Slavery: “The Peculiar Institution” Slaves were brought to the colonies first as indentured servants then slave traders started capturing slaves from Africa and bring them to the Caribbean. The colonist found slave labor cheap compared to indentured slaves who eventually ended their service. Slavery began in the United States about the 1630’s. During this time the colonial courts and legislatures made Africans property and enslaved to their masters for a life time. The legislature also ruled that slave status would be inherited by their children.
This problem is further conflated due to private prison’s desire to lower costs by having fewer guards (Hallett). Despite these alarming issues, it is important to remember that the outsourcing of prison management to private firms was in response to the failure of the government to deal with rising prison costs and overcrowding. That is why recent evidence that private prisons are not more cost effective then public ones potentially puts a nail in the coffin regarding their efficacy (Oppel). Furthermore, their profit incentive has created an ethical dilemma for judges, lawmakers, and those who run the prison systems (Monboit). Still, the debate rages.
Privatized prisons are valuable to the government and the public. They provide a service and help keep prison populations lower for public prisons. Accreditations and privatization work together to train the employees and keep the inmates and staff safe, no matter if the prison is public or private. Corrections Accreditations Corrections accreditations are the standard in which American prisons are operated. Just like a good university has an accreditation to compare with other universities, prisons have the same standards that the facility and employees must strive to achieve.
Criminal law consists of bodies of regulations and rules that will specify and define the punishments for the wrong committed against society or the state. Criminal laws are enforced on state, federal, and local levels. Criminal laws are in place to maintain some type of standard of conduct more acceptable in society, and to safeguard society from criminals. The purpose of criminal laws is to set a no tolerance standard for criminal behavior, also meaning no crime committed will go unpunished thus an attempt to keep the community crime free and safe. When
Private prison companies typically enter into contractual agreements with governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate for each prisoner confined in the facility. Today, the privatization of prisons refers both to the takeover of existing public facilities by private operators and to the building and operation of new and additional prisons by for-profit prison companies. However, privatized prisons should not exist, because it opens the door to inhumane treatment, corruption of the prison system, and leads to prisoners not being rehabilitated which should be the main goal of the correctional system. With a highly increasing prison population resulting from the war on drugs and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and rising costs have become increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response to this expanding criminal justice system, private business interests have seen an opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private- sector involvement in prisons has moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons.
Judges, officers, agents, lawyers and correctional staff have to make decisions about how to proceed with the detainment and punishment of criminals. Correctional officers must have character and exemplify good ethical conduct. These professionals must take their jobs serious and never betray their oath in office, their public trust, or their badge (Peak, 2010). Character and ethics are qualities that constitute the foundation of their occupation and will certainly affect the manner in which they carry out their public-safety duties. Correctional officers play an influential role in the lives of many inmates because of their direct and prolonged interaction.
Santos explains how one of the wardens, in the FCI McKean institution Warden Luther, was there to help those inmates. Warden Luther made it known that this correctional institution and its employees would treat the inmates with “dignity” and the inmates were expected to “act responsibly” (Santos, p. 149). The book describes how the warden posted signs declaring, “Luther’s Belief about the Treatment of Inmates”, which gives rules to staff on how to treat the inmates in a dignified fashion. (Santos, p.148). When you have a warden like Luther, willing to help inmates regardless of their criminal record or status, it gives hope that the prison can be called a correctional facility.
Together these factors have dramatically altered the nature of day-today prison life and inmate culture. Today’s prison life is much better than past times. I think it’s barbaric that prisons used to torture their prisoners, and they had no say in anything. Although today’s prisoners still don’t have much of a say in what occurs inside prison, they know they won’t get tortured like prisoners in the past. I’ve always heard that during the Industrial Revolution, many prisoners were used as free labor, but I never realized how much money the prisons actually made from this kind of labor.
However, the implementation of; Prison improvement program has made it possible for prison to preserve the basic human rights of inmates. A prison is a place that holds people who have been convicted, or found guilty, of serious crimes, although there are a number of reasons why we use imprisonment. Customary we use prison to deter those who commit crime, and also to serve as a punishment for those who commit crime. Nonetheless we also use prison to reform people in order to get them ready for reintroduction of society. The most important thing that we use prison for is to keep people in our society safe, and to offer protection.
Nevertheless, correctional administrators in the modern correctional facilities have been enlightened in that they recognize a broader responsibility and mission of prisons. Protecting the society from criminal acts by offenders serves as the complete mission of corrections in the U.S justice system. In order to accomplish this mission, prisons have to use a combination of strategies for surveillance and control of