The four types of prisons are federal, state, municipal, and military. A federal prison is operated and managed by the government. Federal prisons normally house inmates who have been convicted of a crime in violation of a federal statue as opposed to a state or local laws. A municipal prison is a high security prison. A military prison is a prison operated by the military. Military prisons are used to house prisoners of war, enemy combatants, those whose freedom is deemed a national security risk by the military or national authority and member of the military found guilty of a serious crime. A state prison is a facility operated by a state and used to house and rehabilitate criminals. There is both minimum and maximum security prisons which are divided based on the nature of the crime committed by inmates at the institution. A total institution is an enclosed facility separated from society and physically where the inhabitants share all aspects of their daily lives. Total institutions are small societies and evolve their own distinctive values and styles of life and pressure residents to fulfill rigidly prescribed behavioral roles. Some of these places include prisons, concentrated camps, mental hospital, seminaries, and other facilities in which individuals are cut off from society forcibly or willingly. Jails play an important role in the criminal justice system because it keeps offenders that committed a crime off the streets. Jails also help our community to be safe and there would be less violence. Jails are used as a form of punishment either short-term or long-term depending on how severe of the crime. Without jails in the criminal justice system crimes will be overrated and individuals that break the law will receive no punishments and will keep committing the crimes over and over…
Walking into the jail, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Was there going to be rows of cells with prisoners in them? Were the prisoners going to be walking about like it was any normal day? Were the officers going to be big, scary, and yelling? I made a few guesses but then decided to wait until I got inside and saw exactly what was in store for my classmates and I. We immediately had to go through a metal detector and get wanded to make sure no one was bringing in anything they weren’t allowed to bring in. Right off the bat this set the stage as to how strict the facility was.…
Most people do not realize that there are differences between jails and prisons. Jails hold people awaiting trial or people that are sentenced for a short term, which is usually less than a year. That is jails place in corrections. Prisons hold people that are convicted of crimes and sentenced for a longer term. In the United States, jails are most often run by sheriffs and/or local governments and are made to hold individuals awaiting charges for their case, serving time for a misdemeanor sentence, or they have been convicted and are waiting to get transported to prison. Jails were mostly dark, filthy, and overcrowded in the 1800’s. There was no separation between men and women, the sane and the insane, the young and the old, and the convicted and the un-convicted.…
James Gilligan relays an enlightening message in his article, Beyond the Prison Paradigm: From Provoking Violence to Preventing It by Creating “Anti-Prisons”, about the history and sole purpose of jails. Gilligan dates his research about jails all the way back from the first civilization known to man, Sumerian, to the jails we see and know so well today. At the beginning of time jails literally meant “house of darkness” which when compared to any of today’s jails is very similar to our maximum security facilities with solitary confinement. Jails were first used as a place to house those citizens, who chose not follow the social norms of society, and used a very violent form of punishment to teach a lesson to any of those citizens who even had thoughts of straying away from the social norms and rules of society. Prison was metaphorically seen as hell and the prison guards the demons of hell whose role was to follow through with the punishment of the prisoners. Prisoners would be tortured physically and mentally and then either released or executed depending on the severity of his or her crimes.…
In today’s society the jails and prison pretty much function with the same protocol. In the past the history of the State prisons began at the Walnut Street Jail in 1790, it was the actually first American penitentiary located in Philadelphia. Punishments such as the pillory and hanging were carried out in public. In the past, the Old Stone Jail in Philadelphia held old and young, black and white, men and women all together. In Chester County, the English custom of charging for various other services was also in force, fees for locking and unlocking cells, food, heat, clothing, and for attaching and removing irons incident to a court appearance (Prison Society, 2012).…
An act of 1790 brought about sweeping reforms in the prison and authorized a penitentiary house with 16 cells to be built in the yard of the jail to carry out solitary confinement with labor for "hardened atrocious offenders." Jails are run by the county of a state and serve as locally-operated holding places, usually for brief periods of incarceration or as a detention place before and during trial and other legal matters. For example, someone convicted of a misdemeanor crime would be jail. In addition, the sentence must be less than a year. Jails are especially for someone being held in custody for trail, or they couldn’t afford bail, or they were just arrested will be held in the county jail, not prison. As such, jails are impermanent county residences, and lack many of the amenities and programs that the large prisons have. Jails are usually run by the sheriff or the local government. According to the Department of Justice, there are approximately 3,600 jails in the United States. On the hand, prisons are federal or state-run.…
On July 28, 1812, nine men huddled together inside the Baltimore City Jail, not because they were being detained for criminal malfeasance, but for their own protection from the mob of 1,500 angry Baltimoreans gathered outside. The men inside the jail, led my Alexander C. Hanson, were members or affiliates of the unpopular Federalist newspaper, The Federal Republican. The crowd outside was predominantly composed of European immigrant wage laborers from Ireland who flocked to Baltimore following the Revolutionary War. Without warning, the back door to the jail swung open and the angry mob rushed inside and descended upon Hanson and his cohorts. As described by Isaac Dickson, a Justice of the Peace in Baltimore City, “there a scene of horror…
When the word “Penitentiary” comes to the forefront of one’s mind; it is thought of as a place of friendless imprisonment and punishment for crimes committed. There is a completely different perception of what we envision today when we think of what a “penitentiary” is and what it was meant to be. What we envision is not what was intended. In the 1800s, the “penitentiaries’’ ideal was to be both secular and spiritual. Comparatively speaking, the jails of yesterday housed men, women, and children and were unsanitary…the penitentiary was to be the total reverse of the jail.…
A prison environment is a place where inmates are physically confined and deprived of a range of personal freedoms. It is a cold and unfeeling place to be. There are many levels of conflict and tension (Foster, 2006). The prison environment influences the institutional management and custody by the growing population and the gangs within the facility. Overcrowding aggravates the natural conflicts that rely within the prisons walls which then escalate violence.…
Jails are within the county where the individual is arrested, typically they are intended to hold an inmate for less than one year.…
Many people don’t possess realistic vision on today’s prison system. I have this knowledge because I had a chance to experience it for months while serving a sentence for Trafficking of Marijuana. We are often given the impression that prisons are full of bad people such as rapists and murders. This is a huge misconception.…
When people think of prisons, they imagine that the occupants inside deserve to be there. That a person is doing their time for a crime committed. When it comes to privately owned prisons, the time doesn’t always fit the crime.…
Today, it is a minimum security housing facility that only holds up to 84 people. Although Jails are not seen as the most desirable places to be, they can be very beneficial to its inmates as well as the community. For example, the main purpose of a jail is to separate citizens from dangerous people. By doing so they are ensuring our safety.…
called prison is very lonely, the only people that you see are Satans minions who…
The clear concise difference between a jail and a prison is the time limit a convicted person is sentenced to and what offenses were committed. In a jail, prisoners are usually confined because they were convicted of a lesser or petty offense. Examples of petty offenses are driving without a license or a misdemeanor drug possession charge. Most of these offenses come with a sentence of a year or less and anyone with over a year sentence is usually sent to a prison facility (Seiter, 2011). Jails act as holding facilities where inmates rarely get time to be out of their cells, to reflect, or to engage in recreational time. Because jails are so short term the focus is on inward reflection of crime through solitude. Some of these restrictions are a product themselves of the lesser amount of time spent in the correctional facilities. Criminals are charged more in a jail facility with reflecting on their crime by being exposed to sheer solitude. Furthermore, jails rarely have any vocational or rehabilitation programs utilized within their walls. On the other hand, prisons have an ample amount of time to work with, rehabilitate, and reform offenders. Prisons do this with the hope that offenders can eventually be placed back into society and limit their recidivism back to crime.…