Originally Posted by kane

While I am sure some of them have lost their fear of prison, that is not the reason most re-offend. There are many other reasons including the fact that once you are a convicted felon there is a stigma that hangs over you and it becomes very hard to get a job, much less make a life for yourself. Not to mention many of these people go into prison with no life skills and all they learn while in prison is how to be better criminals. Add in institutionalization syndrome, a system looking for any reason to send them back, and the fact that when people are released they are released right back into the environment that they were in before and it is no wonder most of them end up back in inside.

Let me ask the question like this: If you have two dogs and they are both behaving badly and you take dog number 1 to obedience training. You treat the dog with sympathy and work with the dog to socialize it and train it to be a good dog and you take dog 2 and lock it in a cage, feed it as little as possible and yell at it every day, which dog do you think is going to end up being the better pet?

I believe there are some people who can't be rehabilitated. Pedophiles, rapists, murderers etc. But someone who sold drugs or robbed a store or stole cars likely can. Most of us have a glorified ideal of what prison is and would hate every second we were in there. Clearly the current system isn't working, but when you look at other countries who treat criminals in a different manner and actually do try to rehabilitate them they have a much higher success rate.