Criminology Examples Policeman's Working Personality Essay

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This fear is intensified in the close quarters of prisons. Also, as noted in "Police Control of Juveniles" of Donald J. Black and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. both groups use techniques of fear and intimidation to deal with such a hostile environment. The police use their authority to intimidate prisoners or potential convicts on the street, while convicts use their potential menace and the real or threatened use of violence to assert authority against one another.

The process of "prisonization" and "policization" thus both involve the entry of the individual into a unique subculture, different from those ordinary persons inhabit. Like all human beings, there is a desire for survival, group approval, and esteem, all of which are met, according to the dictates of prison life, by obeying the rules of the social hierarchy. Prisoners are continually watched and monitored for deviant behavior, and these prisoners watch the police to find attempts to circumvent the system. Prisoners also monitor one another for violations of the inmate code, and the police monitor one another for deviating from the model of the so-called policeman's working personality, a personality marked by cynicism towards the persons the police oversee, and a fear of seeming weak.

In prison, formally and informally, small community infractions become the subject of punishment, as a way of making the enforcement of the law felt within the inmate community or within a high-crime area. Simply increasing the visible presence of police in high crime areas, as was done in Kansas City, reduced the rates of crime in a way that also confirms the academic Michel Foucault's notion of making authority visible is one of the best ways to ensure conformity to a rule of conduct, without even necessarily using that authority to inflict physical punishment.

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Conversely, prisoners also make their authority felt by making reference to their outside crimes, bulking up by lifting weights, as well as demanding actual shows of deference from weaker prisoner. Like the police, they establish a code of inmate conduct and a hierarchy to make sure that certain prisoners stay on top and they use implied as well as overt means to do so.

However, another caveat to this depressing picture might be that many convicts and policemen are able to change, and that the function of prison and policing in society can assume a more rehabilitative or preventative role, if policemen and convicts are properly educated as to how this may be accomplished. Although the culture of both the police and the criminal may take the form of a distinct subculture, like all human beings, the justice system and the norms of the system can change, with proper guidance and awareness......

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