Chapter 1 summary
Chapter Summary
The U.S. prison system has grown for almost 40 years, and today it supervises six times more people than it did in 1972, when the prison system started its massive growth. In 2010, jails and prisons declined for the first time since 1973. The correctional growth raises issues of costs, effectiveness, and fairness.
A system is a complex whole consisting of interdependent parts whose operations are directed toward common goals and influenced by the environment in which they function. It is a useful concept because it helps us understand how the various aspects of corrections can affect one another.
Corrections consists of many subunits. Institutional corrections include prisons and jails, and it confines people who have been sentenced by the courts (or, in the case of jails, people who are awaiting trial). Community corrections supervise people who are either awaiting trial or have been sentenced by the court, but are living in the community. There are also private organizations that provide various services to people under correctional authority. The growth in the corrections system has been more a result of deliberate policies that increase the severity of sentences, and has not had as much to do with changes in crime rates.
The penitentiary ideal, first incorporated in Pennsylvania, emphasized the concept of separate confinement. Inmates were held in isolation, spending their time in craft work and considering their transgressions. In the New York (Auburn) congregate system, inmates were held in isolation but worked together during the day under a rule of silence. A Declaration of Principles was adopted at the 1870 Cincinnati meeting of the National Prison Association. The declaration stated that prisons should be organized to encourage reformation, rewarding it with release. It advocated indeterminate sentences and the classification of prisoners based on character and improvement. The reformers viewed the penitentiary practices of the nineteenth century as debasing, humiliating, and destructive of inmates’ initiative.
The Progressives looked to social, economic, biological, and psychological factors rather than religious or moral explanations for the causes of crime. They advocated the development of probation, indeterminate sentences, treatment programs, and parole. The rise of crime in the late 1960s and questions about the effectiveness of rehabilitative programs brought pressure to shift to a crime control model of corrections, with greater use of incarceration and other forms of strict supervision. A combination of concerns about the huge costs of the prison system and the belief that more effective strategies exist for dealing with people who are convicted of crimes has led to an emerging conservative and liberal consensus to deemphasize prisons and increase the importance of “strategies that work”.
Week 1 Reading questions: What is Corrections
Describe the growth of the U.S. corrections system in the last 40 years and discuss at least three issues raised by that growth.
Define the correctional systems framework and explain why it is useful.
Name the various components of the corrections system today and describe their functions.
Discuss what we can learn from the “great experiment of social control.”
Distinguish the basic assumptions of the penitentiary systems of Pennsylvania and New York.
Explain the elements of the Cincinnati Declaration.
What are some of the reforms advocated by the Progressives?
Discuss the forces and events that led to the present crime control model.
What are the changes that are going on today and why they are important?
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