California State Prison Case Study

Prison reform has been an ongoing topic in the history of America, and has gone through many changes in America's past. Mixed feelings have been persevered on the status of implementing these prison reform programs, with little getting done, and whether it is the right thing to do to help those who have committed a crime. Many criminal justice experts have viewed imprisonment as a way to improve oneself and maintain that people in prison come out changed for the better (encyclopedia.com, 2007). In the colonial days, American prisons were utilized to brutally punish individuals, creating a gruesome experience for the prisoners in an attempt to make them rectify their behavior and fear a return to prison (encyclopedia.com, 2007). This practice may have worked 200 years ago, but as the world has grown more complex, time has proven that fear alone does not prevent recidivism. In the 19th century, Dorothea Dix, a women reformer and American activist, began lobbying for some of the first prison reform movements.

The overcrowding of prisons in California and the rest of America is the result of “manufactured crime”. These are crimes which have no victim yet are considered felonies and follow the three strike law. Many people do not know that there are more incarcerated people in America than any other country on earth. According to the American Civil Liberties Union “America contains 5% of the world 's human population while also containing 25% of the world’s prison population. Since 1970, our prison population has risen by some 700% - an increase far outpacing rates of population growth and crime1”. The reason America has so many incarcerated people is not because Americans commit more crimes or the police are just better at finding criminals,

Over the past 40 years U.S. incarceration has grown at an extraordinary rate, with the United States’ prison population increasing from 320,000 inmates in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million inmates in 2013. The growth in prison population is in part due to society’s shift toward tough on crime policies including determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing laws, and mandatory minimums. These tough on crime policies resulted in more individuals committing less serious crimes being sentenced to serve time and longer prison sentences.

Professionalism as Bartollas and Siegel define it “refers to a set of character strengths and personal values directed at providing the highest quality service to others in the workplace, both colleagues and clients” (2013). In the field of corrections, professionalism affects not only those working in the facility or those imprisoned within its walls, but the families of inmates and officers /correctional staff, the local community, and the relationships within the law enforcement community as well.

In the article, Unwinding Mass Incarceration by Stefan Lobuglio and Anne Piehl, they argue that unwinding the mass incarceration “well neither be cheap nor easy, and to be done responsibly will require a new infrastructure of coordinated community-based facilities and services that can meet evidence-based incarceration needs while also ensuring public safety.” Hence, their argument is clean-cut with evidence in the article to back up their argument of unwinding the mass incarceration. Similarly, a solid fill of a concluding statement upon the unwinding of the mass incarceration as stated in the article, “requires much more than stopping current practices or reversing course by mass commutations and early release programs.”

Does it make sense to lock up 2.4 million people on any given day, giving the U.S the highest incarceration rate in the world. More people are going to jail, this implies that people are taken to prison everyday for many facilities and many go for no reason. People go to jail and get treated the worst way as possible. This is a reason why the prison system needs to be changed. Inmates need to be treated better. The government treats prisoners as if they are nothing in this world. The U.S prison system needs to be reformed by building new and better prisons and making it more humane and fair.

Transition to First Main Point: To begin, let’s take a look at what prison overcrowding is.

The high incarceration rate of Black Americans has pervasive and chronically negative stigmas regarding the social and economic vitality of the Black American community, such as a lack of democratic participation and violence within urban communities (Burris-Kitchen & Burris, 2011). According to Forman Jr. (2012), some of 5 the negative affects of systemic racism of Black Americans born into the hip-hop generation who have been convicted include the ineligibility of public assistance programs such as health care, food stamps, public housing, student loans, and some employment opportunities. Additionally, many of the individuals suffering from the stigma of incarceration come from backgrounds of disadvantage such as single parent homes, low

The prior incentives, now eliminated, provided opportunities for transfers to minimum security prisons, and as a result of their dissolution, the prison population began to skyrocket. The perceived conditions of the prisons began to worsen as a result of the overcrowding. In the early 1970’s, one cellblock housed the prison's disciplinary cases and its protection cases, containing about fifty inmates. Those fifty represented around five percent of the total prison population. In 1976, over twenty percent of the inmates were either in protective custody or in segregated units, forcing the utilization of two cell blocks. Each block had a capacity of 90 inmates, but held as many as 200 inmates. (Useem, 1982) It was no wonder the new administration began reporting a new “breed” of high profile inmates entering the

What is the best way to lower crime in the United States? Something that could put a stop to those who continue to commit violent crimes? The Three Strikes Policy was created for that specific purpose. The policy is based off of baseball in which if the batter gets three strike then they are out. The Three Strikes Policy is a law that significantly increases the prison sentence of a person who is convicted of a felony who has also been previously convicted of two or more other violent crimes or serious felonies in their past. This “third strike” is limited to nothing short of 25 years to life for those criminals even with a small third offense. The law was passed by former president Bill Clinton in 1993 when crime rates

In 1954, there were large portions of segregated, made legal by a previous court ruling of Plessy versus Ferguson. (McBride, 2006) In 1954, Oliver Brown, a pastor and welder in the railway system, decided to join a childhood friend in a lawsuit against the BOE because they would not enroll their daughter in a school much closer and not segregated.

Heller where Chicago’s handgun ordinance ban was unconstitutional, it was more of a clarification case

In analysing Steven Raphael’s article, titled How Do We Reduce Incarceration Rates While Maintaining Public Safety?, I was able to uncover some similarities and differences in related topics found in our course textbook-- Steven P. Lab and colleagues’ Criminal Justice The Essentials. Raphael, Public Policy Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has an obvious concern for the policies enforced today that are thought to be responsible to the overcrowding of most prisons across the U.S.. Meanwhile, the textbook draws a close eye to the incarceration rates and increases overtime- all the while remaining objective and open loose interpretation. Both pieces of text add to the enlightenment of my knowledge dealing with the criminal justice system. The textbook is a key part in my learning of the basic “in’s and out’s”, per say, of the criminal justice system--

The first reading “The Just Barely Sustainable California Prisoners’ Rights Ecosystem” by Marco Shlanger analyzes the process of prison rights reform and how the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act restricts litigation of prison rights through imposing increased filing fees and limiting attorney’s fees and damages, specifically in California. Previously, Zacklin’s article underlined the importance of the litigation strategy in order fix collective conciseness (Durkheim) and enable laws that reflect society used by the ACLU. Despite this repressive law, prisoner’s rights are being litigated at a higher rate in California, but the act’s premise cements prisoners as the One Shotters (Galanter) through “friction and starvation”. One Shotters are

The chart provides three alternatives strategies of intervention to solve overcrowding prison, it was then isolated into four unique categories: Effectiveness. Equity, Political Acceptability and Financial Feasibility.