BreakfastMan said:
So, I am taking an intro to sociology class (because I like that type of stuff, and I need the social science credits), and we recently started talking about crime and deviance. One of the topics mentioned was whether the prison should serve as punishment, or should it be used to rehabilitate the prisoners. So I was curious: what does the Escapist community think? Should prison serve as punishment or rehabilitation?
WARNING: this post may contain actual information and a disturbing lack of trendy internet nihilism. Read ahead with caution.
Seriously laughing at all the Internet Tough Guys who want to kill, torture criminals etc, I wonder how big their illegally downloaded software and music collections are.
Prison is punishment by default, so the "should we punish" question is redundant. Simply taking away someone's freedom in a society that has freedom as a core human right is always punishment regardless of anything else that occurs. Rehabilitation programs in prison generally work a lot better than just shoving someone in a cell and doing nothing with them. People also get used to being in prison, this is called "institutionalisation", so if you don't train them to deal properly with the outside world, when they get out often they'll committ crimes just so they can get back in - if you lock someone up for long enough in that environment they start to have trouble functioning in the world outside where they're suddenly not being told what to do and where to go anymore and suddenly need to exercise a degree of autonomy to get by. A heavy institutionalised criminal mind is not trained to deal with autonomy and is just going to consider that all too hard and instead go out and rob another service station. This is why rehabilitation is important. Some people perceive rehabilitation as the soft option or
being nice to the criminal, but what it's really for is to stop people from fucking up again, so you get to keep your DVD player and your XBox. It's an investment in crime prevention, and it works. It doesn't stop every repeat offender but it sure does stop some of them. True sociopaths are rare (unlike people who
pretend to be sociopaths on the Internet, who are fucking
everywhere), everyone else has got a pretty good stab at functioning in society if you're willing to spend some time showing them how to do it. Statistically most criminals come from broken homes and they probably
weren't in fact taught important things about how to function in society, if they don't get that knowledge from somewhere, yes, they will keep offending.
A bunch of people in prison is a wasted resource if they're not doing anything. Keeping someone locked up is very expensive too, it costs about two to three times more to keep someone behind bars doing jack shit than to give them a college education, or teach them a trade, or get them doing some community work (source: Ice-T "The Ice Opinion" 2nd ed. pp.57). A large chunk of my tax dollars therefore goes directly to keeping people behind bars. It would be great if the government would give me a say in how my prison tax dollar was spent, for the money I'm currently spending keeping one person locked up, I could send him to college and keep the change. Or send two to college. Or send one to college and spent the rest on some other unrelated social service that needed some money, like education, the health system, law enforcement, emergency services, whatever. I'd much rather give the prisoner I'm paying to keep behind bars an education and a chance at a decent future, not because I'm some soft-ass person who loves criminals, but because I don't want those fucking assholes to get out of there, get back in the same street gang they were in before they went in, and keep doing what they were doing before.
You could then argue "well, why not just kill them, surely that's cheaper?". Strangely enough, no it isn't. The problem with killing people (assuming you live in one of those places where state-sanctioned murder is legal) is you've got to make sure they're guilty, which means waiting for the trial, and then waiting for their window to appeal the case to run out, which means you've got to lock them up for a fair while anyway. People who have been sentenced to death tend to exhaust their legal options, which means time, which means money on logistics and maintenance, and this takes years. If you start trying to fast-track the process, or deny their appeals, innocent people get killed. If you don't care about innocent people getting killed, then you have to start asking yourself who is the real dangerous criminal mind that should be locked up here, if you're willing to sponsor a government-sanctioned death machine that
may not be killing the right people. Then on top of that you've got to administer the whole killing process, which is costly. Ask anyone who has had a relative die about the costs involved, executing a prisoner is no different in that sense. Even if you're not using lethal injection machines, even if all you're doing is shooting people in the head, and dumping them in a ditch, there's a lot of expense and logistic effort involved in killing. Even countries with no morals that have had supposedly cost-effective mass executions have had to spend millions of dollars making that happen.
Bottom line: a person on the outside or in a rehab program makes money. A person on the inside or on death row costs money. Haven't criminals costed you enough? I firmly believe that one of the main reasons why the USA suffered so badly in the GFC while Australia sailed through almost unscathed (we didn't even technically have a recession) is because the USA has got such a high labour force locked up in prisons doing nothing for their country. The USA has the highest per capita prison population in the world. Those people could be learning, working, generating revenue and rebuilding the damage they've done to their country, but instead they're just sitting there wasting billions of dollars every year on death row or long jail terms, because people think "punishment and death is cooler than rehab, man".
Hope that helps your sociology class...
