Increased Inmate Labour

In most prisons, sanitary, dietary and other living conditions were improved. Draconian forms of incarceration and punishment such(prenominal) as chain gangs and solitary confinement disappeared or became oft less common. Reforms included the introduction of drug and alcohol intercession and commission political programs and the adoption of vocational training and work programs, which eventually came to include 91 percentage of national and 70 percent of enjoin prisoners. Forty state prison systems became subject to federal official court orders which mandated that practices such as flogging and the failure to save adequate recreation, diet and hygiene violated the Eighth Amendment's il legalise against cruel and unusual punishment. In 1965, Congress enacted the Pell fit in program and a small (less than one percent) portion of funds appropriated under it was used to finance educational programs for indigent prisoners.

Reasons for the Backlash of the 1990s

offset printing in the 1980s and continuing to the present time, public attitudes toward the word of prisoners hardened. A 1995 Time/CNN poll showed that 67 percent of those surveyed sight that inmates were treated too leniently. The reasons for this shift in public attitudes were as follows:

(1)Frivolous law suits. A 1961 unequivocal Court case provided prisoners with control access to the federal courts for the protection of their civil rights. Provided access to lawyers give for by the go

Hibbert, Christopher. The Roots of Evil. capital of Massachusetts: Little, Brown,

(3) Political pressures. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that or so politicians in state legislatures and in the Congress, such as Representative go-cart (R. N.J.) began to raise a great hue and cry everywhere supposedly excessive prisoner privileges. In 1995, Zimmer sponsored lawmaking in the House of Representatives entitled the No Frills Prison answer and stated in sponsoring the bill (which did non pass) that "jails are places for punishment, not relaxation." Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm said that "we've got to stop expression prisons like Holiday Inns."

Baer, Thomas H. "Privately Run Prisons Don't convolution Great Savings.

" New York Times, 27 August 1995, E14.

(4) Cutbacks in rehabilitation, counselling and education programs. The 1994 federal omnibus anti-crime act ended the Pell grant program in federal prisons. Smolowe says that "most [prisons] offer some courses, [but] . . . tight budgets have forced cutbacks in recent age; . . . a quarter of all prisoners have neither jobs nor classes to muster in their time and pent-up energies."

(2) Prison overcrowding. In a 1981 case, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution "does not mandate comfortable prisons" and that state measures to double up convicts in cells to relieve overcrowding were constitutional so long as they did not "violate a modern standard of decency." By 1995, 1.5 million prisoners were in state and federal prisons and in jail holding facilities, an increase of approximately 700 percent since 1960. The rate of incarceration reached a nation-wide average of 455 persons per 100,000 of the adult population in 1990-1991, the highest rate in the world. This situation was the result not only of rising crime rates, but also legal changes such as Three Strikes and You're Out and other tightened sentencing laws which oblige mandatory sentences on repeat violent offenders and certain types of na
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