Any incarceration facilities are intended to be a terrible experience. Nevertheless, the rights, policies, and everyday life of an inmate are quite different in prison than in a jail facility. Both jail and prisons are regarded as incarceration facilities; however, the types of in-housed offenders and the role of the two facilities differ. This essay will discuss and explore the differences between a jail and a prison and evaluate the types of offenders detained alongside the mission of the incarceration facilities. A jail is commonly a local detention facility under the local district's authority, a city, or county. Jails are detention facilities for a short period for the newly arrested individuals and those awaiting sentencing or trial. People convicted for a short-term sentence probably for less than a year may be detained on the local jail for the period of their sentence (Gershowitz, 2016). Consequently, jails are regarded to be temporary or short-lived residence, and they also do not have many of the amenities and different programs offered in most of the prison detention centers. In some jurisdictions, jails are in charge of transporting and transporting the inmates to the other authorities, federal or state. Jails are also responsible for detaining mentally ill individuals awaiting their transfer to appropriate mental medical institutions where beds are commonly unavailable (Mulvey and Schubert, 2017). On the other hand, prisons are institutional facilities under the federal government's authority where sentenced offenders are detained for a long time. Guilty individuals that have been found breaking the law of the state are mostly sent to state prison. People that are also found guilty of violating federal government laws are commonly sent to federal prison. Some states in the United States have prisons and jails that are mostly privately governed by a corporation. The states usually reach out to the corporations for contracts to house prisoners, but they do not have too much control over the privately own facilities on how they are operated (Vito and Maahs, 2015). In most cases, prisons have wide-ranging education and vocational training programs, work release programs, halfway house service, and entertainment and recreational facilities. Most of the people in prison, especially men, end up getting detained for the rest of their lives. Prisons are mainly established for four main purposes: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. Retribution involves punishment for criminal offenses against society. Denying the lawbreakers of their freedom is a form of enabling them to pay a debt to the public for their offenses. Deterrence, which is another purpose of putting people in prison, refers to the prevention of impending crime. It is believed that prisons give warnings to individuals contemplating committing crimes. The likelihood of people going to prison will discourage them from violating the rules of the land. Incapacitation is another role of prison establishment defined as the removal of law offenders for the public to keep the public safe from getting harmed by the criminals ( Coyle and Fair , 2018). Rehabilitation as a prison role is defined as different activities set up to change lawbreakers into law-abiding citizens. The different activities set up in prison may involve providing educational courses, offering counseling with a social worker or a psychologist, and teaching job skills.
Both jails and prisons are established to keep off individuals that are likely to bring a threat to the public in such a way people would continue with their everyday activities without any challenge whatsoever. They all are intended for the general deterrence of criminals, thereby help in the reduction of crime as they are established to punish the offenders of crime. From a practical point of view, there is no identified way to discover which sentencing is 'good' since some prisons are considerably more enjoyable as compared to the county jail, whereas some are so much worse. Nevertheless, there are discrepancies in parole rules following the incarceration of the two detention facilities: jails and prisons.
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Reference
Coyle, A., & Fair, H. (2018). A human rights approach to prison management: Handbook for prison staff . Institute for Criminal Policy Research Birkbeck, University of London.
Gershowitz, A. M. (2016). Consolidating Local Criminal Justice: Should the Prosecutors Control the Jails. Wake Forest L. Rev. , 51 , 677.
Mulvey, E. P., & Schubert, C. A. (2017). Mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons. Crime and justice , 46 (1), 231-277.
Vito, G. F., & Maahs, J. R. (2015). Criminology . Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
