CRJ 104 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Solitary Confinement, Supermax Prison, Videotelephony
Chapter 12: Prisons and Jails: Structure and Function
Correctional Facilities as Organizations
Defining Jails and Prisons
• Jails – short-term, hold people who have been arrested for crimes and are awaiting
trial, people convicted of misdemeanors, serving a year of sentence, federal offenders,
etc.
o Run by a county sheriff’s department
• Prisons – longer confinement, people who commit federal crimes and break state laws
o Run by state or federal governments
Inmates, Employment, Expenditures
• 2.3 million people held in jails
• Prisons hold about 3,150 people on death rows
• $50 billion spent by the states on corrections alone
• Public Safety Realignment (PSR) – reducing the state’s prison population through
normal attrition of the existing population
Factors Contributing to Corrections Populations
• Drug problem – almost half of the inmates in federal prisons are incarcerated for drug
offenses
• Violence in society, on television, video games, etc.
• Truth in sentencing – involves restriction or elimination of parole eligibility and
good-time credits
• Rehabilitation – attempts to reform an offender through vocational and educational
programming, counseling, and so forth, so they are not a recidivist and do not return
to crime/prison
• “Nothing work” philosophy – developed by Robert Martinson, belief that correctional
treatment programs generally do not rehabilitate offenders or significantly reduce
recidivism
o Evidence for and against this philosophy
General Mission and Features
• Goals of correctional institutions:
o Managing correctional employees
o Delivering correctional services to a designated offender population
• Mission of corrections agencies: protect the citizens from crime by safely and
securely handling criminal offenders while providing offenders opportunities for self-
employment and increasing their productive works to the public
o Every correctional employee who exercises legal authority over offenders is a
supervisor
o Everything a correctional supervisor does may have civil or criminal
ramifications
• Philosophies:
o Custodial organization; similar to being a caretake of the inmates
o Treatment organization; emphasizing rehabilitation
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Document Summary
Chapter 12: prisons and jails: structure and function. Making jails productive: justice assistance act (1984) removed some of the long-standing restrictions on interstate commerce of prisoner-made goods, prisoners get job opportunities, earn privileges, improve job skills, etc. Community corrections in the federal system: parole was abolished in the federal prison system in 1987. Effects on inmates: social pathology and huge effect on their mental health, studies show that as inmates face greater restrictions and social deprivations, their levels of social withdrawal increase, not effective for controlling violence and disturbances within prisons. Constitutionality: madrid v. gomez, 1995, addressed conditions of confinement in california"s pelican bay security. Housing unit: not enough evidence to close the prison, jones el v. berge, 2004, concluded that extremely isolating conditions cause security housing unit syndrome in relatively healthy prisoners supermax is not appropriate for seriously mentally ill inmates .
