A Bootcamp for Criminals: Inside the Criminal Justice System in America

Noreen Hermans Eiss

May 2019 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

In America’s criminal justice system, despite the assumption of innocence until one is proved guilty, the accused is often incarcerated in a county facility pending trials that can be delayed for years. This situation is exacerbated by the plea bargaining process, which makes those accused admit to crimes they did not do in order to obtain a lighter sentence, the defendant’s inability to face an accuser in court, and the inestimable cost to loved ones and communities of the incarcerated. Drawing from the most current books on America’s prisons and prison reform initiatives, journal articles, magazine excerpts, the latest breaking news politically, and the gut wrenching stories of people experiencing torturous conditions, this book paints a grim picture of a system built on the ethos of power, designed not to rehabilitate or restore an offender to civil society upon release, but to exact punitive measures to break one’s mind and body, in order to effect a master-slave dynamic to ensure complete control over a servile inmate population.

America continues to love its slaves, and, at the rate incarceration is growing, no one is safe; major corporations now are capitalizing on the cheap labor that inmates provide. The terrifying truth is that the for-profit prison template ratcheted up under President Donald Trump is now a well-oiled machine gearing up to operate full throttle, to incarcerate as many people as possible because mass incarceration equals massive profits.

About the author

Noreen Hermans Eiss holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University. She is a secondary education teacher of English Language Arts and Special Education at Plymouth Canton Educational Park. Additionally, at technology conferences, she models examples of how creating movies and filming student work can be used for project-based learning for alternative assessments. Her publications include an IT manual for adaptive technology programs for children with special needs, and the short story, “Dead Men Do Tell Tales,” for the anthology Electric Sheep Slouching towards Bethlehem: Speculative Fiction in a Post Modern World.