Is there anywhere in the world where prisons work in regard to helping people not be criminals again ? My limited experience of working in prisons helped reinforce the idea that prisons are a place that at best dehumanize and negatively affect people and at worst serve as a training institute for creating better criminals. So is there something better to do with people who break the law or who are a threat to society ? Locking them away is expensive and I think mostly ineffective. Alternatively, has anyone found or suggested a model of prisons that is more effective at reducing recidivism and creating good citizens ?
Restorative Justice has a lot of success, and I have seen it working very well in the prison system. That statistics on RJ are very good.
I don’t have a cite but I don’t think anyone who was executed ever offended again.
Some never offended before either, most likely.
Prison is a very blunt tool where one size is supposed to fit all.
That’s why it is not all that effective, every prionser has a differant story, differant personality, what will work with one, will not work with another.
Prisons are largely not flexible enough, although attempts are made to identify matters of individual concern - this is done through sentence planning where targets are set and sentence progression is mapped out.
Trying rehabilitation out would cost far more, and politically it is not acceptable to spend such resources on what the public sees as the utter dregs of society.
Rehabilitation is not something that is time bound, one convict might never be completely free of a pattern of behaviour, but it might be moderated, and another prisonersmight simply need someone to talk to once in a while, many many prisoners need lifelong support which could be very extensive.
Prisoners as a whole have abysmal numeracy and literacy levels, along with very poor problem solving skills, they are often very fixed in their thinking and most have several social and personality disorders which are made worse through substance abuse. Locking them up for 4 years, and then adding perhaps another two years supervision under licence is simply abandoning them, and the public, to their fate.
Legal systems in Western Europe do not have a mechanism to have the kind of monitoring, scurtiny and support that an offender needs to stay out of trouble - once you have finished your term, then you are on your own, that is one of the cornerstones of our legal system.
It is easy to think of much more deserving causes to direct our resources, you do not win votes by spending money on offenders.
Only reason that offenders give it up, if at all, is age.
If you don’t count vengeance carried out on behalf of the martyrs.
There’s some pretty good evidence that intensive drug and alcohol abuse treatment for appropriate offenders results in much greater reductions in recidivism at a much lower cost than incarceration provides.
However this approach is not politically popular, as many feel it does not adequately punish the offender.
Um…I’m notoriously ignernt, I know but…What?
Actually, prison works very well-- as long as the criminals are in prison.
(I’m only partially sarcastic-- one of the best explanations for the great reductions in the U.S. crime rate over the last two decades is simply that more criminals were incarcerated for longer sentences. It’s very much a “duh” statement, but it’s easily lost among many searching for trendier alternative explanations for the drop in crime rates).
Maybe he’s talking about this guy.
Given that many prisoners are inside for drug supply and drug related offences, and they continue with this behaviour, this is significantly misleading.
Many offenders can make plenty of money in prison, there are plenty of assaults and other activities that would also be considered to be criminal. These crimes are not recorded in the national figures, and it also explains why, upon release, prisoners are not resuming their careers following a break, rather, they are continuing them without interruption
You perhaps might also be inclined to believe that at least the public are protected from them, but, many prisoners suffer deleterious effects from others and are entitled to be protected and, it costs lots of money to operate prisons, and the public has to find that money - crime costs in more ways than just direct offending.
Norway has good experiences with open prisons, putting strong emphasis on resocalisation. Here’s a German report about Bastoyprison, and here a clip about Bastoy from Michael Moore’s Sicko movie.
I agree that helping people is the best answer, however the problem is simple. How can you justify offering services to people who harmed others and/or broke the law and deny them to those who are honest and never hurt anyone.
This was the reasoning why one state stopped offering college classes to inmates. They couldn’t justify allowing inmates to attend college at tax payers expense while charging the law abiding for the same thing.
It becomes a vicious cycle and it’s not just prison it’s many things. How do you help people without enabling them. How do you help people while being fair to those who didn’t need that help.
As I said it’s not just criminals it’s everything. Look at our healthcare, we’ll pay for a person who comes into an ER with a heart attack, but we don’t pay for him to get a yearly office visit to check his cholesterol and treat his high blood pressure. Those are a mere fractions and MAY have prevented the heart attack or at least made it less severe. But we don’t do that.
The last problem is some peope aren’t going to be able to be fixed. We as humans hate to wash our hands on anyone, but some people are in fact, beyond help. They have to be removed from society. But when do they get to that point?
The central issue is that you can’t rehabilitate another person. All you can do is offer them the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves. And some prisoners will not want to do this.
That’s not only a non-Christian ethic and logic, it’s also not helpful in the long run. Your country is better off long-term if you help resocalize the criminals and help the people outside suffering to live in minimum comfort, too. But since most people believe the propaganda myths and keep quiet instead of rising up, this practice continues to work despite.
You might want to read this article for a different view.
You might want to read that article yourself. It’s talking about giving aid to children not to prisoners. And it illustrates the point that there are people, like those children, whose needs are greater than those of people in prison.
For the record, I think the best and most cost-efficient way to reduce crime and the prison population in the US would be to legalize most drugs and treat drug addiction as a medical rather than a legal problem.
On the other hand, I do think that there ARE prisoners who are very dangerous sociopaths, who we need to just give bread and water and lock in Supermax for the rest of their lives. Or even put them on a deserted island or something. Oh, and to those people who are all " legalize it and the crime will go down!" Granted it would break the organized crime crime…but what about crime associated with being high? It wouldn’t do anything for the times when a desperate addict shoots his supplier or whatever. Granted addicts are mentally ill…but you can’t commit them to rehab.
I think the idea of prison was based on punishment and incarceration. Rehabilition seems like a modern idea. I’ve heard of the concept of rehab back to colonial America, but don’t recall that idea getting traction until more recently that that. We still put people in prison who haven’t caused people physical harm. In cases like Martha Stewart, I don’t see any fear that she had to be seperated from the public. Wouldn’t that be only punishment? Or rehab of the ‘think twice before doing that again’ kind?
Rehab sounds like a great idea, but it doesn’t seem to be the real reason people are put there. Punishment seems to be the main factor even for the people too dangerous to be allowed out in society. We let them out after they’ve served their time, even though they may be just as dangerous as they were when they went in.
If we go that route, then we should bring back the opium den. You can go into the building and get whatever drugs you want, but you can’t take them out of the building and they don’t let you out of the building until you are straight. Also there is no food or medical care in the building. The real addicts should all OD or starve to death in a year or so.