Prison Environment Essay

392 Words2 Pages
Prison Environment I would describe the prison environment as a place where people are sent after they have committed a crime. In this environment, the offenders are locked up away from society and are stripped of the freedoms that they had before they were sent to prison. In this environment, the offenders must abide by strict rules, be confined to a small space, and are told when/if they can have visitors. The prison environment influences institutional management and custody in several ways. One of which being overcrowding. The number of offenders being sent to prison is on the rise and can affect the system drastically. With overcrowding, the job of keeping an eye on every inmate at all times becomes harder, the threat of gang activity grows, violence rises, and all of these can have a big impact on the overall management. Some changes to prison environments that could improve institutional management could be reducing the number of inmates for starters. Having fewer inmates confined to such a small space could lower the tension and possibly lessen the threat of violence that is prevalent in prisons today. Having programs to keep inmates occupied and give them a feeling of worth and accomplishment could improve management as well. Also, keeping high level offenders away from low level offenders could help with corruption of the lesser offenders keeping them from turning out worse than they were before. Some secure custody methods would be counting the inmates to know where they are, controlling vehicle and pedestrian traffic in and outside the prison, explaining the rules of the prison, the control of contraband, doing searches of the inmates and their cells, and putting the prison or certain inmates on lockdown. The prison environment affects issues of secure custody in many ways. With the different types of inmates, many of these
Open Document