ers and other reformers in Pennsylvania developed the institution of the penitentiary, which emphasized having sinners engage in hard labor and reflect upon the errors of their ways. Before this method, criminal behavior did not include institutions. Jails that did exist, were only for short-term detaining, and were primarily for those defendants who were awaiting a trial or debtors who had not fulfilled their obligations. During this time, punishment was done usually by embarrassment or public humiliation. This was seen as shaming the offender into desisting from continued illegal activities. They also believed that if the rest of society saw what happened to those who did not behave lawfully then they would be deterred to engage in criminal behavior. In societies where labor was in demand, benefits to the community came from the criminal’s punishment of work (Mauer).

Many things have not changed from the thinking of these days. For example we are quick to lock people up without hesitation. Punishment is the method our criminal justice system imposes most often. It seems that when a crime is committed, the initial response is to punish or remove the criminal from the rest of society. We send people through the system only to see them return. Our prisons consist of “revolving doors”, which means that we let people out of prison and these same people return. Reasons for this have been attributed to the lack of rehabilatation in prisons, imposition of stricter sentencing as well as other programs that do not exist to help offenders when they are out.

Prison presents an underlying answer to a problem our criminal justice system does not want to fix. Criminals are sent through the judicial process and sentenced on a crime that may not call for imprisonment. When they are sentenced to serve time in prison they lose most of their civilian rights. They arrive to the prison with a presented culture or civilian self, and have to take on what Erving Goffman, social ahtropologist, believes to be, the inmate’s moral career (or mortification of the self), and become a “new institutional self”. The inmates will experience a fundamental change of who they are. They are striped of all possessions, and given universal attire. Each inmate loses their uniqueness or own identity and are usually given a number in replace of their name. All these processes are Goffman’s explanation of the inmate’s entry ritual. The inmates are usually humiliated, and realize they will look just like the rest of the prison population. The inmates personal identity is no longer there’s, and will remain in the hands of the prison authority until they are released (Mauer).

It is very clear that drug use is closely related to crime. As stated above, drugs initiate many problems for not just the user but the dealer and other innocent victims as well. In 1997, over 570,000 of the Nation’s prisoners 51% reported the use of alcohol or drugs while committing their offense. To break it into two categories, 33% of State prisoners and 22% of Federal prisoners said they had committed their current offense while under the influence of drugs. In 1997 this gap in prior drug use was narrowed, as the percentage of Federal inmates reporting past drug use rose to 73% compared to 83% of State inmates. This increase was mostly do to a rise in the percentage of Federal prisoners reporting prior use of marijuana (from 53% in 1991 to 75% in 1997) and cocaine-based drugs (from 37% in 1991 to 45% in 1997).

Since 1980, no policy has contributed more to the incarceration of African Americans than “the war on drugs”. “As a national policy, the drug war has provoked racial disparities in incarceration while failing to have any sustained impact on the drug problem (Mauer, 143)”. “The war on drugs”, has dramatically increased the number of drug arrests and made sentencing provisions more severe in most states. Drug possession arrests

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