In class this week, we watched an episode from the TV series 30 Days. The episode that we watched was 30 Days in Prison. Morgan Spurlock, the main person for the show, went behind bars to serve a 30 day sentence just to see what everything was like. He did the first part of the 30 days living around others with really no privacy. Then he spent 72 hours in solitary confinement. After solitary confinement, he went back to the normal prison and then finally went to a drug rehab center. He did not need any of this, but he spent time in many different parts of jail to see what it was like for people who go through it. The way that people acted throughout different parts of jail were really interesting to see. Morgan made many "friends" while there. Two of his better "friends" were his roommates George and Travis. Morgan spent a lot of time talking to both of them and learned a lot about their life and what they have gone through. George had been in jail several times, spending more time in jail than out of jail. Travis had been a heroin addict for ten years, since he was 15, and has literally been disowned from his family.
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Many facts were brought up in the show; there were a lot of statistics given as well. One of the statistics given was that 2/3 of people who are released from jail, end up going back to prison. During the show, both George and Travis kept saying that this was the last time that they were going to be in jail and that they would clean up and get better because they never wanted to go back to jail again. However, shortly after being released, both Travis and George were arrested and stand trial once again. While watching this show, it makes people feel sympathetic for those who are in jail and say they want to get better. But after hearing that those people went back to jail, the sympathy goes away; it is almost as if they didn't even try to stay out.
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Jails in America are overcrowded and the lengths of some sentences are ridiculous, but talking about getting clean and actually doing it are two very different things. This relates to sociology because a mind has to be set into motion instead of just lips moving in order to accomplish something.
It's true that most people who get released from jail go back. Jail is supposed to either reform people or scare them from ever committing a crime again; it doesn't do either. The longer you forcibly remove someone from society, the less they know how to function in it. What other options do they really have?
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