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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
The first step should probably try to evaluate what we want prisons to actually do. If we want them to be rehabilitative then we should probably start by admitting prison is a terrible method of rehabilitation and release a whole bunch of these people (or not jail them in the first place). With the people who we do think should be locked up, we should probably try to treat them humanely and treat them with respect in the hope we can turn their behaviour around.
If we just want to brutalise people then we may as well just shoot a lot of these people in the back of the head. It'd save a whole bunch of money and would be quicker than just random nastiness of indirectly not letting people speak to their families or whatever.
At the moment we seem to be operating under the genius idea that if there's two conflicting ideas we should try to do something combining the two. So we lock people up and try to rehabilitate them by being ocassionally horrible to them. With predictable results.
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Half the problem is that we do want to do both, but to different people. If someone's committed a burglary, we really want to rehabilitate them so that they can become a productive and law-abiding member of society, but if they've battered a pensioner to death with a metal bar we want to say "bad boy, live in a small cupboard eating nothing but gruel for the rest of your life with no one for company save for a large rapist who's had no sex for the last 27 years". We then put the burglar and the murderer in the same prison.
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