Certainly this is true. However prisons are also called penitentiaries, correctional facilities, and sometimes reformatories.
Do you think prisons should be solely used for punishment? Or do you think that they should be used as places where real efforts can be made to teach convicts the ‘errors of their ways’ and to try to make them ‘functioning members of society’?
I believe that there are some people who are beyond redemption, who should be incarcerated for life. But I also believe that many, or even most (I’ve forgotten the statistics of the number of people incarcerated for various types of crime, which was posted in another thread), can be ‘turned around’. It seems to me that many people who turn to crime do so because of poor education and/or lack of options. And probably lack of hope. Should concerted efforts be made to correct this situation (as I perceive it), or should we just punish people by locking them up for a number of years and rely on deterrence?
I’d say the enforcement model only works when the perps have been proven to be incorrigible, and truly a danger to society. In many cases, imprisonment only serves to harden people into career criminals. I think its medival; it appeals to people’s baser instincts, which proves we’re no better than common criminals ourselves, and hypocritical to boot.
Sorry, submitted too soon (and misspelled medieval).
It reminds me a bit of the quote by someone who’s name eludes me: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a hero; when I asked why they were hungry, they called me a communist” or something to that effect.
While agreeing with Crafter_Man on point no. 2, I’m unsure about point number 1. It certainly is the conventional wisdom, and seems commensensical, but I wonder all the same. Has anybody ever investigated the true deterrent value of prison?
And I entirely agree with Johnny L.A. Unless we’re locking people up for life (and we almost never are), we have to plan for the post-release life of these people, and make some attempt – any attempt, really – to cut recidivism. It’s not a matter of softhearted liberalism, but of pure pragmatism.
I agree too - although it is true to say that very few people harm those on the outside whilst in prison. Many might return to more and dangerous crimes following however.
Something like 70% of people reoffend within a couple of years of leaving prison in the UK (see here , for cite) that tells me that something is going wrong.
The article cited disagrees, stating that using recidivism rates shows sample bias. In the real world though, of course that’s how we judge whether society as a whole is more or less safe after people have been incarcerated…
I agree completely. I see no signs that harsh punishment does anything to decrease crime, and prisons in particular seem to breed it. They’re like finishing schools for criminals.
I don’t think prisons are the best solution for problems, but I don’t see any viable options. Many prisons offer the inmates access to education - but the prisoner has to chose to take advantage of it. If they chose not to it can’t be forced on them.
And while prisons aren’t a deterrent for some, I think they are for some. If there weren’t any consequences for crime, I believe we would have more of it than we do.
There are two major factors that contribute to recidivism that no amount of education can combat:
No one wants to hire an ex-con. (Actually, few people even want to live around them, especially if they were convicted of a sex crime.) Ex-inmates often have an enormously tough time finding even the most menial work. When given the choice between a low-paying, dead-end job and lucrative crime . . . well, it’s not surprising that a lot of them go back to their old ways, especially if they’ve got a family to feed.
A lof ot prisoners come from crime-heavy backgrounds. Their whole family may be involved in one criminal enterprise or another, as well as all of their friends. There is a sub-culture which sees a trip to prison almost as an inevitability.
Efforts toward rehabilitation in prisons is haphazard at best. Most of the theraputic programs are run by staff members (who have no psychological training) who try to cram in the sessions between their other already-overwhelming duties. Many of the programs are run using a “teacher’s guide” and workbooks that the inmates fill out in a group session. To even enter many of these programs, the inmate has to admit to the crime, which many refuse to do, fearing it will jeopardize their chances for appeal.
A great many of these inmates need intensive one-on-one therapy for it even to have a chance to work, but such a thing would be so enormously expensive that there’s not a chance in hell it would ever happen.
At my local prison, the average sentence is nine months. Not much time for even good therapy to make a dent. Some of these people have severe character flaws (such as a lack of empathy) that are very hard to repair under even ideal conditions.
And lastly, an inmate has to WANT to change. No amount of therapy in the world will help someone who doesn’t want it.
I don’t see it getting any better than the current system we have, namely society geting its revenge on criminals who rationalize that they’ve been treated unjustly by society from birth.
As the baby-boomers age, America becomes closer to the “wrinkle-city” demographic of Maricopa County, Arizona. You know how easy old folks are to scare, and are nostalgic for the good old days when right was right and wrong was wrong? Sheriff Joe Arpaio sure knows, and he’s exploited it into a lifetime job of brutalizing anyone who falls into his system. (http://www.arpaio.com/)
Assholes like him aren’t rare, and the general population is growing more and more similar to his base.
Prisons have 3 purposes. Punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. All 3 will probably never going to apply to any one person, but the combination of the 3 hopefully results in fewer criminals.
If only that were true, take the case of STANLEY “Tookie” Williams.
Whilst in prison he ordered at least 3 killings on those outside prison walls.
Drugs are brought to prison on the instructions of those inside, by their visitors, those who fail to pay up can have their families inimidated on the outside by drug barons on the inside.
I see prison a lot like the death penalty in which it doens’t deter someone from doing a violent and (usually) impulsive and desperate act. A person doesn’t think before they kill someone and say “Gee, I might go to jail if I do this…” Same witht he death penalty. People don’t say “Shit, I think I’ll kill this policeman, I just might get the death penalty for that and the headless hookers in my trunk…”
Prison needs to be focused a lot more on rehabilitation and less on being large holding pens for minorities.
Prison is exorbitantly expensive. We should spend that money on rehabilitating those who can be rehabilitated. The rest, either forgive them or put them down gently with a heroin overdose for the safety of the rest of us, depending on what it is that they do.
Interesting thread. I have thought about this a lot. I see several different things that need to be addressed when looking at a sentence for a criminal:
Deterrence - a punishment harsh enough that other people are deterred from doing the same thing.
Protection of society - locking up a criminal so they can not perform another crime.
Rehabilitation - giving the criminal the skills/attitude to not repeat the crime.
Punishment - making the criminal “pay” for their crime.
A punshment of appropriate severity to express society’s disapproval of a crime.
All of these must be taken into account. For example: imagine an 90 yr old woman who kills her husband. It may be that she is not a danger to society (once we take away her gun) but we still may want to give her a relatively harsh punishment just to show that society sees murder as entirely unacceptable.
You forgot one and it’s the big one - segregation. Seperating the criminals out from the rest of society and isolating them.
People often don’t think about one obvious truth - most people don’t commit crimes. This is true regardless of race, gender, or economic class. The majority of people don’t commit crimes and, for that, they become invisible. It’s the criminals who get the attention.
Criminals chose to become criminals. Other people around them in the same circumstances, faced with the same options or lack of options, made other choices. Committing a crime is never the only choice available.
And keep in mind that in most cases the victims of these crimes are the same people who were in the same bad situations as the criminal was but chose not to commit crimes.
So to get back to my original point, if you take the people who are criminals and lock them up it will have a definite impact on your crime rate.
Once you’ve got them in prison, you can try out different theories of rehabilitation and deterrence. It probably won’t work but it’ll give you something to do to pass the time. But the real impact to society is that the criminal is in prison instead of out in the public.
As for the idea of giving an ex-con a break and hiring him for a job, here’s another idea. Why don’t you find some other guy who grew up on the same street as that ex-con did and went to the same school and had the same background but he decided not to commit any crimes. And hire that guy instead.
The fact is that most people incarcerated will be released. Only the most Draconian would argue that every mugger, drug dealer, or burgular should be held for life or executed. The return to society is an inevitability. It’s only common sense that we prepare prisoners for it, and help to ensure that they won’t reoffend.
Of course prisons should have a rehabilitory aspects.