Walnut Street Jail Thesis

Prison life in Andersonville was considerably worse than the average prison which is why it is considered the worst of the Civil War prison camps. Other prison camps of the time although were a rough life, had better infrastructure, supplies and cleanliness. For example in Salisbury, North Carolina was one of the first Confederate civil War prison camps. Its first prisoners enjoyed playing baseball in their free time. Although the prison did experience overcrowding like all prison war camps, it still had much better supply flow into its walls. Alton, Illinois Federal prison was one of the first Union prison camps. This camp did experience a lack of supplies and disease but had enough space that prisoners did not have to live in the elements. Andersonville had a large flaw in it making that made it a much worse prison camp to stay in rather than these other two. That flaw was that Andersonville was made in great haste and wasn’t even finished before it was in use. (Civil War Prison Camps

These punishments or correctional aspects have done a great deal to the effects upon the prisoners. For the punishment of solitary confinement, this can go both ways. In one way if you put an individual in confinement they have time to think about the crime that they have committed and can give a good hard look at their life. Then on the other hand if you put someone in confinement where there is no noise, no light, and nothing to do this person can go mentally insane. When it began it was for the hardest criminals it has changed now a days to you get confinement for doing another crime in prison, being a disturbance, and/or refusing to do a request for the guards such as take a sheet off you window so they are able to see in on what you are doing, that way they can tell if you are okay or trying to do something illegal in prison. This would include drugs, wine, shanks, etc. also they are able to tell your mental state, if you are in imminent danger from yourself.

Andersonville was a Confederate prison built in 1864 at Andersonville, Georgia. It was designed to hold Union prisoners of war during the Civil War. It was official named was Camp Sumter, however it’s better known as Andersonville. It was built from the ground up by local slave labor. At the time it was 10 ½ acres long and designed to hold about 10,000 men. The camp was enclosed out of 15 to 17 inch hewed pine logs. Along the walls were guard towers (referred to as pigeon roosts by the inmates) placed every 90 feet around the stockade walls.

It’s has been one year since two NYPD officers were gunned down execution style while sitting in their marked patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The ambush horror was met with anger and sadness across the nation as two innocent lives were lost just solely because they wore blue.

Throughout the nineteenth century, penology was characterized by a debate between two 'schools'. The first was the system of "solitary" and "segregation" proposed by the Pennsylvania penitentiary. The second, that of which will be discussed in this paper, the "silent" and "congregate" system was designed for the Auburn penitentiary in New York State.

On April 16, 1963, shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was sent to jail, for public protests against segregation, he wrote the Letters from the Birmingham Jail. The letters from the Birmingham Jail played a monumental role during the Civil Rights Movement, and were crucial to ending segregation in America. During his time in jail, Dr. King Jr, received letters from critics who were questioning his methods and timing of his public protest during the Civil Rights Movements. The letters from the Birmingham Jail were addressed to these critics. They defended Dr King Jr’s non-violent protests, and criticized the cities disciplinary acts of violence toward protesters. The Letters from the Birmingham Jail had a heavy influence on segregation

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” This quote stated by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, presents us with the idea that in order for people to gain the freedom they desire, they must demand and fight for what they believe in. For as long as the civilization has been around, certain minorities get purposely separated from a larger, more powerful group of people, also known as the majority. When this happens, the minority gets discriminated, segregated, treated unfairly, bossed around, and controlled by the majority who is against them. The minorities then start to realize how this is wrong, unfair, unjust and immoral.

Solitary confinement has had a long history in the American prison system. America is the first country to adapt solitary confinement into the prison regiment. Pennsylvania had the first special housing units for inmates or “SHU”. When Europeans came to America to look at the new model for prisons in Pennsylvania they wrote reports describing to the European parliament on how prisoners were treated like caged animals. Many of them quickly realized that this was not what prisons were set out to accomplish. The purpose of a prison is to rehabilitate criminals and bring them back into society as an individual that has the best mental tools and skills to make their respective communities better. Putting inmates in solitary confinement for more than 48 hours can only lead to awful emotional pain and mental problems which can result in self-destructive behavior to regain the self-control that is being deprived through this process of isolation and expulsion.

Thesis: Private prisons actually exacerbate many of the issues they were designed to solve by incentivizing increased incarceration, and at the same time they produce lower value than regular prisons while ultimately costing more, such that private prisons should be abolished and incarceration should remain exclusively public.

Before the 1820s, most prisons resembled classrooms where inmates lived in large rooms together like a dormitory. The newer prisons of the era, like New York’s Auburn Prison, shepherded men into individual cells at night and silent labor during the day, a model that would prove enduring. Women at Auburn, however, lived in a small attic room above

Prison at the time was a place where the penitentiary would use the criminals as basically slaves of the state. They would work them day in and day out. There were problems of overcrowding, sexual abuse, and disease. How was one supposed to learn from their mistakes and realize what they did was wrong when they were just worked to death at the prisons? How is that supposed to help reform a person into being better?

But, in seeking this goal, they sacrificed the prisoners’ liberty within the prison to the extent they went insane. Solitary confinement and beatings are two examples of the terrible conditions. The search for finding a way cure deranged men led to unjust treatment against democratic ideals even though the reformers were trying to improve their lives.

The decision to build a new penal institution in New York was debated by New York state legislators for some time. The legislators were fearful that crime in New York, especially crime committed by males in their teens and early 20s, was rampant and that present correctional institutions were not doing a competent job of dealing with criminals (Pisciotta, 1983). In particular, there was in New York disillusionment over the effectiveness of penal institutions such as Auburn, Sing Sing, and Dannemora Prisons. The plan on which those prisons were organized, referred to as the congregate plan (meaning that prisoners slept in solitary cells, but worked and ate together during the day), did not seem to result in rehabilitation and reformation

Inmates have been placed here for both short and long term sentences. Segregation has a significant impact on inmates with preexisting mental illnesses. According to Arrigo and Bullock?s (2008) research, ?the extreme isolation that was characteristics of the early prisons?ultimately resulted in serious physical and psychological consequences for convicts.? The SHU has become the way prisons control troublesome inmates. Solitary inmates are only out of their cells for weekly showers and recreation time, but they are still heavily restrained. These inmates have no contact with the general population including dining and religious gatherings. This method of isolation leaves no remove for communication with other

“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime