Rehabilitation is more important than punishment

Often this issue is framed as rehabilitation vs punishment, as if it's an all or nothing choice between the two options. In reality most people would agree that some kind of balance between the two is favourable. Yet all too often rehabilitation seems to be a mere footnote and punishment is seen as the priority. I will be arguing that this emphasis should be inverted, and that when dealing with convicted criminals rehabilitation should be society's main aim with punishment given less priority. I will attempt to prove that the benefit of merely punishing criminals is minimal and that a justice system that prioritises rehabilitation would have far more overall benefit to society as a whole. A third important aspect to the justice system is keeping dangerous and violent individuals off the streets. This often seems to be equated with punishment, while the two are actually quite distinct and separate aims. I agree that there is often a need to isolate dangerous people from society at large, the question here is what our aims for the individual should be while they are in isolation. Emotion (1) Of the arguments one tends to hear in favour of prioritising punishment, the most persuasive are often emotional arguments. "How would you feel" people will say, "if someone murdered your family? You'd want to see them punished, wouldn't you?" The answer is of course, invariably "yes" but this clouds the issue of what is of practical benefit to society as a whole. Victims of violent crime and the families of victims need care, compassion and support. They need to know that they are not in danger from the person who has attacked them. What they don't need, and what society shouldn't encourage them to seek, is vengeance. Executing a murderer will not bring back the departed loved one and any emotional satisfaction gained is likely to be short lived and will not wipe out the sorrow of the victim's family. Groups like MVFR have published testimonies from families who feel that the execution of the killer actually intensified their grief [1] To paraphrase Ghandi, the biblical notion of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will, seen to its logical conclusion, leave us all blind and gummy. Similarly, if someone is the victim of property crime, then what should be important to them is that they're compensated for their loss, not the extent to which the perpetrator is punished. Emotion (2) There are many emotional arguments against prioritising punishment, not least the extent of miscarriages of justice. The wrongfully convicted are just as much victims as the victims of crime. The extent of miscarriages of justice is often vastly underestimated, much attention is given to high profile cases, creating the impression that such a situation is rare, but more routine appeals which are upheld are generally overlooked. In the last ten years in Britain an annual average of 770 wrongful convictions are overturned each year [2] and there is every possibility that many times this number languish in prison without being able to afford adequate legal representation to overturn a bogus conviction. Other innocent victims of policies that excessively punish offenders are the families of the criminal. Prison sentences lead to broken homes and cycles of criminality passed down through generations. Deterrence The argument is often made that the threat of punishment is necessary to deter criminal activity. The problem is that all the evidence indicates that it is not working. To refer again to the death penalty as an example, murder rates are far higher in US states that do execute murderers than in those that don't. [3] Regarding crime in general, the "get tough" approach that began to be adopted in 1970s America and continues to the present day [4] has seen prison populations soar. [5] [6] As a last note on the failure of prisons to deter crime, one only need look at the extent of crime that goes on inside prisons. [7] [8] Mental illness Mental illness is a very broad term that covers a lot of conditions, but most experts agree that the rate of mental illness in prisons far exceeds the rate within the general population and as prisons get more overcrowded, the rates rise more. [9] To provide some idea of the impact of mental health on prisoners, UK government figures show that: "Two fifths of women prisoners and a fifth of male prisoners in England and Wales have attempted suicide". [10] Is it right, or indeed practical to punish individuals with fragile minds by placing them in conditions that exacerbate their illness? [11] Making mentally ill people more ill and then releasing them back into society without adequate attempts to rehabilitate them is terrible social policy. Criminalisation Existing penal systems that place vulnerable drug addicts and desperate shoplifters amongst hardened sociopaths act as a university of criminality. The petty criminal who got caught because he was an amateur at his trade, will leave prison with a mental database of other criminals experience, most critically he will have learned what mistakes not to make to avoid getting caught. The middle-class student with a promising future who got caught having a toke, can potentially develop into a capable career criminal under the tutelage of his prison peers and elders. Whatever the specifics, what is known is that most people who leave prison, end up going back in again. [12] Research in the UK has even found that "Reoffending is higher among criminals who are locked up than do community sentences – with 74% of ex-inmates at one prison convicted again within a year". [13] Institutionalisation Even if criminals don't re-offend, the experience of prison generally has an extremely negative impact on their ability to be functional, productive members of society. The impacts are summarised by Heaney very well here, [11] but I don't have the characters to quote from it at length. Economy Community sentences and rehab are invariably far cheaper than prison sentences. To take two examples, here are costs in the UK [14] and in North Carolina [15] This is especially significant as these kind of programs have also been shown to be more effective at reducing recidivism than prison sentences [16]. There are more arguments I would like to make but in order to fit in all my sources I think I'll have to leave it there for now. Over to Con. [1] http://www.mvfr.org... [2] http://www.radstats.org.uk... Lord Chancellor's Department (1999) Judicial Statistics Annual Report London: HMSO Cm 4786; Lord Chancellor's Department (1998) Judicial Statistics Annual Report London: HMSO Cm 4371. [3] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org... [4] http://law.jrank.org... [5] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov... [6] http://www.nytimes.com... [7] http://findarticles.com... [8] http://www.money.co.uk... [9] http://www.hrw.org... [10] http://news.bbc.co.uk... [11] http://aspe.hhs.gov... [12] http://en.wikipedia.org... [13] http://www.guardian.co.uk... [14] http://www.rethinking.org.uk... [15] http://www.doc.state.nc.us... [16] http://www.google.co.uk...