What should prisons do?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In the U.S., prisons were once widely called ‘penitentiaries’. (Some still are, but I mostly hear ‘prisons’.) I think the idea was to make the prisoner penitent – to see the error of his ways and become a better person. I get the idea that today prisons are warehouses. ‘You broke the rules, so you go to the Penalty Box for 25 years.’

Should prisons be primarily focused on punishment? (i.e., Should they be warehouses where people are kept for a given amount of time?) Or should the emphasis be on education/re-education/rehabilitation?

There are people who should never, ever be released while they breathe. Most will be released at some point. Does it then follow that compulsory education/treatment should be used, even at the expense of the (presumed) right of the prisoners to decline to participate? Or should education and rehabilitation be voluntary, and the threat of further incarceration be counted upon to keep the parolees on the straight and narrow path?

2

This is not going to be a popular view on this board, but I think rehabilitation should be the sole purpose of correctional facilities. Anyone deemed unwilling or unable to be rehabilitated, and thus imprisoned as long as they breathe shouldn’t be breathing anymore IMO.

3

My state, Indiana, actually has rehabilitation in its constitution as the purpose of prisons.

4

Actually, it is my understanding that the term “penitentiary” was used by people who felt that prison should be only about punishment, and as brutal as they they could get away with. The bread-and-water, beatings and breaking rocks during the day and sleep on a mat in a dank stone cell at night view of what prisons are supposed to be like.

Rehabilitation should be mandatory, but incentives should be used as much as possible; you can’t really force people to change. Punishment on its own doesn’t work very well; it just teaches people to try to avoid getting caught, and often just drives people to lash out in retaliation. And the way we handle matters now often means that ex-prisoners are so unemployable that they really have little choice but to commit crimes to support themselves, both due to a lack of education and an (understandable) unwillingness of employers to take a risk on them. Besides rehabilitating the prisoners, I think we need to do something to give them a shot at jobs outside the criminal sub-economy if we want them to actually give the law abiding life a serious try.

5

Some views:

Punishment: You did the crime, now do the time. And it won’t be fun.

Rehabilitation: Give prisoner the means to reduce future crime, often by looking at root causes.

Deterrence: Reduce criminal offense
[ul]
[li]because the criminal is removed from society and its temptations[/li][li]they will hopefully be less likely to commit future crimes after a spell in prison[/li][li]potential criminals will be less likely to commit crimes once they see that prison is a bad consequence[/li][/ul]

And probably some others. IMHO the most effective method does not stick to one modality, but uses aspects from multiply philosophies.

Part of the reason why is that there is not one cause for crime. Punishment would work if people had 100% choice in being a criminal, but in reality that is unlikely.

6

Here’s a thought experiment.

Your political opponents are in charge and determine what rehabilitation consists of. You are convicted of a crime and go to prison. They feel, as you do, that you should stay in prison until either you were rehabilitated or you died of natural causes.

How do you feel about that now?

7

I think prisons should serve the purpose of 1) deterring the commission of crime, and more importantly, 2) to protect the public at large by separating those individuals from mainstream society .

8

I feel fortunate that I live in a country where political views aren’t grounds for imprisonment.

If there is any chance that someone who is sent to prison can be rehabilitated so that they can return to society as productive, legitimate members of society the system should do everything it can to make that happen. If the the prisoner can’t be rehabilitated they should not be kept alive as a useless burden on society.

I’m no expert in criminal rehabilitation. I don’t pretend to know what we could do better to rehabilitate criminals, but don’t think we should just be warehousing people for no reason except punishment.

What determines whether or not a given person is likely to be successfully rehabilitated would be defined by society. A society consisting of me would view someone who, despite one or more attempts at rehabilitation, continues to commit crimes as irredeemable. In the real world it is almost certainly politically infeasible to even try to fix the correctional system (in the US, where I live), no matter what the proposed fix is. In this hypothetical I think it is best to assume that the government doing the imprisoning is “perfect” in that it know what, if anything, can be done to rehabilitate those that it imprisons.

By the way: Maybe I was to subtle in my original post but I don’t think we should be waiting for irredeemable prisoners to die of natural causes.

9

I don’t want this to turn into a debate on capital punishment, but I have to say I’m generally against it. Euthanasia as you seem to describe is something I would be against.

My comment about prisoners who should never leave prison was with egregious offenders in mind. Ted Bundy types, as an example.

10

Those Quakers were pretty hard-ass SOB’s alright.

11

They’re mostly called correctional facilities nowadays.

12

Okay, here’s a brief history of penal theory.

In the beginning there was corporal punishment. You broke a law and you were publically flogged or had a hand chopped off. Imprisonment was for people awaiting trial, debtors, and political prisoners.

Then the Quakers came along. They figured hurting people wasn’t going to make them better people. So they had a new idea. They’d lock them up and rehabilitate them. They figured that people became criminals because they were exposed to bad influences. So the thing to do was seperate them from these bad influences. Which meant everyone was put into a solitary cell and had no contact with other prisoners. And minimal contact with staff also. Just put them by themselves in a sparsely furnished cell with a bible. With no distractions the prisoner would read the bible and the good influence of the bible would cancel out any bad influences they had gotten from other criminals in the past. They’d repent all their crimes so the Quakers called these places penitentiaries. The first penitentiary opened in Philadelphia so this system became known as the Pennsylvania method,

It turns out it was a really bad idea. The Quakers didn’t understand how detrimental isolation was to people. The Pennsylvania method mostly turned regular criminals into insane criminals.

The next big method was behaviorism (although this was before the term existed). This theory said that criminals were people who didn’t follow the rules. So the way to change them was to totally regulate every aspect of their behavior at all times and force them into compliance with these rules. Over a period of time, the criminals would fall into the habit of following rules and doing what they were told and they could then be released and would obey the laws. This method was first tried at Auburn Prison in New York and was known as the Auburn method.

It didn’t really work out either. It kept prisoners quieter than the Pennsylvania method did but they weren’t really becoming mentally healthy here either. They were just having their sense of initiative crushed. Prisoners who had been rehabilitated became dependent on having authority figures tell them what to do all the time and were unable to function in the outside world.

The next method was to treat crime as a form of mental illness. You treated the mental illness like you would treat any other illness. Cure the illness and the person was no longer a criminal. This method originated at Elmira Correctional Facility in Elmira, NY and is known as the Elmira method.

The problem is that not all criminal behavior is the result of mental illness. And not all mental illnesses can be cured. So while the Elmira method is still on the books, nobody is claiming it’s 100% effective.

13

They’re mostly called correctional facilities nowadays.

14

I’ve seen little evidence that prisons have more than a minor deterrence and reforming effect.

You get some nations with high reoffending rates, while having very long prison sentences in harsh prisons.
You get some nations with low reoffending rates, while having very long prison sentences in harsh prisons.

You get some nations with high reoffending rates, while having short prison sentences
You get some nations with low reoffending rates, despite short prison sentences in relatively nice prisons.

If there’s a solution to crime, I doubt it will have much to do with prisons.

15

So is this the best we can do today? Is it generally thought that the prison system does a good job of rehabilitating mentally ill criminals? Are there any theories about what, besides mental illness, causes people to commit crimes?

I imagine that the last one has some obvious answers, like socioeconomic status, growing up in certain neighborhoods, etc. But how do you control that after the fact?

All the above are honest questions. I’m just wondering if you have the knowledge to give a more in depth analysis of what the prison system does today.

16

If prisons are about reducing reoffending, then they do not do it well.

UK latest figures reveal what most prison staff have known for decades,

I can think of a goodly few reasons why this happens - education and training may not be relevant, learning is largely compulsory - so prisoners simply go through the motions without any genuine intent, they prefer the lifestyle, many many mental problems, very poor cognitive abilities, highly unrealistic expectations by everyone from governments through to prisoners themselves.

I can think if better ways to educate and train prisoners, however why should such effort be made to do this and spend huge amounts of public money on the one hand, when we in the UK are dramaticaly increasing the cost of University education for law abiding young people on the other hand? We could dispense with most training in prisons and simply lock them up for a very very long time indeed - we could reduce the many differant agencies and services in prisons, all of which cost a fortune to operate, and make training and education non-compulsory and very much a highly valued privelidge.

Few prisoners that I come acrss genuinely value the opportunites to learn and train in prison, why push them? just keep those sorts of inidividuals inside until and unless they decide to change for themselves.Motivation for rehabilitation can only come from within, it cannot be imposed.

By the time prisoners are getting to around 20 ish, they are effectively a redundant resource, they rarely have tradeable skills, and why would any employer want to invest in assisting them when they can employ someone who is willing to learn, is younger, more able in just about every capacity.

The only thing that currently stops them is time, they get fed up with prison, tends to be in the late 30’s.

The dreaded ‘Key Performance Indicators’ which measure the success UK public organisations have been tweaked because everyone involved has an interest in looking good, and the criteria for rehab of prisoners has been reoffending rates in the period of 3 years post release.

The flaw? Well, less than 5% of all crime is detected and having been in prison, offenders have a better criminal education, it also includes people who were most likely not to reoffend - one off offenders and its much too short a period of time - because a substantial chunk of that 3 years is release on licence or parole time - where any breaches of release licence mean they have to behave or be recalled back to prison pretty quick.Result is that offenders keep a low profile during the first few years after release - which does not mean they have stopped offending, just that they take fewer risks.

I notice that since the Ministry of Justice is now threatened with lots of budget cuts - as are almost all UK government departments - so the publication of more realistic figure for reoffending - 9 years post release seems to me part of a strategy to justify the coninuing current funding for various sectors within the justice industry.

One of the cuts proposed is to put short term offenders into community based sentences, since its a lot cheaper - however what do you do with some petty offender who has many many convictions for minor offences that do not attracts lengthy prison terms? Eventually you have to send them down.

It would be interesting to compare our UK reoffending figures across a period of time, especially with the numerous changes to education and training within the last 7 or 8 years to see if there have been any effects, but this is the first time I have seen those 9 year figures.

17

I’d like to see a lot more non-custodial sentences. And public humiliation should play a large part .

As for prisons themselves, I’ll defer to casdave and Little Nemo.

18

Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding, because prisoners simply do not use the same standards and values as the rest of us.

Most of us would be horrified at, say, being put in the village stocks and having rotten produce thrown at them, but to the offender, this would be something of a badge of honour.
I often come across ‘boot campers’ who did their juve time in such places, they wear it like a badge, as if they were not broken down by ‘the man’ and are still just as badass and worse than they ever were - as far as they are concerned, they did their jail ‘hard time’ and they can handle it.

You can see this in the US, where chain gangs were resurrected.Far from being a deterrant prisoners were queueing up for the experience.

Crushing, mundane pointless time is the thing they dread most, uncertainty is another thing they genuinely fear, especially the open ended Public Protection prison terms.

19

I remember reading about that. They were doing it to avoid boredom. That folds in with what Little Nemo was saying about mental health. As for the humiliation aspect, if they’re wearing the stocks (or whatever) as a badge of pride, then it’s obviously not humiliating them, so you switch to something that does.

20

IMHO, neither “rehabilitation” nor “confinement” will work and there aren’t enough prisons and/or money to house the bad guys so what do you do?

As a taxpayer, in exchange for their 3-hots-and-a-cot, I’d like to see some social benefit. There’s nothing wrong with requiring prisoners to give back to the society that’s taking care of them. I’m not talking about paying them a salary for their labor, either.