Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
I am not saying "treating them like savages". I'm not saying "send them all out the yard and it's survival of the fittest". It costs $110k a year to house someone in prison, meanwhile we are spending $10k a year to educated my fifteen year old. There is something seriously wrong with that.
Sixty-five percent of prisoners end up back in prison, so clearly what we are doing isn't working. We need to make prison less of a vacation in order to rehabilitate them. We need to make it so that people will never want to go back.
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You may not have used the word savages, but you did say, "Prison needs to be nasty, vile, and horrible." That sounds pretty savage to me.
To me the way you make them not want to go back is by helping them get some type of opportunity to succeed when they are released. Look up institutionalization syndrome. Just being locked up, even if there are some decent amenities, screws with a person. Many of these people are released, they have no skills, no way of getting job that pays more than minimum wage and they are surrounded by temptation to return to their old lives. It isn't that they are not afraid of going back to jail (although, I digress, some likely are not afraid) it is that they don't think they will get caught or they no longer care because they are hopeless.
I'm not saying we shouldn't lock people up or make them pay for the crimes. We should. I just think making it "harsher" isn't going to rehabilitate them. I think making conditions in prisons worse is only going to make the problem worse.