Walnut Street Jail Janice Tighe Harrison College History of Criminal Justice Mr. Royer 10/17/11 As a Criminal Justice student it is important to know and understand some of the history of our Criminal Justice system. One aspect to know would be the history of our correctional system, in particular the Walnut Street Jail. Before the creation of the Walnut Street Jail life for prisoners was cruel and inhumane. As our text states “By the late eighteenth century, men, women, and children were till mixed together in many American jails. Before the birth of the modern penitentiary at Walnut Street (Philadelphia) in 1790, prisoners endured unimaginable squalor” (Roth, 2011, p. 86).
Determinate sentences involve sentences that have a fixed or flat time (Jirard, 2009). Determinate sentences play a large part in the increasing number of individuals in prison, which, as you can imagine, puts more strain on prisons financially. In the past two decades, we have become increasingly “tough on crime” which has helped to decrease crime to a certain extent. According to an article in the New York Times (2008), the US has fewer than five percent of the entire world’s population, but almost twenty five percent of the world’s prisoners (Liptak & , 2008). The author of the article goes on to say that people in the US are sentenced to do time for crimes that would not produce such a sentence in other countries.
The second factor that needs to be considered is the routine the inmates faced on a day to day basis and the outcome of the rehabilitation. Prior to Pentonville, prisons were used as holding bays for those on death row and debtors, due to prisons being unfeasible for long term incarceration. Prisons were corrupt environments were ‘prisoners were in the company of criminals of every class and degree’ . Subsequently it can be claimed that having ‘passed time, he returns a greater adept in crime, with a wider acquaintance among criminals’ . During the time of the report the Lords Select Committee had promoted the silent system which had been adopted at Wakefield Goal and Coldbath fields in 1834.
The Pennsylvania prison society is said to be the first prison to be formed to respond to the conditions that were in oppressive and this led to walnut street jail in Philadelphia being built (Roth, 2011). The majority of the prisoners had no clothing because they had exchanged their clothing for liquor as the disorderliness of the place had led to corruption where alcohol and drugs were being sold in the prisons. During this time, the prisoners were kept in large, crowded rooms and minor and major offenders were kept in the same room. After the reforms, the prisoners were then sorted in accordance with their crimes or offenses and the overcrowding was addressed and minimized. At the same time, workshops were started to help the prisoners acquire skills in the trade.
Even DOSA (Drug Offender Sentencing Act) which says they get half time upon completion of drug counseling, most inmates are unable to complete. However, due to budget cut this leaves inmates or the state to pay for the costs which cost even more than doing it inside the institution. Recidivism, which means to recommit crime, is over 90 percent for drugs offenders even with treatment. Without treatment or education offenders are committing more crime and most of the inmates are going back to prisons. If there are more good programs that would work for these inmate and guide them throughout, each individual should have the responsibility to complete the program and earn something from it.
Gaols operated on a fee system, which charges the prisoners a daily fee; this was how the sheriffs who operated the system made their money. Penitentiary Ideal The word penitentiary was used for more than twenty years, however there were no penitentiaries as we see them in today’s corrections system built. Rather than a building, the penitentiary was an idea and a set of regulations (Foster, 2006). When individuals would look at the building that held criminals, they would see jails, workhouses, and old run down prisons, none of which fit the ideals of the penitentiary. The ideal of the penitentiary was to create an environment of human punishment rather than physical punishments (Foster, 2006).
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.
In saying this Shalom says that since many of the inmates are of lower income the state is expected to pay for both sides of the defense. So it is not really a cost-effective solution since the rates of lawyers are very high (5). The author brings up the common phrase “an eye for an eye”. Many people would feel this to be true. Shalom gives the example of Coretta Scott King who had a husband and mother-in-law killed in an assassination.
"Bring Back Flogging" was published on February 20, in 1997 in the Boston Globe. In this essay, Jeff Jacoby describes the weak points of today's criminal justice system, and claims that flogging should be our option because it is a much quicker, cheaper, educational, and a more effective way than imprisonment. In his argument, Jacoby does show a good amount of evidence, but he does not seem to support his points. He points out that about 1.6 million Americans were in jail that year (1997), and that this number was 3.5 times larger than that of 1980. This seems to show the weakness of the criminal justice system.
The most important thing that we use prison for is to keep people in our society safe, and to offer protection. However most people think prison is suppose to be a place for punishment. The purpose of prison has changed significantly, in 1967, state and federal prison held less than 300,000 inmates. “Shichor noted that rehabilitation was strongly