Why the U.S. Prison System Needs Reform

Placing people in prison has a negative effect on the poverty population in the United States. As stated in previous posts, the United States currently incarcerates 2.2 million people, nearly half of whom are non-violent drug offenders, accused people held pre-trial because they cannot afford their bail, and others who have been arrested for failure to pay debts or fines for minor infractions. Placing these people in prison only adds to their problems and leaves various negative effects individuals and families living in poverty. When an income generating member of the family is placed in prison, the family looses that source of income for their home. The family is then forced to adjust to that loss of income, and deal with the consequences that follow. The United States prison system should be reformed due its contribution to the number of people living in poverty.

Incarcerating people has a stronger impact when the indigent lives in poverty. Many developing countries such as the U.S. do not not provide financial assistance to the indigent. People who are rich and deal with prison sentences have no problem. They can financially support themselves, their family, and their trial to make their prison sentence as light as possible. However, families who live in poverty experience financial losses as a result of the imprisonment and their family. This is rooted by the new expenses that must be met such as the cost of a lawyer, food for the imprisoned person, transport to prison for visits and so on. When released, often with no prospects for employment, former prisoners are generally subject to socio-economic exclusion and are thus vulnerable to an endless cycle of poverty, criminality and imprisonment. Likewise, imprisonment contributes directly to the impoverishment of the prisoner, of of his family and of society by creating future victims and reducing future potential economic performance.

Let’s take a family of five for example. The family is living in poverty with three kids, a mother, and a father. The mother works at the local restaurant and struggles to support her family. The father works as a lousy salesman and does not too too well for himself. The father still makes double the income of the mother, and plays an essential part in supporting the families finical issues. Although the income is low, the father is the largest supporter to the family. One day, he gets arrested for a non-violent drug offense and is sentenced to six months in prison. He  can no longer bring in income for his family, and as a result the family will suffer from that. This is a basic example with a clear solution. Non violent drug offenses should not result in prison sentences. While they are not ideal in a society, they do happen. Instead of sentencing people to prison for these crimes, they should be sent to a rehabilitate center for the appropriate time to help break any negative cycles.

In addition, being in prison takes one out of society for a prolonged amount of time. Many times, people forget how to interact, search for jobs, and present themselves in the real world after spending prolonged amounts of time in prison. It is also important to consider how a prison sentence is a permanent stamp on ones record. If you were dealing with poverty prior to a prison sentence, there is no doubt that it will be even harder after prison.

Researches have looked into the statistical aspect of what imprison does to the population in poverty. Recent research indicates that, if not for the rise in incarceration, the number of people in poverty would fall by as much as 20 percent. The U.S. economy more than doubled in the three decades prior to the Great Recession, but the poverty rate remained largely unchanged. At the same time, incarceration rates increased rapidly by 342%, from 111 to 491 for every 100,000 citizens. When the statistical data comes into play, the negative effects are exposed. The U.S. prison system needs to be reformed because of this. The number of people living i poverty is more important then placing someone in prison for a non violent crime.

In conclusion, the United States prison system needs to be reformed due its contribution to the number of people living in poverty. Poverty has been an ongoing problem in the U.S. for years now. Everyone is always talking about ways to break the negative cycle, and how people can be lifted from poverty. Rebuking non-violent crimes from the U.S. law can be a huge step forward in breaking that cycle. 

 

 

It is evident that prison food is a public health problem and only getting worse across the United States. U.S. prions are moving to a more industrialized and private system focused on packing prisons with more people in order to acquire larger sums of money. Once again, the U.S. prison system is displaying a corrupt structure to benefit themselves finically. They simply treat their inmates like objects and fail to recognize them as human beings. Industrialized prisons replace cooking from scratch with processed packaged food that does not meet the standard nutrition requirement. Because of this, prisoners are exposed to various diseases and illnesses because they are not getting the proper nutrition to keep their immune systems strong. This plays in to they psychical and mental health struggles that prison life entails.

According to Health.gov, proper nutrition is a quintessential aspect to maintaining physical and mental health. “Food and nutrition play a crucial role in health promotion and chronic disease prevention.” Prisoners currently live in an environment that degrades and diminishes their bodies and mental health. Without access to nutritious food, people who are incarcerated are disproportionately at risk of developing chronic diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, or making their existing health conditions worse. When you add this to the malnourished meals they receive it is no surprise that “in prisons, 25% of females and 21% of males reported ever having an infectious disease.” These numbers should not be this high, and many of these infectious diseases can be credited to the food served in these prisons.

The first example shows prisoners from the Georgia’s Gordon County Jail. These claimed they had lost 20 or more pounds in a few months. The food company that provided for this prison, Trinity, had little regard for what prisoners think about the meals they are severed. They charge jails and prisons as little as 75 cents to $2 per meal and save a substantial amount of money because of it. Although they are making high profits the consumer, which in this case is the prisoner, gets the bad end of the stick. According to Susan Sharen, “Studies show that prison diets are often lacking in nutrition, low in fruits and vegetables, and high in salt, sugar and saturated fat. According to the advocacy group Impact Justice, many meals are downright unpalatable – overcooked, undercooked or just plain rotten.” While prisoners are not expected to get served five course meals, they should not be served processed rotten food.

So, what should be the alternative source of food for incarcerated people? They deserve the right to eat food that will maintain the stability of their health. The food they should be served should be natural food that is not processed. Never should they get served food filled with mold. They should also be given at least 2,000 calories per day which is the suggested number according to NHS common health.

The United State prison system needs to find a middle ground for feeding the incarcerated people. It’s expensive to feed the amount of prisoners that the U.S. has. The challenges in feeding a prison population that large, and doing it cheaply enough that the taxpayers who foot the bill don’t revolt, can’t be downplayed. Even if they serve food that meets religious or dietary requirements, it doesn’t mean it’s nutritious, or that the meal is balanced. In many cases, select prisoners will have food disorders that hinders their ability to receive a full meal. For example, if an inmate is gluten intolerant, the gluten from a meal is simply removed. Nothing will replace the meal, instead they are just given less food.

When looking into the ingredients of the prison food, it is clear the lack of nutrition. John Donovan compared the food products of organic cat food. He proclaimed, “Just go compare those [labels] to, like, an organic cat food label sometime. You’ll see that there are a lot of nicer cat food products that a lot of prisoners would prefer to eat.” This is a clear sign that prison food can be better. Cats do not need to intake the same amount of nutrients that humans do. However, many cats are receiving higher levels of nutrients than that of prisoners. There needs to be change so that prisoners receive the proper nutrition to keep their bodies and minds at a healthy level.

In conclusion there are many clear problems with the way the United States prison system operates. The food that is served is just one example of a way the system runs down the people for their own benefit. When looking at the research, it is clear that prisons serve such nutritionally unbalanced food in order to acquire larger sums of money for themselves. The living standard of people is more important than making money. People should not be living in the environments displayed in prisons.

 

 

 

 

On my Civic Issue Blog last week,  I argued I talked about how the American prison system is unjust due to penal labor and the lack of rehabilitative resources available. This week I am going to talk about how mentally consuming life in prison can be by explaining the Stanford Prison Experiment. The main objective of the experiment was to try and look into the effects caused by being inside a prison environment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a social psychology experiment where a group of college students acted as prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment. Over 70 Stanford students responded to an advertisement about a “psychological study of prison life,” and experimenters selected 24 applicants who were judged to be physically and mentally healthy. The goal of this experiment was to examine the effects being inside a prison for an extended period of time. The experiment began with nine guards and nine prisoners in the simulated prison environment. Three guards worked each of three eight hour shift while the prisoners were staged in each of the three prison cells around the clock.

Shortly into the experiment the environment took a turn for the worse and brutality began. The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica dissected the experiment and claimed, “However, mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly that principal investigator Philip G. Zimbardo terminated the experiment after only six days.” Both the prisoners and guards were paid $15 a day and were selected randomly. The guards were ordered not to physically abuse prisoners and were provided with glasses that prevented any eye contact from being made.

By the second day of the experiment, the prisoners staged a rebellion. The guards organized a system of rewards for good behavior along with a system of punishment for any disobedience. By the fourth day, three of the prisoners claimed to be “dramatically traumatized” and withdrew from the experiment. As the experiment continued, the guards became more cruel and tyrannical, leading to majority of the prisoners becoming depressed and disoriented. Within less then one week, an outside observer came on to the scene and shut down the experiment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment exposed the unethical aroma and structure of the prison system. One of the participants and leaders of the experiment Phillip Zimbardo made a clear observation after going through the experiment. His role throughout the experiment was to be the research psychologist to try and see how prison environments operate. However, he admitted that his role felt more like a prison superintendent, claiming that the experiments “social forces and environmental contingencies” had led the guards to behave in unethical ways.

The other perspective derived from outside observes was that the initial advertisement attracted people who sought authoritarian positions. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC news) released a series called The Experiment which claimed Phillip Zimbardo to be a person of power and authority who imposed a tyranny through his experiment. While this could be a true statement regarding Zimbardo’s true intentions, one must wonder what the prison system serves as.

Similarly to how Zimbardo is seen as a person who strives for power and authority, the people behind the American prions system do the same thing. Have you ever heard the phrase, “two wrongs do not make a right?” Well, this phrase fits in perfectly for the way the American prison system is run. Just because someone commits a wrong doing, does not mean they should be placed into an immoral prison system. American politicians need to put their desire for wealth and power aside, and fix the current prison system. Many of these political figures who are behind the scenes care only about their wealth and disregard basic human rights. Awareness needs to be spread, and more people need to understand how the system works. Eventually, through the desire to make the world a better place, we the people can fix these issues and work to overcome any past mistakes.  

In conclusion, The Stanford Prison Experiment is a perfect example of the hostility that the prison environment breeds. The guards have all the power, while the prisoners are treated like worthless animals. Most prisoners need support, rehabilitation, and guidance to help them re-write the wrongs that brought them into prison. I for one hope we can fix this un ethical issue, and move our country in a better direction!

Thanks for reading my blog this week! Shoutout to Kayla on the idea, I never even knew about the Stanford Prison Experiment before you recommended it in my comments last week! There is also a movie on this experiment which gives a great perspective on how it all went down.

Last week, I argued that the American prison system is unjust due to the unethical way corporations acquire money. This week, I will argue that the American prison system is unjust through penal labor and the lack of rehabilitative resources available. 

Penal labor is often justified as a means of rehabilitation and vocational training to prepare inmates for a future return in society. While the prison system uses the idea of “rehabilitation” as a justification for their corrupt nature, it is evident that the prisons have steered away from any sort of rehabilitation. The prison system has made a transition from a rehabilitation center to a place of punishment and degradation. It has become clear that deterrence and incapacitation are the explicit goals of prison in political discourse, and that the entire system has become more punitive and less oriented toward rehabilitation.

Rehabilitation is supposed to serve an individual to help them re-attain or get better at a certain quality or action. By pushing new forms of punishment that degrades prisoners, such as punitive “supermax” facilities and chain gangs, many inmates will find themselves growing angrier and farther away from their past tendencies. Prisons are supposed to serve as a place of rehabilitation so that people can reflect on their wrong doings, and eventually return back to the real world. It is clear that the prisoners are placed into a system that avoids any sort of rehabilitation, but rather supports their downfall. 

The conditions in most American prisons are inhuman and often described as abusive and torturous. All human rights are essentially thrown out the door once someone is detained in prison. Susan Phillips, a researcher who studied specific features of the United States prison system described each prison system as posturing, pursuit, hedging, affiliation, and abuse that passes for justice in the United States. Prison guards are trained to direct aggression and violence towards inmates when necessary. This essentially gives all prison guards the right to inflict any sort of violence on an inmate at any given time. This sort of physical and harsh punishment simply does not serve as a form of rehabilitation, and therefore should be rebuked and changed. 

In the early 1970s, America started the war on drugs when President Nixion claimed drug abuse to be “public enemy number one.” Shortly after, the government began locking people up at rapid rates for non violent drug offenses. These people were given longer sentences up to nine years for nonviolent drug crimes. Eventually, prison space filled up and private companies were soon contracted to build even more prisons to sentence a larger number of people to jail. The company that builds the prison proceeds to lock up the overflow of prisoners and in exchange receives a fixed rate by the government for each inmate.The companies building the prison are paid for each person they lockup, and therefore work to get more people in jail to increase their own revenue. This appears as a major societal issue. Today the United States houses around 2.3 million inmates, giving it the highest incarceration rate of any country, by far. Most of those inmates are in state prisons, not federal prisons, and the states that must operate those facilities are strapped for cash. As a result, most of the programs aimed at rehabilitation were either scaled back or eliminated. The rehabilitation mentality of the 1960s has thus been replaced by a warehousing mentality, marked by prison overcrowding and plagued by underfunding. 

Many of these people were born into poverty, and struggled with drug abuse their entire life. Due to their pre-existing poverty and poor living environments, drugs were often prevalent in their lives. Imprisoning these people is simply not the answer, and does not solve any problems. However, the government continues to try and solve this nationwide problem by locking people up. Meanwhile, the American prison system of rehabilitating their prisoners was quickly scaled back, leaving incarcerated drug addicts little to no support. The original intention of rehabilitation in prisons established in the 1960s was being replaced by the mentality of overcrowding prisons to make a profit.  

With such a lack of rehabilitation, it is no surprise many of these drug addicts suffer throughout their time in prison. These drug addicts are stripped from their homes and sentenced to prison. Inside these prisons, there is no support or assistance to help these people deal with their past addictions. They are not cared for, and not seen as valuable human beings. The main concern for these private prisons is to lock more people up, and net a larger profit. Someone who has a drug problem does not oppose as a serious threat to society. Although they are harming themselves, many users are causing no physical harm to others around them. Giving these people long prison sentences places them and their families in a worse spot.

Throughout this blog, I will argue that the United States prison system is not morally acceptable due to the poor living conditions, overcrowding, and unjust economic cycle and therefore should be reformed. Many people view the United States as the freest place on earth, rooting in principles of personal and societal freedom. However, for such a supposedly “free nation,” there is a large number of incarcerated people. The United States has the most imprisoned people out of any country across the entire world. Throughout the past century, the number of prisoners has tripled in the United States to 2.5 million prisoners out of 11 million world wide. While the U.S. makes up for only 4% of the world population, they happen to make up 22% of the world prison population. These numbers greatly surpass countries with a larger population than the U.S. such as China or India. Majority of the population fails to evaluate the current prison system in the United States and truly understand why the prisons are so overcrowded. When the information behind the prison system is understood, it is clear that America’s true problems lie within the desire to fuel the economic cycle through corrupt government policies. 

America is driven by the urge to acquire greater sums of money through perpetual economic growth. Large companies have always been eager to work with prisons to increase their profits. To exemplify, the companies that sell nutritionally deficient food are more than happy to sell their food to the prison industrial complex. It is cheap for the companies to produce the food and the prisons serve as constant business that nets them a healthy and consistent profit. Meanwhile, the phone companies acquire additional profit by charging pay-per-minute rates to provide basic communication. The phone companies know how desperate the inmates are and know they will do anything needed to speak with their loved ones. Likewise, transportation companies make a large profit shuttling prisoners to and from court appearances and between prisons. While all these large companies rely and thrive on the prison system, prisoners are dehumanized and suffer through an unjust system that favors the growth of large companies. 

Once placed into the American prison system, all rights and personal freedom goes out the door. Many prisoners are forced into labor and put to work as slaves. For example, the state of California is often seen putting inmates to work risking their lives fighting forest fires. The average pay for these inmates ranges from the legal minimum for incarcerated people of 12 cents to a maximum payment of 2 dollars an hour. Some states, such as Texas, do not require incarcerated people to receive any sort of pay when put to work. Caith Gibbons published an article through the University of Wisconsin dissecting the unjust principles of prison labor. 

“Some prisoners do receive some payment for the work, but it is negligible at best: The Bureau of Prisons pays inmates around $0.12 an hour for their labor. Between convict leasing, the U.S. Federal Prison Industries, and other means of prisoner-manufacturing, penal labor is a billion-dollar industry” (Gibbons Paragraph 3). 

https://badgerherald.com/opinion/2018/02/06/prison-labor-exploitative-unjust-unproductive-toward-inmate-rehabilitation/

Making less than one third of the legal minimum wage, prisoners have no choice but to follow orders and do what is asked of them. Regardless of any crimes they committed in the past, this is nothing short of slavery and simply devalues human life entirely. The government has managed to turn the prison system into a billion dollar industry through penal labor and prisoner manufacturing. While the government finds new ways to extract profit from human life, prisoners are often seen performing forced labor for thousands of large corporations such as Mcdonalds, IBM, Verizon, and JCPenney. These companies are able to grow their profit margin through penal labor with the unjust minimum wage rates. There is no incentive to change these policies due to government officials supporting large companies. Many of the people in power throughout the American government happen to fall in the top one percent of the wealth. Because of this, the government tends to favor large corporations. If prisoners were not put to work as slaves for little to no pay, the companies would have to invest money into real workers for higher pay. This appears entirely immoral and dehumanizes incarcerated people. 

In conclusion, it becomes evident that the United States Prison system needs reform. While large corporations benefit off of free prison labor, prisoners are dehumanized and put to work as slaves. It is important to value all human life, and to not simply focus on income and wealth.