Max Serna
Ms. Williams
English 1A
October 31 2013
Punishment Or Encouragement
Prisons are often what we use to rid of people who are considered “bad” or “criminals” by society. We do not wonder what happens once convicts are in there as long as they are not causing any harm outside of those walls we think its good and safe. A prison takes more money to manage than a school does, as more and more inmates are sentenced to prison, the greater the cost for the prison to be kept running. When we think about it its somewhat fair, that money is in order to make sure that the inmates get the treatments they need such as therapy and rehabilitation and such work in order for them to be released eventually as better people. The truth is that nothing changes in prison, we are so quick to put criminals away somewhere for many years without realizing the true damage we are doing, we put criminals in a facility in which thousands of criminals are placed, all together the criminal minds think alike and are always up to no good.
Prison is the safe zone to us, we keep all the criminals in there and we think we are okay after that. That is all a big misunderstanding, most of the inmates there form cliques depending on gangs or ethnicity, and of course when there are various groups of people trying to be dominant there are bound to be fights in order to establish that dominance. Frank Trippett wrote a document about the prison system, he states that out of all of the inmates in a prison, on average 100 of them are murdered a year by other inmates, now if we think about it, these people are living no different than they did before on the streets, even those who are not affiliated with any groups, they still have to be cautious of the other inmates that they are forced to live with. It is surprising how people actually think that the longer a person does time, the less chance there is of that person committing crime again if they are released, “ Experts find no correlation between crime rates and incarceration rates.” (F. Trippett. Time. 5/5/1980, Vol. 115 Issue 18, p64. 4p), more time simply means more aggravation towards society, it makes the inmates feel like we consider them powerless and that is why we often see the same people go back to jail time and time again. The system is too messed up now to make any sudden changes, it would take years of failure until some improvement could finally be made in regards of stopping groups of same gangs and ethnicity and get everyone to simply do their time and change for their own benefit.
