Week 4 Ethics in Corrections

Ethics in Corrections

            The Unites States of America has the highest per capita of incarcerated persons in the world.  Many of these persons are in prison for drug offenses as opposed to violent crimes.  This growing prison population has vastly surpassed the amount of persons that can be held in prisons.  This over-populations of prisons has led to American enterprises opening up privately ran prisons that are paid by the prisoner thus granting incentive to keep persons behind bars (Fox, 2008).

            Private prisons and corrections have largely been a topic regarding ethics.  Why would a business enterprise want to release a prisoner when they are paid a certain amount a day to keep that prisoner within their prison?  State’s and federal government paying a private company grants inventive not to correct their wrong behavior and to keep them behind bars for longer periods of time.  This kind of business model has been called unethical by many but yet continues to exist today due to the dramatic amount of persons behind bars in the United States (Fox, 2008).

            Corrections officers are often over worked and well underpaid for the type of work that they do.  These officers may receive minimal training, have limited promotion potential and deal with many issues far above and behind the average person.  Corrections officers often make ethical decisions each day in order to better their lives or the lives of the prisoners in which they must see every day. 

            Personally, a man was hired at the same job that I work at.  He was a former corrections officer returning to the Intelligence field from which he was trained to do in the Army National Guard.  This individual told us many stores about when he ran his cell block.  His pay was very low, shifts were twelve hours and strenuous and he worked with two Nationally known gangs, the Bloods and Crypts.  His stories told a lot about making “deals” with prisoners in order to make everyone’s life easier.  The difficult part was drawing the line of how far deals could go and what you could give prisoners in order to make the job easier.  These are ethical decisions our underpaid corrections officers face each and every day on their jobs. 

Bibliography

Fox, C. (2008). The prison population in America. Probation Journal, 55(4), 403-404.