I know prisons and jails supposedly have programs to teach people various life skills, work skills, rehab skills, etc. And after you are released there are programs to partake in too life halfway houses, therapy, etc as part of probation or parole.
But by and large do people get better in prison? It seems there are so many barriers to life after being released that it would be hard to find a job after someone gets out or reintegrate into the community.
Do people, on a large scale, undergo a personal transformations in prison or jail that is interally driven and moves them away from lives of crime (like Malcolm X or Tookie Williams did in prison), or is that more the exception than the rule?
I believe 30% of prisoners are sociopaths, so I wouldn’t expect them to ever rehabilitate. But the other 70%, who knows what happens.
You’d assume the lifestyle of prison would turn a lot of people more violent. Then again, I have no idea and am going on hearsay.
Does it vary wildly from prison to prison and jail to jail on how people end up after they get out?
Unless one was an “unwilling” criminal (ie someone was poor and thus ended up robbing a store for instance), or mentally ill and subsequently cure one needs what I’d say a shift of values and ethics to stop returning to a life of crime.
In my job, I don’t see the guys who don’t come back to prison, so I have a sort of skewed view. I just see the first-timers and recidivists. And the returning inmates outnumber the first-timers at our intake center.
But I have seen some inmates grab hold of what is offered and make proper use of it, with an eye to bettering their lot. They’re the ones who are appalled that their best thinking got them into that situation, and truly want change.
Some others just get sick and tired of acting out and suffering years or decades of incarceration, and mellow out. I’ve heard a lot of long-time cons just say they’re too old and tired for “that shit” anymore. Once they hit the mid to late 40’s the recidivism rate starts decreasing significantly. The older they get, the less likely they are to re-offend.
Western prisons have a mishmash of objectives (punishment, rehabilitation, protection of society, education, deterrence) with various fads emphasizing one or the other at various times. Consequently they don’t do any of them particularly well, IMO. And they are patently mental illness factories.
I think about the most we could hope for is to have people evaluated as they finish up their term, and continue undergo whatever treatment they require. It might be expensive but must be cheaper than the law enforcement industry we have now.
Maybe only loosely related to the sense the OP intended, but I’ve been curious to ask what you think of this recent news – just your general comments or observations?
The problem is that it’s only cheaper if it becomes an adequate substitute. You can’t force a person to be a functioning member of society if he doesn’t want to be. You just give him a lot of wasted expensive treatment and in the end he remains a criminal and you fall back on law enforcement to handle him.
But, should prisons even be in the business of making someone “better?” I thought the primary purpose of prison was to remove unstable/undesirable criminal elements from society. Anything beyond that is of secondary and lesser importance if indeed the primary purpose is as I’ve stated.
The prison system I volunteer in is called The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Based on the name, it seems that they consider improvement one of two primary purposes. Based on what I’ve seen inside, they are trying.
That’s certainly true, but the issue is how these three are weighed. The impression I get, not in any way having any insider knowledge, is that the current trend is towards greater emphasis on the “deterrence” and “retribution” limbs of the triad, both in the US and Canada (with the US setting the pace of the trend).
We have a throw away society. When a person goes to jail, even if they are innocent, they have no value anymore. They are forever ex-cons. They must be met with distrust and dislike . They should not get jobs . Then of course they have to commit crimes to survive. So back in jail with them.
The vast vast majority of prisoners will eventually get out after being removed from society, so it is in societies best interest to reintegrate them and find the ones who want help to become functional, upstanding members of society and help them achieve the skills to do that.
I think I speak for the entire field of penology when I say I completely agree with what you said.
But then you arrive at the key question: how? In two hundred years of trying to turn criminals into functional, upstanding members of society nobody has found a method that consistently works.
you can start out by noticing that lots of poor white people imprisoned for low key drug-related offenses could have been perfectly functional and upstanding if they had jobs. Instead, the wrecked economy pushes them into illegal (though not necessarily profoundly harmful) activities and then the penitentiary system damages them even further.
The practice of severe punishment for minor offenses may have done wonders for keeping black underclass thugs off the streets, but the practice apparently rubs off onto poor whites as well. Not that the folks running the government and the media propaganda that tells voters what to think have much of a concern for them.
That’s partly due to human variation; since people end up in prison for different reasons, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work any better than it would for managing teams or for teaching. And that’s something which can be really hard to get through the heads of TPTB; they can’t even understand that the same management style won’t work equally well with your average accountant and your average engineer, they’re even less likely to understand that treating the same a shoplifting teenager, a dude who’s on his 40th count of “intent to distribute”, and someone who went violent in the middle of a heavy attack of undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia (I think that’s the official name) will not give particularly good results - and if it works for one, it won’t work for all three.