J.T. Hallinan's "Going Up the River"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, according to J.T. Hallinan's "Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation", the prison expansion phenomenon in the United States is not connected to an increase in the crime rate but to the social and economic role played by the prisons and their inmates. The author points out that it is not good for the society as a whole to transform prisons into businesses because they become an instrument of social exclusion and end up keeping inside not only real threats to society but also petty criminals, who become violent thugs when leaving the prison system. The paper relates that a self-financing prison unit can stop prisons from being a burden on the public budget; however, this book warns that this policy has gone too far by transforming a mistake into a life-long confinement and a member of the society into a slave worker.

From the Paper:

"Moreover, another source of profit is represented by the prisoners' labor - cheap, accurate, under strict supervision. Prisoners manufacture various sorts of items - license plates, clothes. They make TWA's airline reservations; they represent a labor force which has no competition on the open market. But, more than items, they produce money, since roughly half of their income goes to the prison budget. In the perception of the author, this is the bitter irony of modern prison system - they have not become efficient, but they became profitable. Still, for the black population particularly, the practice of "marketing" for prison/convict labor bears the echoes of slavery - black men imprisoned and made to work for the profit of the white men."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Foucault, Michel. 1978. "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison", New York: Pantheon Books
• Pitofsky, Alexander H. 2002. "Profit and Stealth in the Prison-Industrial Complex", available at http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.102/ 12.2.r_pitofsky.txt (Oct. 22, 2006)
• Tkachuk, Brian & Walmsley, Roy. 2001. "World Prison Population: Facts, Trens and Solutions", available at http://www.heuni.fi/uploads/6mq2zlwaaw3ut.pdf (Oct. 25, 2006)
• --- The Bureau of Justice Statistics web-site, available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/keytabs.htm (Oct. 22, 2006)

More papers on J.T. Hallinan's "Going Up the River":

• Analytical Essay # 30274 : "The River of God - A New History of Christian Origins"
• Book Review # 147301 : "Grammatical Analysis and Close Reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's, "The Silmarillion"
• Poem Review # 110233 : "T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: