Life After Incarceration

The media and society’s role in the outcome of a prisoner’s life after being released

 

Society is fascinated with crime and justice. From films, books, newspapers, magazines, television broadcasts, to everyday conversations, we are constantly engaging in crime “talk”. The mass media play an important role in the construction of criminality, the criminal justice system and the portrayal of ex-convicts.

 

The public’s perception of victims, criminals, deviants, and law enforcement officials is largely determined by their depiction in the mass media. There is no longer a distinction between real events and media representation, and it has reached a point where people unconsciously accept what they are told through electronic media. The influence of media becomes increasingly significant when alternative sources of information aren’t available.

 

The media plays into society’s fear of ex-convicts, they’re portrayed as vicious people who have committed heinous crimes and will never change their behaviour. Dr Christian Perrin, a criminal psychologist who specializes in the rehabilitation of sexual and violent offenders says: “Do I think society treats ex-offenders fairly? No, I don’t, but that’s also not society’s fault. The media has a lot to answer for, the media portrays offenders in a certain light that affects people’s perceptions on what offenders are, and whether they can change or not.” He proceeded to explain how sex-offenders are represented as being at high risk of reoffending. Once a sex offender, always a sex offender is the common portrayal, but in actual fact, sex-offenders re-offend at the lowest rate across all crimes besides murder. The media takes society’s fascination with crime and twists it to make ex-convicts appear as heartless villains.

 

Life for ex-convicts is hard enough without misperception from the general public. During 2015, 641,100 people who had been sentenced to state and federal prison were released to their communities. In the first full calendar year after their release, only 55% reported any earnings, with the median earnings being $10,090. Of those with earnings, 4% earned less than $500, 31% earned between $500 and $15,000, and only 20% earned more than $15,000. While there are employment programs to assist ex-convicts in rehabilitation, a lot of ex-prisoners don’t have access to them.

 

Jonathan Ng was caught for unlicensed money lending and was handed a hefty jail sentence. Even though he found a job after being released, he found adjustment hard. “When I first started work here, the stigma was definitely there. Being an ex-convict is not easy. You are afraid of how people look at you, how people judge your past and all that”. According to Mr Michael Teoh, a convicted criminal faced with a murder and robbery charge, who now holds group counselling sessions at Changi Prison in Singapore, rehabilitation for ex-prisoners is extremely difficult and needs a lot of patience. “They take it hard when they don’t get callbacks from employers or landlords, or their families don’t want to talk to them”. The misrepresentation of ex-cons adds to the difficulty in leading a normal life that they already face once they get released from prison.

 

According to Jeremy Travis, author of The Growth of Incarceration in the United States There are around 1.7 million children under the age of 18 every year that have a parent in a state or federal prison. Roughly 55% of women in prisons are mothers with 73% of them having lived with their children prior to their imprisonment. This can prove to affect young people greatly as the child can experience degrees of poverty is the family breadwinner goes to jail. They will often have to move homes or school and can face severe isolation. There is a loss of parental relationship which prisoners who are parents have to deal with once they get released. It can get to a point where in some cases, their own children can’t even recognize them as they had grown up without their parent in their lives.

 

Children can get easily influenced by the media and if they see current and ex-convicts being shown in such a negative light, that can really affect the relationship that a parent may try to develop with their child after being released from prison. It can make a reconnection with the prisoner’s children and family extremely difficult and alongside that, there are employment, financial, and housing issues and the stigma that they have to deal with.

 

However, there is a positive change occurring within society and their views which paints a bright future for ex-convicts. There are more and more organizations being created every year that help ex-prisoners reintegrate into society and provide several services for them such as counselling and professional training. Governments are also putting in place more programs in which prisoners will be trained, provided with education and will be given a secured job after being released.

 

Society has also begun to be more accepting of ex-cons with more employment offers being given and seeing treatment from the public improving drastically. There is still a long way to go as there is still a lot of misrepresentation but, these kinds of positive changes give hope to ex-convicts for a better future and a better life outside their jail cell.

 

Citations:

 

Travis, Jeremy. “Chapter 9: Consequences for Families and Children .” The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, by Jeremy Travis, The National Academies Press, 2014.

 

Looney, Adam. “5 Facts about Prisoners and Work, before and after Incarceration.” Brookings.edu, The Brookings Institution, 20 Mar. 2018, www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/03/14/5-facts-about-prisoners-and-work-before-and-after-incarceration/.

 

“A Second Chance for Ex-Convicts.” How Performance Appraisals Hurt Employee Performance | JobsCentral Community, community.jobscentral.com.sg/articles/second-chance-ex-convicts.

 

Ariffin, Nur Afifah bte. “From Jail to a Job: How Ex-Offenders Reintegrate into Society.” Channel NewsAsia, 5 Nov. 2017, www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/from-jail-to-a-job-how-ex-offenders-reintegrate-score-society-9377236.

 

Wei, Cheng. “He Wants to End Bias against Convicts.” The Straits Times, 1 Jan. 2018, www.straitstimes.com/singapore/he-wants-to-end-bias-against-convicts.

 

Dowler, Kenneth. “MEDIA CONSUMPTION AND PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARD CRIME AND JUSTICE: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FEAR OF CRIME, PUNITIVE ATTITUDES, AND PERCEIVED POLICE EFFECTIVENESS.” Stable Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer (SIRMS) Laboratory – University at Albany-SUNY, 2003, www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol10is2/dowler.html.

 

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