Comparison between British and American legal prison legal systems

Comparison between British and American legal prison legal systems

Someone might argue that the private sector’s involvement in the penal system, prima facie, can be regarded as a quick and low-cost remedy to the myriad serious problems facing the penal system including the poor conditions within the prisons, inadequate prisons space, and poor state responsibilities of adequately managing the services within the prisons. However, prisons in both Britain and America are exhibiting different challenges as a result of the policies and regulations governing the entire correctional systems. Despite these dilapidated conditions, prisons remained a significant and integral component of the criminal justice system in the two regions and used appropriately, and they serve a vital purpose in upholding the rule of law. Prisons help the law enforced to ensure that the alleged offenders are subjected to justice and enable the provision of sanctions for serious wrongdoing. The prisons are expected to provide humane experience as well as opportunities to the prisoner to receive the necessary assistance and provide rehabilitations. Basing on these arguments, this research is purposed to explore the situations of prisons in both British and America by considering the pros and cons of American and British law. ¹

British and American prison

In Britain and the United States, prison laws emanate from both state and federal law sources and are used to govern both the establishment and administration of prisons as well as the rights of the inmates. Prisoners, by their very nature, lose their constitutional rights due to the commission pf the crime.² Despite these developments, they are guaranteed some form of protection by the eighth amendments of the United States Constitution, which prohibits against unusual and cruel punishment.³In addition, the protection calls for the inmates to be accorded minimum living standards. In the case of Brown v Plata, for instance, the Supreme Court accepted the court-mandated population limit as a strategy to prevent overpopulation, which violated the eighth amendments of the prisons in California.⁴

The inmates under British and American laws possess some constitutional rights, including the due process and the right for parole. In addition, the prison laws have acknowledged some of the societal issues affecting inmates, particularly those from minority communities. In particular, the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause under the US constitution protects prisoners against unfair and unequal treatment with regards to their creed, race, and sex. Similarly, the 1978’s Uniform Law Commission dictates that an individual in custody possess the protected interest in freedom from discrimination basin on their religion, race, sex, and nationality. Lastly, the two constitutions recognize the prisoners’ right to religion and speech provides they do not compromise their status as prisoners.

Compared to the US, Great Britain has the highest number of law-abiding populations of any nation of the vilified world. With a total of over 40,000,000 people, this rate of serious crimes is extremely low compared to the most advanced countries.⁵ This particular rate has been credited to its excellent system of criminal courts and criminal low in Britain. In particular, England has been ranked the best country with an excellent prison system, which acknowledges the fact that the prison is a facility where criminal justice has to be effectively executed. The prison is regarded as the chief instrument the which the criminal law is effected and consequently through which should be judged. The courts may be swift, sure, and scientific, but having inefficient institutions that handled more serious crimes without being efficient in repression and correction of the criminal tendencies of the accused, the issue of crime will persist in the society due to this well-established institution. The English prison system has remained the commonplace for the scientific penologists across the world due to its tremendous outcomes in dealing with correction.

Prison conditions in America

The inmates in the United States prisons operate on a limited food budget with the national average daily cost of 2.62 dollars per prisoner. With regards to overall architecture, the US prisons are most commonly constructed after the penal model using concrete walls, cage-like rooms with minimal personal privacy, and vandal-resistant equipment and furniture. Such unnatural living conditions may adversely impact the wellbeing of the inmates and increase prison violence. Besides, the prisoners, the general wellbeing of the correctional personnel also affected by the poor living conditions. Although most of the prison institutions in the US are developed after the traditional penal model, such harsh living conditions have no significant impact on the deterrence of the offenders from perpetrating future crimes. The poor living conditions within the correctional facilities are likely to heighten the probability of reoffending.  The harsh environment is one of the core weaknesses of the United States’ prisons and thus prompting a need for implementation of more humane prison conditions, which may positively influence the general wellbeing of both the staff and the inmates as well as establish a healthier inmate-guard relationship.

Britain

Britain has a unique distinction with the highest imprisonment rates per capita in Western Europe. According to the statistics taken by the council of Europe, Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland exhibited a prison population of 55,047, revealing a total of 96.5 citizens per 100,000.⁶ The region exhibits the highest rates of imprisonment per capita in Western Europe. Compared to the United States, this rate is relatively higher with the high per capita confinement rates of any other sizable country int the world. The situation in these prisons tends to differ from one facility to another. However, some common problems exhibited in most of the prisons in Britain, including extremely poor conditions for pre-trial individuals, inadequate in-cell plumbing, and inadequate vital work and educational activities for the majority of prisoners. In addition to this, mentally disturbed prisoners, especially those who are much more susceptible to self-injury and suicide, have not been given proper treatment or attention. The correctional facility across the UK tends to vary widely, and particularly Leicester and Brixton prisons are exemplified by lack of out-of-cell time and overcrowding for inmates.⁷

Pros of the US prison laws

In the United States, both state and federal justice systems have a network of agencies focused on supervisions individuals under incarceration, parole, probationer rehabilitation. Penal institutions offer a wider range of programs besides monitoring the prisoners under custody. Besides, they are responsible for supervising offender who is released conditionally and those that are provided with penalties that do not demand imprisonment and still need legally prescribed supervision. The correction officers’ roles are very diverse, including overseeing confinement of prisoners that are sentenced in their primary role as well as other expanded responsibilities including rehabilitation and reformation of sentenced offenders, provision of counseling to prepare for the reintegration into the society, and planning for educational opportunities. One of the strengths of the American law that stands out is the provision for the outstanding correctional programs.

The US prisons offer work and educational programs, which are the most extensively employed model of treatment in these facilities. The growth and the expansion of these programs are a reflection of the abiding belief that work and educational skills, as well as the good habits attained via the acquisition of these skills, are core to accessing job opportunities and ultimately becoming a productive citizen. Despite the non-equivocal outcomes, these programs have a significant impact, particularly in minimizing after release recidivism in situations where they are targeted towards a particular inmate and when a multi-modal approach is employed to rehabilitate the offenders. According to the 1995 state and federal prisons survey, about a quarter of the prisoners were admitted to some forms of the educational program, and almost $412 million are channeled into the US prisons’ educational programs yearly. These initiatives absorb over 50,000 prisoners in the adult basic education that focuses on the different core areas such as literacy, mathematics, social studies, and science and language arts.

The prison laws provide for training of the inmates for employment by providing them with vocational education. From the 1994 survey of the correctional facilities established that out of over 65,000 of the inmates in forty-three correctional systems were admitted into the training programs aimed at empowering them with vocational skills essential for securing employment after they are released from prison.⁸ Similarly, approximately 70% of all prisoners are assigned work to do.  Some of these assignments include working in the prison industry, institutional maintenance, and laboring on the prison farm. This particular strategy is embraced with the assumption that maintaining the discipline of working while under custody irrespective of whether marketable skills develops will eventually culminate into steady employment upon release of the inmate. Both the UK and US prison systems embrace this particular strategy as a way of reducing idleness in prisons and keeping the facilities orderly.

Besides, the US correctional services include the provision of inmates with access to other kinds of education, including life-skills training. Such programs are often regarded as counseling interventions. They are predicted founded on the assumption that upon reintegration into the society, most offender may lack the form of basic understandings and knowledge which is integral to the American society. Life-skills and other related courses empower inmates with diverse skills about the job application and interview and management of one’s household and money. In addition, training empowers inmates on how to lead a healthy lifestyle, how to acquire the driver’s license, and how to be a responsible spouse and parent.

Provision for counseling and psychological programs

Besides the education and vocation programs, both the British and American prison laws provide for programs aimed at furnishing the inmates with the skills to lead a productive life upon return to their communities. Some of these programs are meant to change the underlying issues implicated in or causing the criminality of offenders. Drug abuse programs form part of the most common interventions because about half of the inmates report having abused drugs for a significant period prior to their arrest. In the united states, about 20% of the federal inmates and a third of the state prison inmates have reported consuming drugs at the time of perpetrating a crime that caused their arrest.[1] The increase in numbers of drug-related offenses in prisons has been influenced by the commencement of the war on drugs in 1980. The programs, such as the therapeutic communities meant to house drug-addicted prisoners within isolated units, are part of the effective strategies adopted to rehabilitate addicts within the prisons. Similarly, the residential substance abuse treatment that gives drug treatment to inmates in separate units is beneficial in the process of reformation.

The united state prisons provide both group and individual counseling to the correctional facilities to help the convicts to forfeit their criminal lifestyles. There have been several treatment modalities attempted, although the cognitive-behavioral treatment has been an approach of growing appeal. This particular method is the cognitive-behavioral treatment, and despite the state and federal government presenting these programs in different forms, they are targeted towards the ways of thinking and other forms of criminal attitudes known to enhance illegal behavior. The antisocial attitudes of some offenders are challenged through counseling, which rationalizes the supportive criminal behaviors by striving to externalize blame as well as the failure to face the harm that was committed.

The above illustrations inform the strengths of the prison policies and guidelines aimed at rehabilitating the criminal offenders and reintegrating them effectively into society. Administration of criminal justice to individuals differs from a different punishment than another offense of different magnitude. Even though some offenses receive different punishments from others, the comparative weight of the criminal offenses remains an issue of state discretion despite the variations in the way criminal offenses are approached. The principle of equal protection remains core in the core, and it is not affected by the severity of the crime performed. On most occasions, heavier penalties are applied to habitual criminals, and such individuals are likely to become ineligible for paroles.[2] In both the Britain law and American law, the nature of the punishment is highly dependent on the nature of the crime perpetrated.

Weaknesses of prison laws

Despite the tremendous impacts that have stemmed from the enactment of the prison reforms, both Britain and American prisoners have suffered significant challenges that particular those associated with high rates of arrests. In Britain, segregation is exhibited in most prisons, particularly Leicester Prison, for their protection or the sake of maintenance of good discipline and order. In practice, prisoners under segregation are housed in sections or wings of the prison without the permission to freely move out to interreact with the rest of the prison population. Rule 443 remains controversial for various reasons. A group of prisoners remains isolated from the general prison population temporarily whenever there is a fear of an inmate getting involved in the disruptive act. Despite the assumption that the move maintains the good discipline and order, its application results in circumvention of the right of prisoners to the disciplinary hearing before detention within the segregation unit. This rule, therefore, punishes prisoners without any recourse. Rule 43 prisoners are majorly the sex offenders, and their number has drastically grown since 1981when sex offenders comprised about 4% of the total general prison population. This number has been increasing in subsequent years, contributing to the issue of poor regimes and overcrowding in prisons.

There has been a tendency to incarcerate mentally disturbed individuals in prisons rather than within the medical facilities. Most of the inmates currently housed in British prisons exhibit psychiatric disorders, and their imprisonment is due to the shortage of secure treatment facilities. In addition, most hospitals that lack secure units do not admit mentally ill individuals who have been convicted or charged with violent crimes. The absence of secure space and facilities within the prison forces the prisons to place the mentally ill patients with disruptive behavior within the segregation units as a form of punishment.  In addition, such facilities administer high dosage drugs, which compromises the health of these inmates. This particular correctional approach is revealing a lapse within the prison system because mentally ill individuals should be subjected to the psychotherapy and treatment and not held in segregation.

In the American system, the penologists acknowledge the accidental criminal that gets trapped into temptation and, to some extent, guided astray through bad examples. There is an assumption that such individuals are eminently irreformable. In addition, the confirmed criminals start during the early youth, which is blamed on being taken care of under bad homes and sometimes to parental neglect. However, the penologists insist that there is one greatest single causative factor that is yet to be properly understood. In both the two prison systems, mental abnormality and mental defect, as well as psychic constitutional inferiority, has been established as the greatest causative factor. These two aspects are the primary sources of failure both in schools and in reformatories. To a greater extent, this particular situation substantiates the residuum of irreformable, namely recidivists.[3]

The strategies under prison laws under the two countries have relied exclusively on punishment as the best approach to minimize recidivism and crime. The toughness during the crime era resulted in the skyrocketing of populations in prisons with increased rates of incarceration not only in Britain and America but across the world. The main objective of this strategy was to punish more offenders and to do it more severely. More capital investment is channel towards expansions of jails and prisons with radical reformations to sentencing laws, including implementation of mandatory minimus, mandatory sentences, and habitual offenders. Besides, the criminal laws in the two jurisdictions have been expanded and thus broadening the range of behavior that exhibits criminal liability and thus broadening the scope for the criminal justice system. American criminal justice has also expanded its role to include the war on drugs. Despite these initiatives, the overall rate of recidivism has still gone up, which demonstrates that offenders get rearrested back into prison even after securing their release from the criminal justice system. Recidivism, in particular, is the conservative measure because it is a pointer to the rearrests.

Conclusion

The high rates of incarceration have impacted the prison experience in a manner that is significantly harmful to some inmates and thus compromising their chances of leading a healthy life upon release from custody. Prisons are among the most powerful social settings that can have various physical, psychological, and behavioral consequences for the inmates, which mainly include the degree to which the severe stressors characterize their life. Besides the weaknesses associated with the criminal justice system in Britain and America, there has been tremendous progress in developing the prisons, particularly open prisons. The training offered to imamates equips them with vital skills that render them productive members of society, upon their release, and ultimately a more efficient reintegration into the society. The correctional system approaches the process of correction from a position of a more moderate reformist, which acknowledges that the punishment system needs to gravitate more towards reforms. Also, the duration of reform relies entirely on the speed of the rehabilitative progress. The strategies to concentrate on reforms had greatly impacted the British and American sentencing practices and promotion of flexibility in terms of imprisonment compared to the old correctional system. Also, the correction systems are more concerned with the quality of correction programs in the prison, but still, there is more change needed to handle issues such as overcrowding in prisons.

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[1] Murphy, T., and Whitty, N., 2007. Risk and human rights in UK prison governance. The British Journal of Criminology, 47(5), pp.798-816.

[2] Noel Whitty, ‘Human Rights As Risk: UK Prisons And The Management Of Risk And Rights’ (2011) 13 Punishment & Society.

[3] Charles B. Fields and Philip Priestly, ‘Victorian Prison Lives English Prison Biography 1830-1914’ (1987) 78 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-).