Prisons: The Impact Of Privatization On Prison Quality

When it comes to the idea of a prison, it brings up a multitude of images for different people. The relationship between media representations of prisons and public understanding of imprisonment is complex precisely because the prison carries multifarious symbolic meaning, which vary between different media and genres such as in television programs, including documentaries, dramas, and reality TV. Some may visualize prison as storage where maximum criminals are allocated per minimum spaces are in order, while others see a character- and lightless community where repentance is nurtured. Those kinds of perceptions are obsolete, yet both correspond to architectural configurations, which remain to function at this generation. Although, the number

And how will this justify the issues of male sex offenders from repeating their sex crimes. While there are many pros to chemical castration, the side effects outnumber the real issue. Chemical castration goes against a person’s human rights, it also is an option the government hands out so that the offender can avoid jail, yet they are still suffering due to their health’s side effects. Chemical castration is offered to sex offenders, sex abusers, and child molesters who are serving time in prison for committing specific crimes in exchange for shorter prison time and to those who are in the process for release as time served. The process of administering a Depo-Provera injection or pill to sex offenders is to lower their testosterone levels and decrease the sexual desires to preventing them from repeating the criminal acts.

Private Prisons: Their Pros and Cons At one time, all prisons were public, but the system has started to make a transition to a new age, where private prisons began to emerge and eventually changed the system as a whole. Private and public prisons are not one in the same. The former are for-profit businesses where, like the latter, convicted criminals are also confined. They are contracted by the government with the aim to alleviate the strain and congestion that is experienced by federal prison systems.

According to Alkon (2014:12): Plea bargaining is based on informal negotiations. For plea bargaining to function, prosecutors need to have the discretion to decide when to offer plea bargains and what the offer should include. This can lead to different legal outcomes for otherwise similarly situated defendants. Some variation in sentencing is inevitable, even where all parties have followed the law and acted in good faith in negotiating pleas. However, plea bargaining can be used to cover disparate sentencing due to systemic problems like political interference in the legal system or corruption.

In 1972, former President Richard Nixon made his infamous statements regarding crime and drug abuse. In this speech, he declared a war on crime and drugs and intended to decrease the number of people using drugs and the amount of crimes that were committed. Since this declaration, incarceration rates in the U.S. have gone up by 500%, even though the amount of crime happening has gone down. One of the reasons why I feel our rates have risen, is because sometimes, we put people in jail when they don’t need to be there in the first place.

To help with the prison solution it took, Judge Thelton E. Henderson. Henderson stood up for the prisoners who didn 't have a voice, he talked to many people and demanded money from the state so that he could improve the health care in prisons. This ended up with them realizing that the prisons are too overcrowded and they need to do something about it. They found this out after viewing statistics of people who ¨died from an illness in prison or committed suicide¨. This is not surprising that this health crisis is still going on, at the same time the case was happening Obama Care was working on being formed.

Privatization is the process of reassigning ownership rights of a firm or possessions from the public or government to a private individual. Privatization has its merits and demerits. The merits are important to the stakeholders while the demerits work against the public who in a way are denied their basic services or more so charged a higher fee for which they could have covered with their taxes. Privatization of the police has two sides of benefits to the public, the citizens and the government. Considering the benefits, it is good to start with the public, which is more affected by the works of the police.

Private prisons were constructed as a response to the overcrowding in federal prisons during the 1980s; many people speculate whether or not private prisons are good or bad. Critics argue that private prisons like any business are driven by profit, and prisons profit from the amount of criminals they are able to contain which gives the private prisons and their shareholders incentive to keep the prison population high and expenses low. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency estimates that over the next ten years state and federal expenditures on prisons will amount to $351 billion6. These government subsidies along with the support of private prison shareholders allow the prison industrial complex to keep their power and influence

Prison used to be looked at has a place to try a rehabilitate someone from their crimes so they may join society again has a law-abiding citizen, however, that has changed recently has we have begun to see the government turn these duties over to privately owned prisons. Turning the rehabilitation process into a form of business that has become very lucrative. The government did this to save money and cutback cost, however, with the correctional system turning into a large business it needs consumers, those consumers have come in the form of minority prisoners punished harshly for non-violent crimes now spending 2-8 years in prison in a lot of circumstances if not more. This factor has been a big aid in sending minority members to prison because private owners have spent so much money on facilities that they expect to have them occupied which in some cases puts pressure to provide prisoners. And in other cases elites work in cohort to make sure the prison population remains high so they may all benefit

Even though Nixon started the war on drugs and focused on law enforcement, his administration still allocated some money to treatment and prevention, whereas the Reagan administration focused only on law, order, and punishment. In Ronald Reagan’s radio address to the nation on October 2nd of 1982 he declares, that the battle flag is up, and the United States is going to win the “War on Drugs”. Drug enforcement had seen major increases to their budget, while money for treatment was almost non-existent. Since then, the war on drugs has only caused more racial tension between majority groups and minorities. One major cause of added tension is the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement which increased significantly in the 80’s, when “the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) developed profiling of drug couriers to intercept and reduce interstate drug trafficking” (Sirin 4).

Prisons that are managed by the government is the most effective form of prison system. The government is responsible for the services that the citizens want to be provided publicly and are willing to pay (Gregson, 2000). Privatization means that there will be more government spending as the government will be the financier as they shift the functions and responsibilities to the private sector (Gregson, 2000). Private prisons can raise concerns on how are they managed.

As I mentioned above, since the War on Drugs era, the prison population has increased at an alarming rate. Overcriminalization has most of the responsibility for this problem. Along with the overcrowding of prisons, the obstacle of overcriminalization also brings sentencing reform to the table. It puts citizens that had no criminal intent in their actions and non-violent offenders in prison for unjust lengths of time. Serving

If an individual’s health insurance plan will reimburse for out-of-network coverage, the math should be done to see and understand if this is a way to afford seeing the clinician of your

Few manuals exist to help diagnose a patient mental health and these are the International Classification Disease and Related Health Problems (ICD-10-CM) and DSM or known as the diagnostic and statistical manual. These diagnostic materials have huge impact on are legal and political issues today. Sexual Predators who have been incarcerated also deemed to suffer from paraphilic mental disorder are now allowed to have indefinite preventive civil commitment for criminals who have completed their prison sentence. This means that the states can decide whether or not to keep sexual predator locked up beyond their prison sentence, that they think is high risk rejoining society and might commit another crime. While mental health caregivers used ICD’s and DSM’s to diagnose a patient, the criminal justice system also uses the DSM’s as a legal basis for sentencing and committing sexually motivated criminals to psychiatric care.

In the United States there are more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world. Recently, many states have taken drastic steps allowing private companies to buy prisons and operate them as profitable businesses. The business models of these companies relies on a high incarceration rate and the ability to operate at a very low cost. This could put a large portion of the prison population at serious risk of having their safety put behind the revenue they earn. Even though these for-profit prisons show no evidence of saving the federal government any money, and have dubious health and safety records, some politicians still push for legislation that is good for private prison companies.