This thread is about the subject of Prison Reform. Here's my argument:
[quote]Now, this isn't a subject that many people really hear that much about, but I feel it is of the utmost importance in this country that hold about 25% of the world's inmates. Think about how you perceive prisons in America. It's not exactly a very posh image, is it? Dirty cells, prison gangs, violence, rape, and the feeling that one could die at any one moment. There's a saying I've heard being told around, how prison "is where you learn to be a criminal." And, to be honest, why wouldn't you? Most of the time if you're in a prison, you're a convicted felon. The second you are free from the cages of the concrete dungeon, you're now given a brand new hell: adapting to the outside. Alas, even though you are free, you've been branded with a title that is vilified across the land, which makes getting a job or an education after the fact incredibly difficult. You know what this causes? Exactly, you must be a criminal again in order to pay the bills and just survive in the hostile world we live in.
Think about that for a moment. You have paid your debt to society and yet you're still tormented night and day by bill collectors and you can't get a job because, let's face it, nobody wants to hire a convicted felon. What I've said illustrates the prison system here in America, and I believe it simply does not work.
See, the American prison system is based firmly on the punishment of offenders, which makes sense from the surface: they did the crime, now they have to do the time. However, there are flaws with this system that ensure its failure.
First and foremost, let's just talk about the deplorable conditions that most inmates suffer through every day. Now, by "deplorable conditions," I don't just mean the actual physical conditions of the prisons (which can be fairly good all things considered depending on the prison), but I also mean the violent environment of which inmates have to deal with during their times in prisons. You have everything from people getting shanked to groups of ethnic gangs fighting to guards beating up prisoners they deem unruly. All of this creates an air of hostility that over time causes prisoners to transform into violent, rule-breaking menaces themselves (although this might be exaggerated a fair deal in some cases). Since they have adapted to this new way of life filled with life-threatening danger, life on the outside is much tougher because they're used to danger lurking around every corner and violence being required daily to deal with everyday life, which is a major disconnect with life outside the bars for the most part.
Additionally, because American prisons are, in a word, cages to keep wild animals from hurting innocent people, rarely are there programs to keep prisoners occupied with other meaningful tasks. Meaningful tasks, in this context, can mean anything from reading books to doing manual or industrial labor for the government. This lack of things to do might contribute to violence and drug use within prisons because prisoners simply don't have much else to do but sit in their cells and wait for the day they get released, if ever.
Lastly, there is a major issue with the label of "convicted felon" as well. Since major employers are always notified of any major dots on one's rap sheet after release from prison, it is extremely difficult for ex-cons to get any actual job because nobody will hire people who have done such crimes. You might think that this should be happening, because they [i]did[/i] do a major crime and it is natural to avoid hiring people who do such actions. However, there are two major reasons why I must object:
1. The fact that employers won't hire ex-cons based on their past crimes is bluntly discrimination, and as such should be filed similarly to cases of not being hired based on race, creed, sexuality, etc.
2. Since they can't get a normal job on the outside, many ex-cons are forced to go back to crime. Typically, this ends with the ex-con returning to prison for another crime, which only wastes more taxpayer money.
Because of these reasons, this label is extremely harmful to people that have done crimes in the past.
Now, you might be asking how we fix it. The answer is simple in one way and complex in another. Simply put, we need to focus our prisons to the other side of the spectrum: rehabilitation. To give you a good impression what I mean by rehabilitation, look at prisons in Norway. [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4beUC3-ckw]Here's a video about them, to give you the good idea what I'm getting at.[/url] Norwegian prisons treat inmates more like humans instead of animals, like US prisons by giving prisoners access to information and giving them livable conditions and things to do, instead of caging them up and letting them roll about. Also, most Norwegian prisons also employ psychologists to help figure out the real source to some inmates' crimes. Because of this, Norwegian prisons are much more successful in keeping prisoners out of prisons than American prisons. [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgHdGr4aQoU]Check these statistics at about 1:39 in the video[/url] (the source is Young Turks, so take the video itself with a grain of salt, but the statistics seem semi-accurate. If they aren't, please tell me so I can change my source). Of course, we don't have to have our prisons exactly like Norwegian ones, but beginning to take account of their success and basing our system around it even a little bit might yield great results
[b]Basically, we need to introduce prisoners in the US with better facilities to give prisoners information, psychological assistance, work to keep them occupied, and maybe even technical or trade educations so they will be better qualified to receive employment outside the prison. By doing this, former inmates will become less likely to commit more crimes and thus return to jail, saving what could account to millions to billions of taxpayer dollars and reducing crime rates across the board. It could also raise average education of the population as well, especially if a technical education program is instated in prisons.[/b][/quote]
Discuss.
private prisons
what a laughable notion
[QUOTE=Kalibos;32451679]private prisons
what a laughable notion[/QUOTE]
[img]http://reidreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Rick-Scott-batboy.jpg[/img]
I think that in pretty much all cases rehabilitation would be better than the current system. And those that it wouldn't be better at dealing with are most likely cases where it would just be better to separate someone from other people and let them live out their lives in a controlled environment. (People such a sociopaths who just don't understand why what they are doing is wrong for example.)
[QUOTE=Kalibos;32451679]private prisons
what a laughable notion[/QUOTE]
We already have those.
They nearly always result in political corruption and over incarceration because of the incentive to gather new inmates.
What we [I]should[/I] do is try to prevent criminals from ever needing to resort to crime in the first place, instead of (at least in California) letting our prison worker unions walk all over the fucking state government, resulting in a crumbling state budget and incredibly over-populated prisons.
[QUOTE=Mr. Scorpio;32453054]We already have those.
They nearly always result in political corruption and over incarceration because of the incentive to gather new inmates.[/QUOTE]
i know you have them that's why i said what a laughable notion
notion wasn't the right word though
still laughable (in a tragic way)
I believe that the inmates themselves are half of the equation that makes a good prison.
And with the American prisons packed so full of millions of different individuals, it's no wonder that there's just violence, the reason why they are in.
[QUOTE=Bat-shit;32454744]I believe that the inmates themselves are half of the equation that makes a good prison.
And with the American prisons packed so full of millions of different individuals, it's no wonder that there's just violence, the reason why they are in.[/QUOTE]
The primary problem is that people aren't sectioned by their perceived threat or psychological status, but by crime.
This means people not likely to harm others again can end up in a high security (bad) prison and the most insane offenders can be put into a minimum security prison for not committing a crime warranting a higher security setting.
Most of the time inmates have black market trading going on, drugs, cigarettes in some places (I think they were recently made illegal in some/all? prisons?), Telephone time and Television time are a scarce commodity so they fight over that too. The list goes on, really.
People could definitely be treated better, prisons also shouldn't be private. The state wants to keep people imprisoned so it's their job to assume responsibility for the cost. There are also obvious moral hazards when there's partnerships between public and private, no prison is "private".
[QUOTE=DarkendSky;32453117]What we [I]should[/I] do is try to prevent criminals from ever needing to resort to crime in the first place, instead of (at least in California) letting our prison worker unions walk all over the fucking state government, resulting in a crumbling state budget and incredibly over-populated prisons.[/QUOTE]
When someone does go to prison, it should be ensured that they never return by rehabilitating them.
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