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What I Learned In Criminal Justice

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Before getting into studying the field of criminal justice I learned that my previous knowledge about prisons and prisoners was either completely wrong or very incomplete. My first original belief was that the worst kind of people were in jail. That if you walked into a jail every person that you would see there are the worst of the worst. Another original belief was that if someone was in prison then they did something that put them there. These original beliefs came from the typical sources you get growing up, your parents, school teachers, and peers. Growing up I was taught that prison was where the terrible people went and it’s a scary place that you don’t want to be. But the moment that impacted me the most about prisoners was my senior …show more content…

With this experience and adding to my original knowledge of prisoners being bad people I thought that I knew exactly the type of person that was in prison and I had a very good understanding of the type of people that made up the prison system. When it comes to the prison itself my original knowledge came from my one interaction in Belize and a television show. Growing up I had little interaction with the prison system at all. The only memories of prison was in a television show I watched and that was called, Psych. During this show they would make little humorous remarks about prison being not as bad as people say. For example the main characters in this show would say, “We are talking about the Santa Barbara jail not San Quinton, people compare it to a mid-range sandals resort.” This show made it seem as if jail really wasn’t that bad of a place to be. Unfortunately I took this to heart and had the opinion that prisons in America must not be that bad. With this being my only exposure to the prison system I knew that I did not have a good understanding of the system but thought it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to

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