After listening to Ismael Nazario, viewers obtain an inside view of experiences from within prison walls. From abuse to the general lack of freedom, the TED Talks video provides information about prison living that you would be unable to know within living through it. Nazario discusses the hardships he lived through while in prison and the obstacles he overcame using advice given to him by others.
Abuse
Physical AbuseFrom being beaten to being denied basic necessities to live, the physical abuse in detention centers is not absent. In the case of Terrill Thomas, who died of dehydration after having water withheld for over a week, the officer's got off clean. As usual with this system, the ignorance of authority is quite present. In 2015 the Human Rights Watch had one one hundred pages of reports with broken bones of prisoners. This list was constructed only of prisoners with mental illness, not including the thousands without. The violent actions agains inmates are disregarded due to the superiority of the officers which was discussed in the Vice Article.
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Shown above is an image from a Vice article displaying the extreme statistics of abuse cases in prisons. An astonishing thirty percent of abuse cases ended up with no charge to the defendant.
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Sexual AbuseThrough rules that are sloppily enforced, the harsh reality is that sexual abuse occurs in many detention centers around the globe. From the Guardian's article about Kevin Raymond Young, readers got to slip into the eyes of a seventeen-year-old boy who was stuck in the unfortunate circumstances of having officers sexually abuse him while in a detention center. After discovering that his main abuser had a history of child sexual abuse, it brings up the integrity of the system for allowing such a person to work with young kids. Although only one of thousands who are sexual assaulted each year in detention centers, Young informs readers on the harsh ignorance of the penal justice system.
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"There are two things that are important to successfully sexually abuse somebody. One, anonymity or silence – if you can't carry out your act without people knowing, you're not going to be at it very long. The second thing you need is a victim who's 'reliable'; a reliable victim is someone who's already been abused to the point where, if they do speak out, who on Earth is going to believe them?
-Kevin Raymond Young
In the Guardian article on Kevin Raymond Young's abuse, readers are informed on the grim realities of sexual abuse within the penal system. The two important things that factor into sexual abuse and his knowledge of this give an even more vivid reality of what he had to live with during his time in the detention center.
Overcrowding
Within the past few years, the United States has been faced with the issue of prison overcrowding more than ever. With the only solutions being build more prison or release more prisoners it leaves us in a slight predicament. Even if we continue to build more prisons we will eventually run out of room and resources as time goes on. However, the thought of releasing prisoners doesn't sound the best either. In 2013, California was required to release 33,000 prisoners due to lack of space within the system. This may sound like they were letting violent criminals onto the street but that it false. Within recent years multiple states have began to legalize the use of marijuana, one of those being California. For all inmates who were originally sentenced due to illegal use to this, their illegal act is not legal. This along with the option of parole and other small details found in the Christian Science Monitor, the solution to our extreme overcrowding within the penal system seems to be an easier fix than we all assumed.
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This cartoon from US. History in Context displays the issue of prison over crowding. By making a humor representation of the issue, viewers still get the information needed to see that prisons are being over crowded.
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