It’s funny that this question should come up, I was just reading about this...
On top of what everyone else said, institutionalization, and the prison industrial complex are also issues.
When a person gets out of prison, not only is it close to impossible for them to find a job that they could make a decent living with, but they are changed mentally. First off, everyone knows (whether they admit it or not) that a prisoner has no rights. Although it’s in the books that prisoners have rights, the lengths that they must go through to exercise those rights virtually makes exercising those rights impossible. If you put a person in an environment where everyone from the guards to the other inmates are lying and killing on a daily basis, where violence is almost an expectation, you’re not going to come out the same way you went in mentally, or morally. For a person to survive they would also have to play their hand in the violence and deception - either that or become someone’s girlfriend and/or prostitute. And rape in prison is no where near as funny as what the media portrays it as. So it changes people, not in the sense that they learn how to commit crimes, but their mentality changes in the sense that they become mentally capable of committing a crime. They’re often more likely to use drugs or alcohol, on the inside and outside, as well. Usually the people who can’t function on the outside because of the reasons listed above are called institutionalized.
But don’t get me wrong, not everyone who comes out of prison is a nervous wreck, a drug addict, or a raging animal. And not everybody that ends up going to prison is necessarily a "bad" person.
It also destroys the family structure in the Black community. If a person is incarcerated, it not only affects the convict, but his/her family as well. It takes fathers and mothers away from their children, if they took care of them to begin with. So oftentimes children in broken and/or single parent homes learn how to be "grown up" from their peers (who are also misguided), other criminals in their environment, or (as in my case) productive/positive people. So they either grow up to be like their parents or "alternative" father figures or they change for the better. The cycle is either continued, or stopped.
Also, although many people are taught that the 13th Amendment completely ended slavery, it did not. What the 13th Amendment does is defines what paid vs free labor is and what a person can or cannot do to make another person work for free, or less than their fair pay. It outlaws physical coercion (killing, beating, other acts of violence), blackmail, abusing the law, threats, etc. But what it does allow is psychological coercion ("brainwashing"). This amendment, let alone any of the Bill of Rights, does not apply to convicts.
Prison is a multi-billion dollar industry. Not only do you have contractors who make money from building and supplying prisons, but the prisoners are also pretty much forced to work - the prisons contract prisoners out to work, so the prison owners themselves make money too. Most jails and prisons in America today are owned and operated by private companies, not the government. For example, in the freshman dorms at my school, all of the mattresses used there were made in the Texas Department of Corrections there was someone who made millions, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling these beds to the company that handles housing for this school.
On top of that, politicians pass laws that give longer sentences, for less and less serious crimes. Most of these laws directly affect low income neighborhoods, as opposed to middle and upper classed ones. They claim that sending to people to prison longer will deter further crimes, but it obviously does the opposite. So what happens is, businessmen lobby politicians, and use the media to create fear within the general population, and the politicians in return make harsher laws that get more people sent to prison longer. This is the prison industrial complex.
If prison was about changing people to become productive people, the justice system would function completely different from how it does now.
Everything is cyclical in society - everything relates to something else in one way or another. Time for a change.
Peace.
Source(s) :
I have a parent locked up.
I have relatives that work, or worked, for a local jail.
It’s funny that this question should come up, I was just reading about this...
On top of what everyone else said, institutionalization, and the prison industrial complex are also issues.
When a person gets out of prison, not only is it close to impossible for them to find a job that they could make a decent living with, but they are changed mentally. First off, everyone knows (whether they admit it or not) that a prisoner has no rights. Although it’s in the books that prisoners have rights, the lengths that they must go through to exercise those rights virtually makes exercising those rights impossible. If you put a person in an environment where everyone from the guards to the other inmates are lying and killing on a daily basis, where violence is almost an expectation, you’re not going to come out the same way you went in mentally, or morally. For a person to survive they would also have to play their hand in the violence and deception - either that or become someone’s girlfriend and/or prostitute. And rape in prison is no where near as funny as what the media portrays it as. So it changes people, not in the sense that they learn how to commit crimes, but their mentality changes in the sense that they become mentally capable of committing a crime. They’re often more likely to use drugs or alcohol, on the inside and outside, as well. Usually the people who can’t function on the outside because of the reasons listed above are called institutionalized.
But don’t get me wrong, not everyone who comes out of prison is a nervous wreck, a drug addict, or a raging animal. And not everybody that ends up going to prison is necessarily a "bad" person.
It also destroys the family structure in the Black community. If a person is incarcerated, it not only affects the convict, but his/her family as well. It takes fathers and mothers away from their children, if they took care of them to begin with. So oftentimes children in broken and/or single parent homes learn how to be "grown up" from their peers (who are also misguided), other criminals in their environment, or (as in my case) productive/positive people. So they either grow up to be like their parents or "alternative" father figures or they change for the better. The cycle is either continued, or stopped.
Also, although many people are taught that the 13th Amendment completely ended slavery, it did not. What the 13th Amendment does is defines what paid vs free labor is and what a person can or cannot do to make another person work for free, or less than their fair pay. It outlaws physical coercion (killing, beating, other acts of violence), blackmail, abusing the law, threats, etc. But what it does allow is psychological coercion ("brainwashing"). This amendment, let alone any of the Bill of Rights, does not apply to convicts.
Prison is a multi-billion dollar industry. Not only do you have contractors who make money from building and supplying prisons, but the prisoners are also pretty much forced to work - the prisons contract prisoners out to work, so the prison owners themselves make money too. Most jails and prisons in America today are owned and operated by private companies, not the government. For example, in the freshman dorms at my school, all of the mattresses used there were made in the Texas Department of Corrections there was someone who made millions, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling these beds to the company that handles housing for this school.
On top of that, politicians pass laws that give longer sentences, for less and less serious crimes. Most of these laws directly affect low income neighborhoods, as opposed to middle and upper classed ones. They claim that sending to people to prison longer will deter further crimes, but it obviously does the opposite. So what happens is, businessmen lobby politicians, and use the media to create fear within the general population, and the politicians in return make harsher laws that get more people sent to prison longer. This is the prison industrial complex.
If prison was about changing people to become productive people, the justice system would function completely different from how it does now.
Everything is cyclical in society - everything relates to something else in one way or another. Time for a change.
Peace.
Source(s) :
I have a parent locked up.
I have relatives that work, or worked, for a local jail.
"In the Belly of the Beast" - Jack Henry Abbott
"Discipline and Punish" - Michael Foucault
The 13th Amendment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_…
Psychological Coercion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychologic…