Why We Need To Rehabilitate Prisoners

The tension between rehabilitation and punishment has been increasing dramatically. This is because there have been sharp rises in the prison population and repeat offender rates. When one area is over emphasized in relation to the other, there is the possibility that imbalances will occur. Over the course of time, these issues can create challenges that will impact the criminal justice system and society at large. (Gadek, 2010) (Clear, 2011) (Gatotch, 2011)

Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission)

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Everyone knows that you can’t help someone unless they want to help themselves. When the prison system was first established, the possibilities in rehabilitation were nothing like they are

Prisons not only rehabilitate, but they also deter people from going to prison. The fear of going to prison is a great deterrence for a perspective criminal. Hard life styles along with loss of freedom tend to push the criminal away from the chance of being incarcerated. Numbers show that there are fewer rapes, and fewer murders, each year, all an obvious product of prison deterrence. After all, if a person has a friend who just got out of jail, and hears all of the war stories, that person would surely not want to go to prison and end up like his friend. By making life in prison hard, the prison is doing a great job in getting the word out. Prison is no joke! They are doing their job in deterring criminals from wanting to enter the gates of hell.

One of the purposes of prison is to rehabilitate offenders to go back into society. Meaning after serving prison time an offender should have learned their lesson and be able to become a productive member of society. it is

The United States criminal justice system has failed to rehabilitate criminals. Even after being punished for their crimes, convicts continue their wrongdoings without having gained valuable lessons from being incarcerated and are sent back to prison. Jails are supposed to aid those imprisoned by helping them gain skills that will reduce future occurrences and enable them to act morally in society. Punishing criminals is not as productive as it is thought to be, shown by the increased incarceration rate from 250,000 in 1976 to almost 2 million by 2003 (Lynch 26, 49). Instead of learning how to work towards managing their problems, prisoners are expected to learn from their mistakes by being

Aside from the reasons listed above, there is a breakdown of the individual: prisoners learn to function in a system that aims to have total social control, which breaks down their ability to function outside of that system. They are separated from their families and limited in their communication to the outside world. Prisoners in maximum security facilities are restricted from socializing, such as in Pelican Bay, where all meals are eaten in the cells and outdoor time happens in tiny yards confined by 20-foot-high walls (Banks, 2013). These practices all have the effect on the socialization of prisoners who will have a more difficult time returning to society. In a word, they are dehumanized. In such confinement and limitation, they are not gaining soft skills, job training, or interpersonal skills that will help them thrive “on the outside”; instead, they may actually be losing those skills as they adapt to the environment they are in. This in turn exacerbates the problems that may have landed them in prison in the first place, such as lack of socio-economic opportunity, lack of education, anger management problems, absence of respect for human life, and so on. (That said, there are low-security prisons and jails that offer programming of this nature that I will analyze at another time). If we plan on sending millions of individuals back into society after exacerbating root problems that may have led to the initial crime, how can anyone pose the argument that prison protects the public?

Prison life can be harsh, and time spent in a isolation is even worse. A majority of those in prison spend countless hours in idleness. It would be much better if they used that time to reeducate themselves for a productive life on the outside. Some of the prisoners have serious emotional and mental problems that are never addressed and it is illogical to not attempt to correct these problems before they are released.

     The idea of sentencing a criminal for a period of time in a prison isn't working, so prisons should focus more on changing their rehabilitation programs. Life in prison should be like the outside world as much as possible, given the fact of imprisonment. Prisoners would be less prepared if the prison environment is artificial and abnormal compared to the outside world they will have to encounter later on. A prisoner also needs to keep family ties. Research in

Often now, it is believed that a prison sentence is not always the most effective way of

Society holds expectations for its citizens, and non-citizens at a very high level. They expect everyone to abide by the law, and give back to the community. In a perfect world all citizens and non-citizens would be good Samaritans, sadly it is far from that in today’s society. Many individuals are deviant and stray from society’s expectations of them. We know them as criminals. Indeed some of them may be hardened criminals, yet some of them commit petty crimes that are still a burden on society. Whether, their crime is petty or severe, society expects them to pay for their actions. Most criminals at one time or another will spend time in prison or jail.

When the average person thinks of jails and prisons, they typically think of horrible criminals being locked up in order to protect the rest of society. They think justice has been served, and those who did the crime are now doing the time. But what goes on inside a prison, and inside the minds of the inmates? What about after those offenders have served their time, and are now being released back into the general public? People don’t really think about how prison affects a person’s mentality, or how incarceration impacts both relationships the inmate currently has, or ones that will develop in the future. Although it isn’t something most people think of first, incarceration is an experience that can have a negative psychological impact on a person for quite some time.

With the highest incarcerated rate in the world, does the United States prison systems offer quality rehabilitation or just punishment? According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there was approximately 706 prisoners per 100,000 residents, or about 2.2 million prisoners in 2012 and within 3 years, almost 6 out of 10 released inmates will be rearrested and half will be back in prison. According to data from www.gpo.gov , the vast majority of prisoners are not rehabilitated. Two-thirds of released prisoners are re-arrested and one-half are re-incarcerated within three years of release from prison. Rates of recidivism rise to approximately 75%-85% of released prisoners are likely to be re-arrested within a decade of release. Successful rehabilitation is vital when releasing an inmate into the community as it produces a significant reduction in criminal recidivism. The purpose of incarceration is to protect the public and punish as well as rehabilitate the criminal. It is designed to change an inmate's view of life and alter their future behavior when re-entering society. Prisons offer education, labor, and other rehabilitation sources to inmates, so why is the recidivism rate so high with these programs in place?

The failure of imprisonment has been one of the most noticeable features of the current crisis in criminal justice systems. At best, prisons are able to provide a form of crude retribution to those unfortunate to be apprehended. At worst, prisons are brutalizing, cannot be shown to rehabilitate or deter offenders, and are detrimental to the re-entry of offenders into society. If anything, they do little else than confine most prisoners, and as a result lead to the imposition of certain undesirable learning habits and labels. Such habits include the learning of survival patterns of behavior, which do little to help the prisoner to be reintegrated as a useful and productive member of the community.

From their inception, prisons have attempted to act as both a deterrent and a rehabilitator. However, in certain times one of these is