What works better than prison ?

[Little_Nemo]

@AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet

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.

No, people would just go down to the local heroin shop and buy their drugs there. There are plenty of people nowadays with legal addictions to alcohol and nicotine who don’t need to commit any crimes to sustain their habit.

[Backcountry_Medic]

I don’t think the question has an answer, because I don’t think society will ever come to a consensus as to what “works” means. What is the ultimate goal of prison? Is it to punish, rehabilitate or make criminals into working members of society? As it is right now, prison is more of an inconvenience for the criminals there than anything else. If you do a minor crime, you have a minor inconvenience, up to lifelong inconvenience for major crimes. I think PJ O’Rourke said something along the lines of “prison might not be so bad [for an older kid being sent there for a drug charge], he’ll get to eat more often than he does now, get to see all of his friends that are there already, and he’ll be out in just a few years anyway.” Or at least something to that effect.

Maybe it would be better to just give all non fatal crimes a five year term where they have to prove they are helping to better the community. Start them with a relatively short prison sentence, no more than a couple years. Once out, give them support; educational help, job placement help, anger management, whatever. Once they’ve had five years, make them convince a jury of their peers that they are now a benefit to society. If they can’t make that happen in five years assume they are beyond help and somehow remove them from society (confine them for life, kill them, send them to a prison island somewhere with no chance of escape, etc). It may seem harsh, but I think something like that might make some criminals see that they would either have to adapt to something useful to society or be weeded out.

Maybe I’m way off the mark, but it seems like the idea is that criminals “repay their debt to society” by being in prison may be the ultimate goal. I just don’t see how filling a glorified dorm with them and making them just hang out for an arbitrary amount of time repays anything. Make the “repayment” mandatory and something substantial.