Real-life implications of "Had To Come To Prison To Be A Crook"

Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook

Inspired by this tangent in another thread, I figured we may as well make one for discussing the tendency of prison to breed worse criminals. (As the trope launcher, I did not collect or add real-life examples, but did not prohibit them either.)

I figure for people to continue with the prison approach in light of this seems to suggest either that willful ignorance is at play or that popular priorities favour deterrence and punishment over the notion of rehabilitation. That popular opinion in these kinds of debates tends to be dismissive towards the notion of rehabilitation for criminals other than drug users (more so on other sites than here, as this place is relatively progressive) I would be inclined to go with the latter.

Ideally, a punishment requiring the criminal to do X tasks to make up for what they did sounds like it would be a more pragmatic approach, as it would still punish them and deter others while yielding more practical benefits. But how realistic is it, in light of the momentum prison has as the method of punishment?

edited 12th Jun '11 11:02:05 AM by neoYTPism

Anyone but clinical psychopaths and certain forms of severe mental illness can be reformed or treated, and taught how to live their lives in a different way, but it is incredibly difficult. It's a complete change in lifestyle for most, and many criminals lack the skills, patience, impulse-control to deal with it, even if they want to reform, so recidivism is a problem for a reformation based program.

Also, most career criminals are stubborn, macho, vainglorious assholes who wouldn't take your help if you offered it because it's seen as admitting weakness. For reformation, the subject must want to change, and many don't. It's still worth doing though, out of basic human decency if anything.

edited 12th Jun '11 12:05:35 PM by MatthewTheRaven

Recidivism is lower in reformation-based systems than punitive ones.

You might also be interested in these threads, since they've gone over both the theory and the statistics in some detail.

edited 12th Jun '11 12:05:17 PM by kashchei

Yeah, I know.

I'm in favor of reformative systems. But I always bring up the dark side first. Recidivism is a more of a 'problem' for reformative systems than punitive ones, however, because advocates of punitive systems know that criminals are evil and need to be punished, so when they lapse back into crime, they're vindicated. ("See, if we just executed them all we wouldn't have this problem!")

That's why a reformativist (?) needs to deal with the perceived problem of recidivism first, before any progress can be made.

edited 12th Jun '11 12:10:26 PM by MatthewTheRaven

I'm not sure what the dark side is if the rates of recidivism are significantly lower with reformation. Just because it is not a system that succeeds in 100% of cases does not mean it's not, evidently, the best available.

The dark side could be that reformation-based systems have less of a deterrent effect (for first-time criminals), or that they tend to be more expensive (though I'm not aware of any stats on that; I expect both are true but I don't know how much they out-balance the drop in recidivism and better integration in society).

edited 12th Jun '11 12:18:36 PM by SlightlyEvilDoctor

The deterrent is not in the severity of punishment, but in the certainty of being caught. Losing one's freedom is horrific enough, in any case.

Many things can be deterrents, and I agree that increasing the likelihood of being caught is a good one, and probably more important than whatever happens in the prisons. Security cameras everywhere! Compulsory GPS ankle monitors for those convicted of petty offenses, etc.

That was the similar sort of thinking behind public hangings. Dickens himself often asked men who were about to be hanged wether they had seen one before, and almost all of them had. It doesn't stop people commiting crimes.

I think that the only function that prisons would serve properly is the permanent removal of certain criminals from society - while still giving them the ability to redress their crimes (which execution - though permanent - does not.)

That is to say: certain crimes such as rape, child molestation/rape, serial murder and other inherently recidivist crimes, should be handled by life imprisonment - which removes the risk posed by that person - with in-prison work programs, the proceeds of which go back to the families and communities harmed (after covering the prisoner's living costs - why should we pay to feed them?) - which will go in some way to redressing the crimes committed.

Anything that does not warrant locking up the person for life should be handled with work programs wherein the criminal pays back to the families and communities affected by his/her crimes.

I think in Greenland most of the convicts do community service. There is a 1% re-offending rate.

If that was applied to say, Britain, then if we acheived a 30 or 40% re-offending rate (guesstimation based on pop. size), that would be a success.

Prison should only be for serious crimes, like rape or murder. Anything less than fraud but above stealing from a store is over a hundred hours, and anything below stealing from a store gets double digits. Anti-Social behaviour gets over a hundred hours.

It benefits the prisoners (they do constructive work, and pay a debt to society through hard work), the government (it is much cheaper to get someone to do comm. service than to pay for prison. To set up ONE prison could cost enough to build two secondary schools), and the community (lower re-offending rates and some decent work done).

Completely agree.

Want to know the best way to make a normal person who may have made a few mistakes into a hardened criminal? Send them to prison.

Not to mention you pretty much destroy any chance of them having a future when they get into prison and get out.

One objection a lot of people have to serious amounts of prison labour is that it puts an unfair pressure on the justice system to find people guilty and give them long sentences. It might encourage corruption in a country facing economic difficulties (that's a big "might", but core principles like "innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot are essential to keeping the system above reproach, and I can't help wondering if such a system would threaten that).

I thought most threads regarding justice system have been about serious crimes already? Hence the attention brought to Capital Punishment...

A great deal of people against capital punishment still think those advocating it want to execute teenagers who kicked down garbage cans.

PS-Deterrent is only 50% of Crime Prevention...the other 50% goes to neutralization. Reformation may prevent some kid from ever painting penises on the school walls a second time, but it's never a 100% solution, there will always be repeat offenders no matter how much nice words and support programs you shower them with. This is where a blade comes in. When it comes to public safety, 100% is better than <100%.

edited 13th Jun '11 2:20:20 PM by Signed

What did any of that have to do with what this is about?

Mostly a reply to the quote I quoted where I said I thought it was assumed we were only talking about the serious crimes to begin with.

Plus,

edited 13th Jun '11 3:03:23 PM by Signed

And so what if we kill a few innocent people? Much more important to protect society in ways life imprisonment somehow can't.

Yeah, that's what I didn't get. Signed brought up capital punishment out of nowhere.

edited 13th Jun '11 4:37:36 PM by MatthewTheRaven

That's the best form of punishment that's preferrable over rehabilitation in serious cases.

Prove it.

Can you take it somewhere else? This is about rehabilitation and prisons, not the effectiveness of the death penalty.

"One objection a lot of people have to serious amounts of prison labour is that it puts an unfair pressure on the justice system to find people guilty and give them long sentences." - Jinren

I'd be more worried about the privatization of prisons by that logic.

That is an objection to private prisons, it works equally well for this though.

Right, but using the logic consistently means dismantling the privatized prison system while we're at it, rather than settling for something that neither removes its conflict of interest nor gains from the practical advantages of prison labour.

Also...

"Can you take it somewhere else? This is about rehabilitation and prisons, not the effectiveness of the death penalty." - Thorn

To be fair, the subjects ARE interconnected, so I am open to thread branching here.