Answer to Question 1
The four architectural designs most widely used in American prisons today are the radial, telephone pole, courtyard, and campus styles. The radial design is a wheel-shaped configuration that has corridors that radiate like spokes from a control center at the hub. The prison with a telephone-pole design has a long central corridor serving as the means for prisoners to go from one part of the prison to another. Extending out from the corridor are cross-arms containing housing, school, shops, and recreation areas. A courtyard prison design has corridors that surround a courtyard. Housing, educational, vocational, recreational, prison industry, and dining areas face the courtyard. A campus style design is an open prison design that allows some freedom of movement. The units are housed in a complex of buildings surrounded by a fence.
Answer to Question 2
Advantages include the following: they control inmates with disruptive behavior; they house inmates who are too disruptive and dangerous; and they improve system-wide prison safety, order, and control, as the housing of these offenders removes them from the other prisons.
Disadvantages include the following: excessive levels of pain and harm are often inflicted, there is difficulty in controlling disruptive behavior, mentally ill prisoners are disproportionately represented in these prisons, inmate-to-inmate violence is not reduced, there are harsh conditions of confinement, and there are possibilities that these prisons may be racially motivated because so many African Americans are inmates.
American Hairless Terrier
A rare albino American alligator
In American Progress (1872), John Gast depicts a feminized (and eroticized) America moving westward,
North American Cordillera