Law Essay: Ethical Issues Related to Prison System

Ethical Issues
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Ethical Issues Related to Prison System
Essentially, prisoners can be classified as a captive population. It predisposes inmates to suffer from many ethical issues. Two of the most common ethical violations in the United States include an excessively long solitary confinement and prisoner-to-prisoner abuse.
The U.S. has been experimenting on solitary confinement for approximately 200 years. The prisons are termed silent prisons, which can sometimes be equated to supermax prisons. Here, inmates are forced to suffer from absolute solitude without interruption. Studies have shown that these cause psychiatric illnesses, which make it a violation of human dignity. The process destroys the criminal beyond reason and without intermission nor pity. Hence, it kills the criminal slowly. Solitary confinement is a means of disciplinary and administrative segregation or protecting vulnerable individuals in a general prison. Nevertheless, the abundance of rules and the lack of quality treatment are considered torture and violate human rights (Cloud et al., 2015).
Another ethical issue is prisoner-to-prisoner abuse. One of the instances where this may be applied, is during an event of inmate raping. Singer, as stated in Smyth (2011), reveals that around 200,000 prisoners become victims of sexual abuse in many American jails and even juvenile detention facilities. Among them, 80,000 suffer from vehement and recurrent raping. The victims usually suffer from mental anguish and even physical injuries.
Private Prisons Versus Traditional Government-Run Prisons
The primary difference between private prisons and government-run prisons is how they deal with finances. The former receives a subsidy from the government based on the number of prisoners and the time that they have to serve. Around 9% of the total inmate population in the U.S. is housed in a private prison while the rest may be in a correctional facility or government-run prisons. Also, studies show that private facilities choose less violent inmates trained to create products that can be sold to companies or provide services. By contrast, public prisons are managed by the federal government. The majority who stay here are the more violent prisoners. The government has the right to release the inmates earlier, and the inmates have to follow the strict regulation of the federal government. Although these reflect benefits, research has shown that there are more deaths and even violent deaths in public than in private prisons (Acevedo, 2017).
It is ethical to privatize prisons because, despite having committed a crime, they are still people with autonomy and human dignity that must be respected at all means, regardless of what they have done. Private institutions also have a better and less violent program for the rehabilitation of the prisoners. This is a better method to help them change their life perspectives, especially when the crimes committed are not capital sins based on moral t...