A Utopian Prison Contradiction in Terms? (original) (raw)
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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 2011
Given the often disquieting history of correctional institutions, we question the notion of a utopian prison and, instead, make suggestions for simply improving existing institutions. First, prisons should adopt a clear commitment to the principles of restorative justice and rehabilitation. Second, the recruitment, training, and retention of staff should be reformed so that staff members are more likely to have a high commitment to such principles. Third, the physical, social, psychological, and moral/ethical safety of the prison must be improved so that individuals can concentrate on change rather than mere survival. Fourth, the evidence supporting rehabilitative programming should be consulted, but, in addition, a more nuanced measure of success should also be considered. Finally, it is necessary to understand the barriers to improving prisons, including the vested interests that profit from the “prison-industrial complex,” public opinion, and budgetary restraints. In conclusion, ...
Prisons should help prisoners rather than just punish them.-John Howard, 1726-1790 When we speak about crime , we often focus on preventing it rather than looking at the source of the social problem. People who commit crime against women might be hailing from backgrounds that are crime-prone, where women are not respected equally, where the family unit has disintegrated. Parallel this with studies that show that a vast majority of prisoners across India return to a life of crime upon release from prison. There is therefore a constant cycle between the committers of crime and society, and it doesn't end when they are put in prison. More often than not, prisons are breeding grounds for further crimes, for resentment. By creating an unhealthy prison environment, we are therefore cultivating more crime, which in turn is brought to society sooner or later because many released prisoners are not able to reintegrate into the society. To put an end to this vicious cycle, it is very important to understand the potential of education in the prison environment in preventing crime, at the source. We, as a society, seldom question the causes and the reasons of crime and criminality but react to it all the time on the basis of what's popular rather than what's right. There is a direct correlation between criminality, the social circumstances of people and the education as well as poverty. It's generally people from the lower socioeconomic classes that end up in prison. High rates of unemployment and poverty drive people to commit petty crimes, at the same time also making it more difficult for them to deal with the legal system. Once we look at the statistics and the evidence, we need to ask if there are there ways that we can reduce the number of people committing crime? And if we can say yes to that we will automatically reduce the number of victims and it's far better to prevent people from being victims of criminality rather than responding to it. Instead of seeing prisons as a revolving door of punishment, we can see it as an on-ramp of opportunity so that our communities can be renewed all over the country. Education can be a wonderful opportunity for exploring and discovering. It is transormative and reinventing. We need to change the prison paradigm and for that we first need to clear the misconception that we have about crime and incarceration. You see, we think that crime is the problem but the truth is they are actually just a symptom warning us of a problem in our society. We see that in the disproportionality of our justice system, the failings of our educational system and our socioeconomic inequalities. Many crimes are merely a symptom of these problems and trying to solve them to mass incarceration is not the cure. Sure it might give us a solution temporarily, but it is not going to fix the problem, which is the society. The lack of education is at the heart of the many problems that lead to prison; and it is believed that the lack of education contributes to incarceration and recidivism. If there is a direct correlation between them : Why don't we turn prisons into schools? This way we can address the symptom which is crime, and at the same time address what many would call the heart of the problem : Lack of education. We need to cutivate the prison into a place of learning, a place where prisoners can work with the community to give back in a real way. The whole purpose of punishment should be to teach and educate the prisoners so that they make different choices. Prisons are supposed to be teaching a lesson, educating so that these men and women make better choices in the future, but somehow we become so fixated on the punishment part that we miss the whole point. Prisons should be able to cultivate the positive aspirations of these people. First thing we need to do is open them up to the public. Let the community see the actions that prisons are making towards atonement and the steps institutions are making to facilitate and hold prisoners accountable. After all, it's our community that's at the heart of our society. It's where these prisoners were raised, where they committed their crimes and where they will eventually be released. These communities have as much right, responsibility and duty to be a part of this process as the correctional staff. Custody levels should be replaced with grade levels; where the higher the grade level achieved to the completion of educational programmes further the access for reintegration, allowing the prisoners to use what they have learned in the prison to earn back their place in the society. By doing this we could take the general public's lack of information, the growing communal fear regarding the prisoner's release and transform them to a graduation, an acceptance back into the society, supported by the community's knowledge of a prisoners's personal progress. Just like to grow a tree, it's not enough to just sow the seeds in the ground; we need to fertilize it, we need to till the soil, water it and if the environment is not conducive to producing the type of plants we want,we make a greehouse.
Leave the Door Open? Prison Conditions and Recidivism
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2022
Over recent decades most developed countries have witnessed high and often increasing rates of incarceration. In the United States, at the end of 2015, almost one per cent of the adult population was behind bars, with a sevenfold increase in the incarceration rate since the early 70s (Carson and Anderson, 2016). Over the last 15 years the total prison population has gone up by almost 20 percent, more than the corresponding growth rate of the world population, in spite of strong counteractive forces (see Table 8 in Walmsley, 2016). 1 This process risks feeding on itself, as a large fraction of those who are sent to prison are repeat offenders. In the U.S. State prisons, for example, about 40 percent of released inmates are re-incarcerated within three years. 2 Addressing this "revolving door" problem is now a top priority for many policymakers: if societies were able to reduce reoffending, victimization and incarceration rates would be reduced as well, generating large economic and social benefits (see Raphael and Stoll, 2009). Since recidivating criminals have already spent time in prison, it is natural to ask whether, and if so how much, prison conditions affect subsequent recidivism. In designing an optimal prison system one would want to know an answer to this question, as well as the possible trade-offs involving relative cost and deterrence effects. In broad terms, there are two alternative and opposite views on how prison conditions should be and on their impact on recidivism. One view is that prison life should isolate inmates not just from the outside world: inmates should spend a large part of the day inside their cell, movements inside the prison should be regulated and monitored; discipline should be strict, with punishment for every deviation, and inmates should have little or no room to choose how their daily life is organized. We will call prisons of this kind closed.
Prison Abolition: From Naïve Idealism to Technological Pragmatism
2020
The United States is finally recoiling from the mass incarceration crisis that has plagued it for half a century. The world’s largest incarcerator has seen a small drop in prison numbers since 2008. However, the rate of decline is so slow that it would take half a century for incarceration numbers to reduce to historical levels. Further, the drop in prison numbers has occurred against the backdrop of piecemeal reforms, and there is no meaningful, systematic mechanism to reduce incarceration levels. Despite this, there is now, for the first time, a growing public acceptance that prison is a problematic, possibly flawed, sanction. Prison is expensive, inflicts serious unintended suffering on offenders, and profoundly damages families. Alternatives to prison are finally being canvassed. In one respect this is not surprising. The manner in which we deal with serious offenders has not meaningfully changed for over 500 years—during all this time, we have simply locked offenders behind hig...
Sowing the Seeds for Change: Prison Abolition in Overcrowded Times
Studies: An Irish Quarterly Journal , 2024
This article reflects upon questions around penal legitimacy and the importance of sowing the seeds of change in Irish penal policy. It is argued that prisons should be regarded as an inherently problematic institutional response to criminalised behaviours and that further prison reforms are an insufficient remedy to such endemic problems. In so doing it is hoped that the article will help open a space for reflections on a very a different way of approaching penal and social harms in Ireland – the idea of penal abolition. Prison abolitionists ask us to consider whether the harm and suffering created by prisons and punishment are justified. People normally think harming other people is morally wrong, and penal abolitionists argue that if the grounds for penal confinement are not morally water-tight, then we should abandon our presumption of imprisonment in response to human wrongdoing and instead develop rational alternatives that are morally justifiable
Changing Prisons to Help People Change
Contexts, 2021
It is important to consider the conditions of prison life in understanding how individuals rejoin society at the conclusion of their sentence. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based approach that promotes new ways of thinking and behaving for both incarcerated persons and correctional staff that will better prepare returning citizens to be valuable community members. We consider that “since criminal behavior is driven partly by certain thinking patterns that predispose individuals to commit crimes or engage in illegal activities, the widespread implementation of CBT [and immersive cognitive communities] as part of correctional programming could lead to fewer re-arrests and lower likelihood of reincarceration.” This article includes short, intermediate, and long-term policy and practice recommendations to begin implementing this model, beginning with funding to support the implementation of Cognitive Communities, re-branding prisons to focus on rehabilitation, and fi...