Have You Ever Been Fascinated By Prisons?

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Have you ever been fascinated by prison systems and how they operate such as the types of educational, vocational or recreational programs they offer inmates or how they classify prisoners?

Yes, as a matter of fact. It always struck me as wasteful to lock up a potential labour source. If they are too dangerous to work, they should be eliminated. Or, perhaps, given an option of exile to some remote area where they can do as they please (maybe an area in Alaska), but if they leave the cordoned area, they are shot on site. If they were to accept such an offer, a chip of some sort would be implanted to track them in the event they escaped. Or maybe create a large scale military unit comprised of criminals for front line use (I think the US army is already granting a number of "moral waivers"). Impractical suggestions, but the status quo of the penal system is broken beyond repair.

The whole idea of a penitentiary was to reform those imprisoned, but that seems to be the opposite of what is achieved.

Yeah. I even wanted to go to prison for a short period of time, but thankfully my mom and brother talked me out of it.

yes. read up on Jeremy Bentham and the Benthamite model - The Panopticon - for an unders 9notanding of the modern prison system and the relationship between "successful" modern incarceration and architecture. All seeing, the use of wings and a centralisation of observation points. the dismantling of the notion of "privacy," in a sense...the prison guard as unseen seer and the prisoner was theoretcially to remain oblivious to this fact.



so, modernism, the Enlightenment and the inception of the Big Brother idea. (in the Orwellian sense, as opposed to the crappy tv series....)

as an aside...also been to prison. not a nice place.

I think a main point of prisons that you might be forgetting is that prisoners are incarcerated to feel remorse for their actions, not just to segregate them from society. Sending them to an isolated penal colony where they have virtual freedom wouldn't do much for making them dwell on their crimes. I for one am against prisoners getting to work outside of prison on public-works projects, since those jobs could be had by the masses of unemployed adults currently starving in this country. However, forming prisoners into Dirty Dozen batallions and being sent on suicide missions to earn freedom might not be a bad idea, but you run the risk of liberating rapists and felons prematurely.

I am fascinated by prisons myself. I imagine myself all of the time as an inmate and have a sickening fear that I will be incarcerated one day myself. As a model for running jails/prisons, I love the methods of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Ignis I hope I never get on your bad side.

I am fascinated by prisons, if there is ever a documentary or reality TV show about prisons I watch it. It all seems so dreadful and shocking that I feel like a voyeur peeking in on a train wreck.

I took a few treatment of offenders classes in college and worked for a few years watching over guys 3rd shift at an alternative to prison.

I did come up with an idea for a really bad prison for people that really make me mad - it would be in Antarctica underground so they couldn't escape. They be in their cells 24/7. When they bring them the food they'd just throw it in their face. If they made ONE SOUND the guards would rush in and beat the crap out of them with their nightsticks. If they spit on a guard they'd get all their teeth smashed out with a brick. If they layed a hand on one they'd get both arms and both legs broken and then beaten unconscious. No showers either - if they start to stink they'd get sprayed with a fire hose.

They sound scary. Unless. I could make up my own prison and it wouldn't really be a prison. It could be a sorority house except no hazing allowed and people couldn't have too much ToM because then they would all be deciding weird stuff behind the scenes.
So, my sorority would be for people without ToMs. I would offer scholarships.

I am fascinated by them but i get more fascinated with the psychological details of things than the general details.

OMG i just realized psychology is my "special interest" and many of the others are sub categories of that!

am couldn't care less either way,but mum seems to have always been obsessed with them,am used to think why doesn't she just go in one if she likes them that much.
she has always watched and re watched any programmes to do with prisons [fake or real] such as cell block h,oz,prison escape [thats what she calls it,its prison break she means],the real bad girls and other real stuff on people in prison etc.

i used to be interested in prisons when i had a friend that was also interested in them.
not because he influenced me, but because we speculated similarly as to the type of people who are in prison, and what prison life was like.
we used to imagine how it would be to have to shower among toothless imbeciles who are ill equipped for reason and restraint.

sometimes, we would go and park the car outside "long bay" detention centre, and witness the prisoners stalking around their yards through the wire fences.
it was kind of like the zoo.

these people have been deemed restrainable by society, so i liked to watch them to see how they acted.

they got rather angry because we were on the wrong side of the fence. that caused problems.

one day a prison guard person drove his little car out to where we were parked, and asked us not to come back.

we usually went and got some mcdonalds food before we parked there, and ate our quarter pounders while watching the inmates through the fence, and the guard said that it was causing some trouble in the prison because they thought we were taunting them.

whatever.

i have no real interest in the design of prisons, or the safeguards against ingenious inmate plots and their contraptions they craft from apparently innocuous objects.
it is mildly interesting, but not fascinating.

I worked in a state prison for a couple of months.

I can tell you that the system doesn't work.

I find them interesting and I have been surprised prisons can be like camps because they have activities there such as bands, drama, basketball, etc. I know in Montana it's like that at Deer Lodge and they even have TVs in their cell with free cable. The older prison didn't but the new one they built in the late 70's does. I have always been fascinated when we drive by a prison. We always drove by one on the way to Montana when we lived in Washington. I have also seen on in CA along I-5 I think it was and I have seen one outside of Salt Lake City and I saw the inmates in the yard.

Of course I have visited a couple, the old Montana State prison and The Alcatraz (sp).


I still wouldn't want to be in prison though. I heard how bad they can be such as not only you get bullying, you can get beaten by inmates and I was shocked how gaurds there can abuse inmates and many of them get away with it. I watched a video about that and many of them had disabilities such as handicaps or mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Besides I doubt I get unlimited access to the computer and be allowed video games and DVDs in my cell. I also heard you can't have your personal items there and you have to earn them yourself by re buying them in a place there. So I like can't bring my PSP with me or my CD player if I got sent to prison.

However I love it how child rapists get beaten in prison by inmates. I know lot of people think they should be shot but I think they should not be and let them suffer in prison. Killing them would free them from the misery. I think the same from all inmates because you don't get very much freedom and you are confined to a cell and locked in a facility and you can't do whatever you want like you can't travel or decide to go to places outside of prison.

Actually I've been once, even since I watched the MSNBC documentary series "Lockup", and it's spin-offs Lockup RAW and Lockup: Extended Stay. I kept even watching the episodes over and over as background noise.

But prisons are not a good place to be at all, also they don't even work at all because how they are run in the United States.

How do prisons not work, care to elaborate? Do you mean criminals don't learn their lesson because they commit the same crime again when they get out? I think they are just stupid because they commit the same crimes again when they get out. Instead of learning their lesson to not ever do that again, they learn they need to be more careful when they do the crime so they won't get caught. The USA can't control how stupid people think.