We will begin by examining THE COSTS OF PRISONS
CLEAR AND COLE (Chapter 1)
We know little about corrections, and often see it as just bricks
and bars.
Prisons are responsible for the management of people who have been
accused or convicted of criminal offenses, and includes:
programs,services, facilities and organizations. We forget that
prisons are just part of corrections. It also includes:
--probation
--parole
--other community supervision
Prison structure is complicated by nature of system (fed
system--explain)--different ways of looking at corrections (by
discipline)
a) soci
b) psych
c) cj (administration)
d) political sci
e) legal (mandate, legal changes, enforcment of law)
complicated by many factors:
1) nature of prisons
2) conflicting goals
(org, ideol, phil, etc:
a) goal conflict
b) goal displacement
some definitions:
1. misdemeanants: a misdemeanor is a crime that carries a
potential sentence of one year or less, and is usually
served in county jails. it also involves fines under a
specified amount. usually a violation of municipal or
county law. examples: drunk, window peeping, speeding,
etc.
2. felon: felonies are crimes, usually against state or
federal law, for which law provides penalities of more
than one year confinement and fines over a certain amount.
felons usually (but not always) serve their time in a
prison.
3. jails:
4. prisons
5. juvenile offenders: involves crimes of offenders under a
certain age, usually 17 or 18. there are special courts
to hear such crimes, and processing different.
[mention here problem of lying about age]
6. just desserts: people get what they deserve: hence, its a
model of the criminal sanction that emphasizes derserved
punishment: criminals shuld be punished because they have
infringed on rights of others, and the severity of the
sanction should fit the crime.
AS A SYSTEM, WE LOOK AT SEVERAL COMPONENTS:
--GOALS
--ENVIRONMENT
--"FEEDBACK" (interconnected "synergy" loops)
--COMPLEXITY (interconnections, evolution)
KEY POINTS:
1. an institution must be viewed as a totality in its own
right, made up of sub-systems. Thati is, it's a BUREAUCRACY!
(explain)
2. an institution is interrelated with other aspects both of
the cj system and society at large
3. changes in one area will affect changes in other areas
[give as examples lane's "media coup"
point: corrections reflect a social division of labor existing at
a particular time in history.
PRISONS ARE A VERB!
The text emphasizes that things are NEVER AS SIMPLE AS THEY SEEM!
Like the text, we begin with the question: WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF
CORRECTIONS?
Several purposes. In Illinois, by statute:
1) Public Safety
2) Punishment
3) Rehabilitation
As a bureaucracy, corrections and related tasks are divided up
among many entities (county, state, federal), and within these are
subgroups.
This is compounded by the problem of our skewed ways of thinking
about corrections. One of the primary ways that our images and
views of things are skewed is IDEOLOGY
Largest prison systems?
1) California (about 141,000, down from 173,000 in 2006)
2) Texas (154,000+ in mid 2012)
3) Florida (103,055 (end of 2011--stable over 4 years)
4) Georgia (55,944 (end of 2011)
5) New York (55,436 - down from 67,131 in 2008)
5) Illinois (48,427 (end of 2011, but expected now to be lower)
(GO TO IDEOLOGY HANDOUT)
Return to JT's homepage