Plan to Improve Correctional Facilities

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Plan to Improve Correctional Facilities CRJ 410 Corrections May 11, 2014 In a diverse country, prison administrators must keep in mind the variety of people that populate the prison that they are overseeing. Each of the prisoner whether white, black, Latino, or female, will have their own special needs and specific challenges that will need to be addressed to properly administrate the prison. Corrections involve providing care for the inmates that have been incarcerated, probation and parole after the release of an inmate and reentry strategies for the inmate to become a part of society after their sentence is over. The different populations of the prison may require different strategies to fully meet the requirements for corrections. Implementing a plan that helps to improve a particular population’s interactions with corrections will help the correctional field to serve their purpose to society and the inmates entrusted to them. Inmates that are mentally challenged pose a variety of challenges to correctional facilities that need to be addressed. One of the major target populations within the field of corrections are those that are mentally challenged. According to Renee Lewis, in 2012, there were an estimated 356,268 inmates with severe mental illnesses in U.S. prisons and jails while there were only 35,000 mentally ill individuals in state psychiatric hospitals (2014). There are 10 times more mentally ill people in prisons and jails than in state psychiatric hospitals and their conditions will often deteriorate while they are incarcerated. One of the challenges that mentally ill inmates will face in a correctional facility is that there may be an inadequate amount of resources in the prison to deal with mentally ill inmates. The second challenge is that there are a lot of misinformation out there regarding mental illness that can cause inmates to
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