Prisoners

Abstract

Technically, a prisoner is a person who is found guilty in the criminal justice system of committing a criminal offense and is held in custody at a correctional facility. While the definition of a prisoner holds true from the inception of government custody to the modern prison system, it is the purpose of the prison that has changed over the centuries. The purpose of modern‐day prison is a mixture of deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. While critics of the current criminal justice system would debate the purpose of the current system as being more retribution than a mixture, arguments of racial and economic bias dominate much of the current prison discourse. Moreover, it is the government's own policy changes that provide the most ammunition for the critics of the system. While imprisonment is used throughout the world as formal punishment, the more recent drug policies of the United States have recently come under much public scrutiny. Over the last three decades, the United States' war on drugs produced government policy changes that caused a dramatic increase in the prison population. While the increase itself is not necessarily at issue, it is the analysis of the new prison population that calls into question the criminal justice system's declaration of equality.