IAS Capstone E-Portfolio/Essay Prompt

Student’s Name： Xingyun Shao

Course: BIS 499 D

Date: 03/04/2018

Creative and Critical Thinking

The article, Recidivism in the United States, creates the need for one to develop mechanisms or measures that seek to reduce the rate of recidivism in correctional facilities in the United States. Currently, the rate of recidivism is high with the majority of formerly reincarnated individuals falling back to the life of crime. According to the article, recidivism is societal problem rather than a correctional departments’ problem. At least 80 percent of released inmates suffer from unemployment, mental illness and drug abuse. Given the fact that, the current strategies to reduce recidivism are ineffective and unsustainable, it provides a platform in seeking out new means to reduce recidivism, hence, enhancing my abilities in critical and creative thinking.

Taking into context that recidivism requires the participation of many stakeholders, it would be critical to find ways to encourage active participation among the different stakeholders. Moreover, enhancing the re-integration process of released convicts through strategies such as local policy formulation that support research on the same, hence, enact feasible measures which are monitored and evaluated over a given period of time. The article creates an avenue to which one has various probabilities to which re-incarnation is reduced. An individual is able to be an active participant in the same in regard to offering psycho-social support to freed inmates such as offering them temporary shelters and technical skills such as mechanical or tailoring skills that can prevent them from falling back to crime.

The article, A Day in the Life of Robert Carradine, provide specific facts on the day to day activities of Robert Carradine a 28-year-old male living in New York. Given the limited nature of the article, it limits one’s abilities in critical and creative thinking. The article only provides sequential activities of Robert Carradine, offering little insight to other social events around his life such as family, work, and the emotional environment in his life. In other words, Robert Carradine’s life is pictured as ‘perfect’ leaving out room for the reader to emotionally connect with the subject.