environments in the last few years? This paper delves into those topics and provides the available literature that validates the points to be made in this essay.
The History of Prisons and Prisoner Life in America
According to author and Professor Jack Lynch, prisons were among the very first public buildings when settlers began to populate and develop the New World. And there were few long-term punishments that were meted out, and among those were individuals convicted of being "debtors" (Lynch, 2008). The problem with putting the poor in prison because they couldn't pay their debts was that "…they could never earn the money they owed"; but it wasn't until the 1830s that the U.S. began to "…abolish debtor's prisons" (Lynch, 3). Instead of being imprisoned, convicted criminals were forced to wear letters on their clothing indicating the nature of their crime. In fact, up until the year 1700, "criminals" were subjected to "public shame"; to wit, those who committed adultery wore an "A" (think Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter); others wore "B" (blasphemer); "D" (drunk); "F" (fighter); "M" (manslaughter); "T" (thief); and "R" (rogue) (Lynch, 3).
In the late 1700s American political and moral leaders began to back away...
TREATMENT OF PRISONERS IN THE U.S. AND RUSSIA How Does the United States Compare to Russia in Following the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners? There are nearly 9 million people under certain forms of incarceration or supervision across the globe. The United States has the highest number of prisoners or individuals under some of supervision since approximately 25% of the world's prisoners are held in the country (U.S.
In many ways, Russia is still recovering from it, trying to deal with the fact that only a few decades ago, it inflicted on itself one of the worst holocausts in human memory" (Hochschild, 1993). Therefore, the purges were used on the one hand to discourage the people and the elites in particular from establishing a dissident opposition or a negative pole of power that could have countered the
U.S. has not Signed the U.N. Convention Treaty on the Rights of Children This paper presents a detailed examination of the Treaty on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children. The writer explores the treaty and the nations that have signed it. The writer than delves into some of the reasons the United States has not signed it. This paper is written from a legal standpoint therefore there
The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Illinois and argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect against race discrimination only…" Gibson, 2007, Background to Muller v. Oregon section ¶ 1). The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not include the protection of women's rights. The following depicts Justice Bradley's concurring opinion regarding Bradwell's Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper
'" Two steps if taken, however, would almost halve our prison population. First, repeal state laws that now mandate the incarceration of drug offenders and develop instead many more public and private treatment centers to which nonviolent drug abusers can be referred. Second, stop using jails or prisons to house the mentally ill. Tougher sentencing is being justified, in part, by the widespread belief that incarceration is the chief reason violent crime
Nils Christie in his book Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style, a person has difficulty knowing who are the worst criminals -- the men and women prisoners or the individuals who run the penal industry. The book details how the United States relies on the criminal justice system to enrich business interests by following the model of corporate America. The disciplinary system is supposedly designed to control
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