Yuma Territorial Prison

“Crimes against humanity” In Abby Mann’s play, Judgment at Nuremberg readers ask themselves if Janning really should be charged with crimes against humanity. Was he in fact the most cruel and devastating murderer and torturer, this world has ever seen? Or was he just doing his job for the love of his country? Jannings may have done what he thought was for the love of his country, but he most certainly committed crimes against humanity. Tragedies like the one that happened in Germany has…

As I sat in philosophy class, I listened to the discussion about “The Color of Fear” (documentary). Many people sat quiet in efforts to keep arguments and insults at bay. However, one female stated something that made my thoughts initiate. She loudly and proudly stated, “I’m a white female, as white as they come, and I do not have white privilege”. She finished her statement with a further explanation, “I had a rough life growing up and I never got everything I wanted; therefore, I’m sure I was…

It has been documented that private “for profit” correctional institutions have gained a substantial foothold in the prison landscape. In the 1980s, a qualitative shift in the relation between corrections and private businesses began due to the raise of private prison management. Private prisons-both state and federal-represent just a small slice of the eighty billion dollars spend yearly on corrections (Markowitz, 2016). In 1995, there were less than 30 adult confinement facilities operated by…

guilty. Those against the death penalty often times think if a perpetrator is murdered or sentenced to death by the victims’ family, then them themselves become the perpetrator thinking that death is the only true justice, moreover, sending them to prison means that their family members got killed for…

1. “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin is a short story that starts in media res (in the middle of things) with the narrator, who is a high school algebra teacher in Harlem, New York, reading from a newspaper article that his seven years younger brother, Sonny, is arrested for using heroin. After some time, the narrator writes to Sonny after his two-year-old daughter, Grace, dies from polio. The narrator has a flashback to a time his mother was alive to tell him that he had an uncle, but the uncle…

Marianne Szegedy-Maszak’s “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism” and Dr. Zimbardo’s “The Stanford Prison Experiment” are not considered extremely recent; still they retain relevance and applicability today. Szegedy-Maszak proposes that the Abu Ghraib scandal possesses three key aspects conducive to a torture driven environment: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. Szegedy-Maszak attempts to provide an explanation for the inhumane actions of American soldiers toward Iraqi…

Depending on the severity of the crime, prisoners can sit in prison for years and years. In a worst case scenario, they can even sit in prison till death. This can be problematic because once they do come out of prison, they often have a hard time adjusting and it is likely that they will commit the crime again. However, at the same time, it is debatable to say that these prisoners deserve these kinds of punishment and that the whole point of the prison system is to isolate them from the world…

The practice of mass incarceration in the state prison system is an epidemic that stretches far beyond the stringent sentencing guides that are imposed by the state legislatures. This crisis is one that is attributed throughout all levels of the government. As a result, America has suffered both economically and socially because of mass incarceration. The United States prison population has more than quadrupled due to harsher penalties for non-violent offenses (Mass Incarceration in the USA).…

According to this law, the teen criminals who convicted a murder crime will must aid life in prison without any chance of being released. Before this law, the teenaged killers could only be sentenced to jail until they reach their age of 21 years. After the age of 21, the case were to be transferred to the adult court and they were to treat them…

Murder: the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another; also the subject of an commonly banned book In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Banned in some schools -such as Glendale (CA) Unified School District in 2012- for its gruesome details of violence, accounts of rape, and profanity, In Cold Blood depicts the murder of a family. Perry Edward Smith and Richard (Dick) Eugene Hickock, the killers, were hoping to gain wealth and fortune but ended up on Death Row a few years later.…