Incarceration is one of the forms of punishment for committed crimes. The Prison system in the United States consists of many correctional facilities that are intended to rehabilitate criminals. It includes federal, state, and local (county and municipal) stockades. The modern U.S. penitentiary method has retained the influence of the Pennsylvania-Oborne system: prisons use strict policing measures, but there are some elements of a progressive punishment reflection. Penitentiaries can also be divided into several types depending on the form of imprisonment. Convicts expecting sentencing or being condemned for a misdemeanor offense are kept in jails (Wagner and Bernadette 2). People that are convicted of a felony are usually sent to prison. Those who have committed particularly serious crimes are often held exclusively in solitary confinement.
The U.S. penitentiary system has many problems, the chief of them is the huge number of inmates. There are approximately 2,5 million people in prison, about 25 percent of the world’s jail population. They are so overcrowded that the Supreme Court has decided that the United States needs to reduce the defendants’ number. California has decreased the amount by more than 15 thousand people, but it has not lessened the acuteness of the crisis in which the whole penitentiary system is. Most U.S. prisoners are people of color, which means that the American penitentiary system does have a pronounced racial character. According to the federal Bureau, 38.6 percent of convicts are black, and 30.1 percent are Hispanic (Melossi and Massimo 61). The rest are white (27.5%), Native American (2.4%), and Asian (1.5%).
The country’s jail population, which has grown to millions, is seen in the United States as a unique social phenomenon and is referred to as a policy of ‘mass incarceration.’ The term spread in America back in the early 1970s, when the number of people put behind bars increased exponentially. This course was largely due to the 37th president of the United States, Richard Nixon, declaring war on drug-related crime. Ronald Reagan continued his direction; during the eight years of his rule, the number of prisoners in the United States rose from 329,000 to 627,000 (Melossi and Massimo 64). Due to the dramatic increase in captives in the 1980s, the country faced an acute shortage of jails. Private companies came to the aid of the state, to which they began to transfer the custody of prisoners.
The most famous prisons in the United States are Alcatraz and Guantanamo. Alcatraz is located on a rocky island near the city of San Francisco. Originally Alcatraz was a military jail, so the main contingent of the institution consisted of privates and officers convicted by a tribunal. In 1934, a new building was erected on the island, cause of the transfer of Alcatraz to the U.S. federal system. The security measures were seriously strengthened, the number of cells was increased to 600, and prison towers were built along the perimeter of the building. In 1963, the penitentiary was closed due to unprofitability, and now there is a museum on the island. Guantanamo was established in 2002 on the grounds of a U.S. military base. The central purpose of the Guantanamo Bay prison is to hold terrorists and those accused of collaborating with them. The terms and regime can be changed by prison authorities or U.S. military officials (Melossi and Massimo 54). There have been reports of prisoner mistreatment since its inception. Among other things, sleep deprivation, exposure to loud sounds and silence, and various torture are practiced here.
Works Cited
Melossi, Dario, and Massimo Pavarini. The Prison And The Factory: Origins Of The Penitentiary System. Springer, 2018.
Wagner, Peter, and Bernadette Rabuy. ‘Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017.’ Prison Policy Initiative, vol. 119, 2017, pp. 1–23.