The analogy of the cave tells us nothing about reality. Discuss [10] To explain the way in which Plato’s analogy of the cave could tell us something about reality, one could use the example of a small town, in the middle of nowhere. Many people live in this town, and it has a school, a church, a post office and a shop. The population of the town rarely leave to visit other places. These people can be considered to be the prisoners in Plato’s analogy, chained together, facing a blank wall, assuming to know everything about the world from the small part of it they’ve seen.
The original role for prisons was just to hold criminals and no regard was given for an inmate’s well-being. These prisons were often overcrowded and dirty (2011). The welfare of the inmates did not seem to matter. As Roth states in the text “Contrary to existing penal protocol, Rush envisioned a prison system in which convicts were housed in a large building equipped with single cells to segregate the more dangerous and disruptive prisoners. All others were lodged in apartments” (2011, p. 89).
Criteria for placement at Tamms are currently so vague that every prisoner in the Illinois Department of Corrections is eligible. Decisions to send men to Tamms are secret and not open to review. Men are not given placement forms and many do not know why they are there. A number of men have life without parole sentences and don’t know if they will ever be released from Tamms to general population. Every man at Tamms Supermax is kept in solitary confinement.
I find this very odd, very odd indeed that I have never met this person to which he speaks, but I do not second guess my masters commands. After this peculiar incident I began to notice something change in my good sir. He would go for days and never meet me at the front door to let him out. This irregularity began to progress more and more. One evening while at home after observing that the laboratory and my masters quarters were empty I stayed awake waiting for him.
That forced a few changes in Brett’s behavior and lifestyle but in the end nothing prevailed. This next text I am about to speak about is also a very good example of institutions, where as the “prison farm” I spoke of earlier this text which is named “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest” Directed by Milos Forman in 1975 is about a mental hospital but the man sent there ( Jack Nicholson ) finds the head nurse a lot more dangerous than the inmates themselves. Randle Patrick McMurphy ( Jack Nicholson ) thinks he can get out of doing work while in prison by pretending to be mad. His plans are rapidly backfired when he is sent a “mental asylum”. He tries to liven the place up on his arrival by playing card games and playing basketball with his fellow inmates, but the head nurse is after him at every turn.
When Red finishes his sentence he reunites with his friend in there outside plan to an island. The Shawshank Redemption portrays a prison as an institution which does nothing but house people with no sense of direction. They worked the prisoners for their own use and had no rehabilitation plans available for the prisoners. The movie shows themes where it is extremely lacking or nonexistent for rehabilitation back in society. In two sequences in the film it provides this powerful message.
Privacy is not a term that is recognized in prisons because it does not exist. (Foster, 2006) The cells have toilets and a sink within feet of where they lay their heads to sleep. It is near impossible for a prisoner to be alone while serving their time unless they are in solitaire confinement for whatever reason. The only places there are for a prisoner to be is in their cell, the cafeteria, common housing area, or in the yard. Inmates usually find other inmates who share the same ideology, religion, gang affiliation, or ethnic background, to spend their time with.
He feels alienated, meaningless, and dehumanized. Gregor is not capable of establishing a relationship, he says: “The steady stream of faces never become anything closer than acquaintances” (Kafka 8). Even as a human he feels unable to connect with others. This feeling becomes magnified through his transformation; not only is he emotionally alienated from society, he is also physically isolated in his room. According to Freudian’s theory he displays signs of a core issue referred to as Fear of Intimacy.
The guards were given no training on how to be guards and how to do their job. They created the prison by boarding up each end of the corridor in the basement of Stanford’s Psychology Department building by taking the doors off some laboratory rooms and replacing them with specially made doors with steel bars and cell numbers. To understand what goes through prisoners minds and to get the full effect on how they act and what they do, they put a videotape and recorded what events occurred. An intercom system was also placed to monitor what the prisoners discussed. There were no windows or clocks so they couldn’t tell how much time has passed which later resulted in some time-distorting experiences.
The panopticon is a type of punishment where the prisoner is left alone but is on constant surveillance. The idea behind this punishment technique is that prisoners will behave for fear that someone is watching. In a panopticon there is a round room with jail cells in the wall. There is a central tower where a guard is supposed to keep an eye on the surrounding cells. The cells are made for only one person and there is a solid wall in between each cell so that prisoners cannot communicate.