Friday, April 29, 2011

Interview Correction Officer

My last and final source was the interview. His name was Seth Mugleston badge number 67231 who works for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation at Folsom Prison. I ask Correctional Officer Seth a number of difficult questions. One of the questions I ask Seth is “why do convicted criminals continually use drugs in prison if drugs are the main reason they are being institutionalized?” He said, “most addicted offenders have a sever case with drugs and alcohol use before they come into the institution. So it is hard for them to be rehabilitated, but we have many substance abuse programs to help the repeated offenders. Drug addiction is a mental escape for most of the criminals. Many of the violence that we have in prison are drug related. Drugs can be used for money almost exchanging goods like prostitution, cigarettes or even money and those three things go hand and hand with each other. It is almost the code the inmates live by, it is sad but true. Money of the drug related problems come from debt that builds up with the prisoner. There is a so called game called hide and seek the inmates and correctional officers play. It is not a fun game every time we crack down and find out how and where the drugs are coming from. The inmates already have another way of smuggling the drugs into the facility. It gets very frustrating when your think that you job has some sort of significance that day and then you find out the next week or two that so and so got popped and put in the ADSUG.” He explained to that ADSUG is a administrative segregation to allow the individual to think about what crime he has committed. He goes on with “there are a number of ways that drugs are smuggled in to prison.

One way is called “Kestering” it is when a female or male put drugs or other criminal objects in their anus of vaginal area.” Then I asked “why do prisoners use violence toward each other?” He said they form their own society. You have youngsters. Grandpas and shot-callers” I was very confused when he said shot-caller so I asked him to define, he said it is someone in charge, leader like almost like a judge. They have similar ranking system like the American military. He stares up again, “prisoners have their own set of rules it is like a code. The prisoners have to follow the law of the code that has been passed down to generation to generation. But they also have to follow the institution codes and regulations.” He continued on about that topic for a bit but then he says something that really got my attention. He said, “it is a very unnatural way of living after a number of years in prison and their mind changes almost like they don’t even know who they are any more when that process happens they become institutionalized” After the interview I had a much better knowledge of problems and procedures that correctional officers deal with day to day. When he talked about how the inmates forget about who they are, it was mind blowing.

I would have never thought that peoples personalities actually change and they became a different person. Another situation that Officer Mugleston talked about that really took my interest was when he said that the inmates have their own code that they go by. I knew that the prisoners had regulation for themselves but I would have never thought that these codes of inmates go back from generation to generation. It makes me think about the number of fathers and sons who are in prison together. It is a very sad thought that son and father are institutionalized together.

Work Cited
Interview -Mugleston, Seth. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation at Folsom Prison. Badge # 67231. Correction Officer

Thursday, April 14, 2011

High Cost of Prisons in America

The cost of the American prison system is at an all-time high. The reason for this is because the prison systems are too overcrowded. The social problem with the prison system is that when criminals are in prison, they network into career criminals. When they get released into society, the only tool the criminals have is crime. This situation is very sad. The prison systems of America need to concentrate on creating more job opportunities for these incarcerated individuals rather than have the inmates go into prison as convicts and get released into society as career criminals. Inmates are coming out of prisons worse than when they go in. If nothing changes, inmates will just keep returning to prisons in an endless cycle of capture and release. More and more inmates will make prisons their home.

For the states which employ the death penalty, this luxury comes at a high price. In Texas, a death penalty case costs taxpayers an “average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. In Florida, each execution is costing the state $3.2 million” (Warren, Jenifer). In financially strapped California, one report estimated that the state could save, “$90 million each year by abolishing capital punishment. The New York Department of Correctional Services estimated that implementing the death penalty would cost the state about $118 million annually” (Warren, Jenifer).

If inmates keep going back to prison, the cost will destroy the American economy. “Prison operations consumed about 77% of State correctional costs in 2001” (Myser, Michael). The remaining 23% was spent on juvenile justice, probation and parole, community-based corrections, and central office administration. State prison systems spend more than “$30 billion annually, and the Bureau of Prisons budgeted $5 billion for just 182,000 federal inmates this year” (Myser, Michael). That translates into plenty of work for companies looking to crack the prison market. “During the last 25 years prison and jail populations have grown 274 percent to 2.3 million in 2008, according to the Pew research, while those under supervision grew 226 percent over the same span to 5.1 million” (Warren, Jenifer). It estimated that states spent a record “$51.7 billion on corrections in fiscal year 2008 and incarcerating one inmate cost them, on average, $29,000 a year” (Warren, Jenifer).

The cost of an inmate is about $20,000 to $50,000 a year depending on if they are on death row or not. Thirty Thousand dollars a year is unnecessary spending. Most Americans work hard for their money. These inmates cause crime which goes against society’s economic health. So much money is being spent just toward keeping people incarcerated. People have to realize that we, as citizens, don’t need to pay $30,000 a year to keep criminals behind bars. If the American people cut in half the federal inmates' cost it would save the United States $2.5 billion.

I understand that we as a society need to lock criminals up, but do we really need to make their incarceration so costly. I know there are some aspects of prison life that cannot be cut, such as security; but in California the inmates eat full course meals and get milk. Some prisons even have HD televisions so the prisoners can be entertained. In Texas they give the inmates a biscuit filled with all the nutrients the human body needs and I think that they should implement those austere measures in California as well.

Work cited
Warren, Jenifer. High Cost of Prisons Not Paying Off, Report Finds. June 8, 2006: Los Angeles Times, 12 March 2011. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0608-05.htm
Myser, Michael. The Hard Sell. March 15 2007: Business 2.0 Magazine: 12 March 20 http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/12/01/8394995/indn x.htm