Prison Gangs Essay

American popular culture strongly influences the public image of American prisons.
American culture distorts, twists, and exaggerates perspectives on prisons and creates frightening images of prison inmates. American culture depicts images of cruel men and women who deserve whatever shoddy conditions they find behind prison walls and razor-wire fences. These images permeate the American cultural psyche. Who doesn’t know the meaning of ‘going up the river’? Over the centuries the concept of the ‘penitentiary’ symbolically represented in the collective consciousness of American culture the worst of everything human. Ideas of vicious criminals and sadistic wardens, to some degree, function in our culture to scare citizens away from a criminal lifestyle. The proximal cause of prison gangs stands outside prison in the economic neglect of inner cities. Nevertheless, state and federal legislators talk about getting tough on crime without conscious recognition that America’s economically neglected poorest elementary and middle school children await tough sentences. Tax dollars reluctantly and clumsily flow to support schools, medical care, family health, and job training for those at highest risk of youth and prison gang affiliation. Gangs and crime, drug addiction and homicide, spousal and child abuse produce the children of poverty who will be the next generation of prison gangs. Unsurprisingly our prisons keep filling with substance abusing, mentally ill young and adult men and women who were reared in communities legislators neglected.
These men and women find help but at a terrific cost to human life. Hidden behind prison walls and razor wire, we find the irony of modern American prisons. Prisons are relatively safe r and healthier places to live than inner-city neighborhoods. Prisons should be safe and healthy. Healthy inmates cost less to house. Critically ill inmates receive state-of-the-art medical attention. A close look at a contemporary American prison would...