The original idea for the penitentiary system came from the religious leaders of colonial America. It derived its name from the word penance, a word meaning to repent for one’s wrongdoings. While in essence the earliest intentions of the penitentiary was as a place to hold convicted criminals, its other objective was to be a place of spiritual healing. The Pennsylvania Quakers were among the most influential reformers of the colonial prison system. Among them was a man named Thomas Eddy, who helped write the original penal code for the state of New York in 1796.
Most of them only engage in the experiment for the money, none of them new exactly what was actually going to happen. It was supposed to be a safe environment to study weather the violent in prison was due to the prison setting, or is it due to the personalities of the prisoner and guards that causes the violence. One of the biggest mistakes that were done in this experiment was that Zimbardo himself was one of the participants of his own experiment, which I think had a huge effect on the course of the events. Since He was the superintendent he was on the guards’ side instead of just observing without any influence of the direction of the experiment. Another ethical problem accrue when there is an invasion of privacy of the participants, like when the prisoners were stripped naked.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the leader of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of the Public Prisons, revived the Quaker code in the late 1700s. The first prison was established in the United States in 1790 by the Philadelphia Society. A wing of the Walnut Street Jail was converted to house sentenced offenders as an alternative to corporal punishment. A regimen was created that involved hard work and doing penance for their offenses. Prisoners were given work to do during the day in their cells and at night they were encouraged to read the Bible and do penance.
They were unsafe because there were no regulations on how they were built. Some tenements didn’t even have windows or fire escapes. As a result many immigrants were caught and killed in fires (OK). Some groups tried to change the living conditions for the better. Immigrants worked in sweatshops that were dangerous.
I know multiple people who have wasted a whole night in jail because they had a small amount of marijuana in their pocket or car. It is ridiculous! Bancroft writes, “one side of the equation are the costs of policing, maintaining many hundreds of thousands of mainly low-level drug criminals in prison, (P 124). This got me thinking about people I know and the thousands of people I don’t know who get busted for drug charges. Some are petty and some are not.
In most case before new laws were passed, was officer’s word versus the inmates. Claims that officers were sexual assaulting the inmates. The second is that the corrections officers were not preventing the rape and assault of the inmates. Over the last twenty years the taking in consideration of the claims more seriously. In 2003 the Prison Rape Elimination Act was passed.
When the mental health facilities were shut down, police and prisons are left to deal with the mantally ill patients. As these patients were released from the hospitals, due to their lack of mental health, many would become homeless and eventually cycle into the prison systems. Once in the prisons, these mentally ill individuals are offered much less care than what many of them need in treating their different types of disorders. Group therapy in such prisons is very informal and conducted in an uptight environment. In these sessions the inmates are kept in chains and separated by jail cells in an open room, as opposed to a patient friendly atmosphere the psychiatric hospitals are able to provide.
In the book “Dry Manhattan” in chapter eight, the city of New York suffered much embarrassment throughout the country. This city had the most crime rate at night, when all the nightclubs or bars were open. The mayor of New York wrote a letter saying “The Prohibition needs to end and our city has been embarrassed and we are sick of it.” Many people found that this was a big deal and some sort of law change needed to occur. It has been so many years of trying to smuggle alcohol and crime that people just plain had enough.
Corrections Trend Evaluation Angela Masters CJA/394 August 5, 2012 Hollis Severns Corrections Trend Evaluation In the past most have watched the correctional system in the United States go from one extreme to another. In the beginning, the only concern was putting prisoners in prison and leaving them there. In present time our goal is more emphasized towards rehabilitating and treating prisoners. Issues such as funding and crime rates play a critical role in the corrections department. During the “lock them up” theory, emphasis was placed on longer sentences, fewer paroles, higher levels of security, and no focus was placed on rehabilitation programs.
Tax payers pay to house these inmates and pay for their medical expenses as they spend the rest of their lives in a prison cell with no hope for the future. In order to understand the circumstances and issues that led to the tens of thousands who have been imprisoned on drug charges we must first understand addiction and the role that drugs play in the American society. This paper is going to discuss the importance of the criminal justice system, how it operates, and the constitution based upon this topic, social equality and fairness and how the criminal justice system helps and fails to restore social