Okay, I’m not going to try to defend Florida.
Let’s put aside the moral issues.
Most people would still support the idea of prisons being places for rehabilitation. Because turning criminals into non-criminals is a benefit for everyone. It leads to a reduction in crime, which everyone would favor. Even criminals like the idea that other people aren’t committing crimes.
So some people like the idea of rehabilitating criminals because it helps the criminals. And other people like the idea of rehabilitating criminals because they want to make their own lives better.
This leads to two questions.
Why isn’t every prisoner rehabilitated? Because rehabilitation is really difficult. It’s almost impossible to rehabilitate somebody who doesn’t want to stop being a criminal. So it’s something we work at even though we realize the success rate will be very low.
Why are there people who oppose rehabilitation? Because if you look at our political scene you will see there are people who are dumb and vote for things they hurt them.
How else can the rights taken from prisoners be described other than in comparison to other members of society. There’s still no logic there. They’ve had rights removed because they committed a crime. How does that translate to free room and board?
If they received probation or house arrest as a sentence we don’t feed and house them. What is about the necessity they created to incarcerate them that justifies them not having to contribute to their survival the way everybody else on earth has to?
On this note, let me point out something that should be obvious but many people miss.
Prisons and the people who work in prisons are often not responsible for the issues the general public associates with prisons.
Use the example kayaker gave. It’s easy to look at a situation where 75% of the people in a prison are innocent of crimes and decide “Wow, prisons are morally wrong.”
But here’s the reality; prisons don’t go out and grab people off the street. It’s the police and the court system in Florida that made the decisions that sent all of those innocent people to prison. If you’re appalled by this situation don’t direct your anger at the prisons, who had nothing to do with its existence.
The same is true with many of the other issues people have mentioned. If prisons have shut down libraries or stopped mail deliveries or aren’t paying prisoners to work, it’s because the prisons are carrying out the directions they were given by the legislators in their state. I can assure you the employees in those prisons weren’t happy about those decisions because they made their working conditions more difficult.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. My son says 75% of the prisoners he deals with say they didn’t do it. Of course they did. They also say they have no idea where the cellphone under their mattress came from.
I agree with what you are saying in principle. However, isn’t the reality that the lack of prison space requires us to incarcerate people mainly because they are danger to society and rehabilitation is not the primary goal? I’m sure there are a lot of people who see imprisonment also as punishment and don’t care about rehabilitation in any realistic way, unproductively as you describe below.
This is one of those areas where I feel a lot of people will say one thing but their actions or indifference says something else. I don’t mean you specifically, Little_Nemo, I mean us in a collective sense. Although if I’m being honest, I would have to include myself when talking about indifference because it’s not like this has been an issue I ever think about when voting for someone.
I don’t think you’ll find many people who voice opposition to rehabilitation. They might disagree on how best to go about it, but they’ll at least agree it’s ideal. But then a lot of them turn around and support measures that focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation. But then maybe for a lot of them they believe punishment is the best form of rehabilitation.
I am not sure it’s between punishment and rehabilitation as much as it is between safety and rehabilitation. People want their tax money for the justice system spent on keeping themselves and the public “safe”, which means locking-up the bad people and keeping them off the streets. I doubt many people think too much beyond that - what happens to a convict once they are locked-up - be it rehabilitation or punishment. As long as the bad people are off the streets, the public can just forget about them. I feel like punishment vs rehabilitation should be a bigger part of the discussion, but it’s a nuance I think the general public just doesn’t engage much or really care about - they just want the bad people locked-up.
The example of Florida detailed above sucks. It’s like the system is set-up to exploit prisoners for free work, and to milk the prisoner for every thing they have, and are going to have. A way to create 2nd class citizens by continuing their punishment well beyond the time sentenced and served.
Prisons can have multiple functions (punishment AND rehabilitation). The fact that we treat felons who have served their time differently from non-felons suggests we don’t fully believe in rehabilitation, though. Perhaps losing your right to vote forever (some states) is part of the punishment for the crime, but the difficulty of getting certain jobs with a felony or other criminal conviction means we don’t really believe we are rehabilitating anyone.
I think you are underestimating the role of prison employees and corporations in the prison industrial complex.
There is no legislative act banning of traditional mail in prisons. In fact the law mandates prisoners have access to mail from certain privileged sources, such as the attorney and the court. These are exceptions to the new rule put in place by the Florida Department of Corrections with the explicit justification of making it more difficult to sneak in contraband. A couple other jurisdictions have a similar rule, I think Georgia among them, though I don’t know if the decision was ever based in statute.
It is worth noting that though the Florida Dept. of Corrections (FDC) is a government agency, it is only part of the machine. It is the largest agency in the state of Florida, by budget. We pay the FDC some $3.3 billion each year, comparable to the entire nation of Canada spends on its prisons. Even with all that money, Florida still offloads about an eighth of its prisoners to privately operated prisons. There are also federal prisons which are not subject to Florida laws or regulations.
No legislature to my knowledge has passed a law to shut down prison libraries. Lots of voters are aware of and support the rehabilitative role of prisons, and much money is earmarked for work rehabilitation and educational programs. But while significant money is certainly spent in the name of rehabilitation, that does not make it the primary or even secondary end of the prison system in principle or practice. I’ve read plenty of reporting that prisoners are often transfered before they can complete a work education program, as a form of punishment. In Florida, as I understand it completion of such a program is a requisite to prison work with pay.
~Max
I think you’re overestimating the generosity of the public.
A great many people think that criminals should be turned into non-criminals, not by virtue of rehabilitation, but by virtue of prison being so awful that ex-cons would rather starve on the street than get sent back.
Here’s my broad view on the subject. A prison system can serve five purposes.
Punishment. This is a moral issue so there’s no objective truths here. But some people feel that when a person is found guilty of committing a crime, they should be made to suffer in order to restore some kind of social balance. So prisons should be a means to make convicted criminals suffer. I personally disagree but as I said this is a moral question so I can’t pretend my belief is the objectively correct one. However, I will note it is objectively demonstrable that if your goal is to make somebody suffer, prison seems like an inefficient means to deliver that suffering. You’d be better off going back to the old methods like flogging or torture. Give the criminal the punishment they deserves and then let them loose. There’s no sense in stretching out the punishment over years while you pay for their living expenses.
Deterrence. This is the theory that says you make convicted criminals suffer not out of some moral issue but in order to fulfill a practical purpose. By making a criminal suffer you make the criminal want to avoid future crimes in order to avoid future suffering. And you make other potential criminals avoid committing crimes in order to avoid suffering by them seeing the consequences inflicted on the convicted criminals. The problem with this theory is there is no clear evidence that it works. And I personally feel you can’t justify knowingly inflicted any unnecessary suffering unless you have strong evidence that it is producing good results. And that’s not the case here.
Segregation. This is the theory that says the large majority of crimes are committed by a small minority of criminals. So if you can find that small minority of criminals and separate them from society as a whole, the effect will be a very large drop in crimes. For example, by locking up one percent of the population you can eliminate ninety percent of the crimes. The nice thing about this theory is there’s some evidence that it actually works.
Rehabilitation. This is the theory that says you can turn criminals into non-criminals. Prisons were originally set up for the purpose of confining criminals in a place where they could be rehabilitated and that is still the primary purpose of prisons. The problem, as I have noted, is that while the general idea of rehabilitation is great and supported by most people, the actual process of rehabilitation is very difficult. Nobody, in literally over two hundred years of trying, has come up with a rehabilitation process that generally works. So what prison systems do is put their best efforts into rehabilitation while acknowledging the results will often be failure. And prisons put a lot of effort into trying to develop new rehabilitation programs that will produce better results.
Profits. This is a new one on the list. But some people feel this is the real motive behind prison systems. But here’s the reality; prisons don’t have profits. It costs more to run a prison system than you can possibly generate in revenue. Private prisons were a fad back in the nineties but corporations quickly realized they couldn’t make money out of running prisons. So private prisons are a small and shrinking portion of the prison system. Now I will concede it is possible for some individuals to make money out of prisons. You can take a system that is being supported overall by taxpayers and then find some part of that system where you can make money. But that doesn’t mean the prison system is justified as a profit maker.
Those are the exact five goals I was taught in school. Punishment and deterrance were popularly ranked above the other motives, in my professor’s experience. Same as your ordering.
~Max
Maybe not, but private companies can certainly profit BY prisons. As is the case with a lot of public-private partnerships / relationships, the public subsidizes the private profits. In this case, by providing an exploitable pool of labour. The public pays for feeding, housing, processing (costs); the private uses the labour (benefit). This is all in theory—I have no idea how much of this is actually happening.
Convict leasing to private, for-profit entities was abolished in the U.S. many decades ago.
~Max
One story I read - that I cannot find anywhere - was that the prisoner sued the STATE for inhumane conditions, won, and the money was garnished. I may well be misremembering.
Maybe officially - but for-profit prisons, which rely on inmate labor as part of their economic plan, amount to the same thing.
New York kept pretty tight limits on it (at least during my career). We did not produce any products that would be sold to the public.
For example, I managed the metal shop at Attica. We produced things like lockers, beds, file cabinets, and office furniture. But none of the stuff we made was sold to any private business or individual. We only took orders from government agencies or from non-profit organizations.
I had a pretty good sized number of prisoners working for me (along with a number of employees). But I don’t feel the prisoners were being exploited. Working in the metal shop was a popular and high-paying job assignment for prisoners and we always had more prisoners asking for jobs there than the number of jobs that were available.
Well, inmates are put to work running the prison. But this is standard practice even in state run prisons. To my knowledge private prisons cannot have inmates produce goods for commercial resale or provide labour for the fulfillment of a commercial contract. For example inmates are not going to be out there working a commercial sugarcane farm. But they might be working farms the prison uses to feed its own prisoners.
~Max
They do not receive them for free. At least not in all prisons.
inmates may be responsible for “pay-to-stay” fees when they are in jail. Pay-to-stay fees are charges assessed to incarcerated individuals and may include fees for booking, daily room and board, work release, physicals, medication, hospital visits, and dental visits.1 They are distinct from the fines and restitution that defendants may
be ordered to pay as part of their sentences. Nearly all states have laws allowing county jails to seek reimbursement from inmates for room and board and medical fees…
A jail stay of 150 days could accumulate an average charge of $2,500
At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt
When her mother died two years ago, the state of Connecticut put a lien on the Stamford home she and her siblings inherited. It said she owed $83,762 to cover the cost of her 2 1/2 year imprisonment for drug crimes.
America’s Dystopian Incarceration System of Pay to Stay Behind Bars
It was in Post Dispatch, and there’s a second lawsuit from different prisoner