Prison Reform Essay Sample

The best piece of writing I have done this semester is the Prison Reform essay. This is the best writing because It was the one I had the most fun with. I enjoyed the research section of it as well as the writing of it. Learning about what goes on behind the scenes of the prisons was very interesting. One of the biggest things that make me feel like this is my best essay is the use of statistics. I use statistics throughout the essay, such as, “In men's prisons, 21 percent of inmates are physically assaulted within a six-month period by the staff. 19 percent of inmates report being assaulted by other inmates. About 9 percent of male inmates reported being sexually assaulted in prison (180,000 men) and less than 8,000 are reported.” These use of statistics can help people reading understand how often this is actually happening. The second way I believe this is my favorite essay is the use of stories from actual inmates. I used a woman named Jessica Kent, who is a felon and an ex drug addict. She gave birth in prison and explained how her experience had been very traumatizing. A quote I used from Jessica Kent, “A quote from Kent during her Ted Talk, “the birth of my first child caused PTSD and postpartum depression to the point I couldn’t speak. I was kept in the infirmary for two weeks. I was not given access to mental health care, no psychologist came to see me.”” This gave the readers a thought of the real issues from someone who had experienced them.

My worst piece of writing would be the essay we did about our lives using songs. I don’t remember a lot of my life and I was making things up. Between the ages of five to eleven it is blank. I used music that I knew my mom listened to and made up a story. Some examples would be the band Poison. I know my mom had a CD and she did have a crappy CD player, but I don’t remember her ever walking around the house playing it. The CD player stayed in her office at work and I only ever saw it when she would take us to work with her. The Blake Shelton album was also a lie. I had to google his album to know what songs were on it. I do not remember any of the music my dad listened to. I went by CD’s I knew that they had. I also wasn’t that interested in writing it, the more interested I am the better the writing would be. I believe that it was the most boring piece I did so I wasn’t able to do my best on it.

I accomplished a few things as a reader. I learned during book club to think deeper about the meaning of books. Reading The Great Gatsby is what taught me. After a few things were pointed out to me I was able to think deeper about the book. Another thing I have accomplished is reading more books. Usually I don’t have time to read between work, homework, and the boys. I got time in classes to read and was able to read way more than I have since we got custody of the boys (which was four years ago). This is something that will help me out in college. Being able to look into deeper meanings of books when I need to read them for classes. My favorite text I read is still the mentor text Difficult Girl by Lena Dunham. This is the one I was most interested in while reading and the one I related to more. The least favorite one we read was about covid in schools article. It was the most boring. I had no interest in reading it and genuinely didn’t care about it. I think that was the only article of the week I didn’t get 10/10 on.

I was taught the complete opposite of what they taught me at Northridge regarding the citations. I was told to always include the page and the paragraph in my citations. When I did a document on citations it was not how I was supposed to cite my sources during paragraphs. This is going to help me write papers in the future. When I write research papers for college I won’t get chances to correct citations. This way I can get it right the first time and not have to worry about the essay not getting the greatest grade because of my citations.

I think what I learned that is most important is how to research. Research is going to be a part of my life as a social worker. I learned this by doing the research paper. I had watched the Edpuzzle on how to google questions and get real answers. That helped me out tremendously on learning how to research. This again is something that is going to be very important in college and in my future career. I will be joining the substance abuse and mental health part of social work, which means I will have to know how to research addresses, family histories, alcohol and substance abuse dependency centers. Places I can send my clients to to get the help they need.

I didn’t really work with others a lot this year, the most I have worked with others is on a book club. What I learned goes hand in hand with what I learned about reading. Talking about books with others helps understand it better. Especially a book as complicated as The Great Gatsby. I also learned that having someone read my writing can find things I didn’t notice. I will have to work with others heavily in my future career. Working with parents or coworkers. This will help in my future career.

I would say reading the mentor texts resulted in my best learning. I was able to see how to set up different types of writing. How to start different types of writing. I also was able to learn what type of reading really interests me by reading the mentor texts. Learning this will help me know what novels I will like to read in the future. I will be able to choose actual interesting books instead of choosing books, reading one page, and never touching it again. I would have liked if we had more writing prompts. If we had more writing prompts, I feel like I would have been able to write more. This class is more of a self paced class, but for me to do good work I would have benefited from constant writing prompts. The writing prompts we started doing after the research project was a lot easier for my writing.