Prisons should focus on rehabilitating criminals

My opponent says that deterrence doesn't work because then we would have no crime, but this is faulty logic. The crime rate is what it is because deterrence works. If we used rehabilitation, potential criminals would be less afraid of going to prison, thus increasing the crime rate. I have already given reliable evidence for the effectiveness of deterrence, the Pro just refuses to acknowledge it. The Pro tries to rebut my arguments about how rehabilitation is an incentive to offend and how it violates justice by saying that rehab is only for drugs and alcohol. This is not true. I thought I made it clear enough in the first round when I stated that rehabilitation is defined as the restoration of someone to a useful place in society, but apparently that was not enough. Wikipedia says that rehabilitation means "to restore to useful life, as through therapy and education" or "to restore to good condition, operation, or capacity"[1]. In both of these definitions, rehabilitation is trying to turn criminals into good citizens, and while drug and alcohol addictions are part of that, they are not the whole thing. The main focus of rehabilitation is to educate the criminals so they can get a job and be a productive member of society. For this reason, my arguments about incentive to offend and justice are still valid. According to Helen F. Ladd in the NY Times, "NO one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds"[2]. This is what I was talking about in my incentive to offend argument. Poorer people usually do not do as well in school and don't always have the money for college. Even with student loans, college is expensive and not everyone has the money for it. This should be enough proof that there is at least some incentive to offend with rehabilitation. The arguments that the Pro made against my justice point are not a sufficient rebuttal. He says that there would still be justice, but he missed the point of my argument. The main point is that you are rewarding the criminal after he commits a crime instead of punishing him for it. The Pro seems to attach my arguments about public opinion to those of justice, but they are two separate arguments. He says that public opinion has no place in a justice system, because the United States is a democracy, public opinion always matters. In a democracy, the public votes for what they want and things they don't want will not be very likely to get anywhere. Also, he says that if public opinion is against criminals, then we should rehabilitate them, but my evidence from Stanford was from after the criminals were rehabilitated. This shows that even after rehabilitation, not many people are willing to accept criminals. On the Pro's argument about rehabilitation reducing crime, he has very little solid evidence. He says that 2/3rds (66%) of criminals leaving jail will reoffend within 3 years, then goes on to say how rehabilitation can reduce recidivism by 83%. As far as I know, you can't have a negative recidivism rate, so these numbers cannot be used together. Also, the Pro's evidence from Norway may sound nice, but they have a very different society from us. There are so many other variables that you cannot say that rehabilitation is the cause of their low crime rate. Even if you accept the Pro's argument about how rehab reduces recidivism, that does not show that it will reduce the crime rate. The deterrence that has been shown to come from prisons would clearly outweigh the benefits of reduced recidivism. Deterrence has been proven to stop 15 crimes for each criminal locked up, so taking away deterrence would increase the crime rate 15x. Rehabilitation, on the other hand, only stops up to 83% of current crime, if that stat is to be believed. When compared, 15 times as much crime is much bigger than 83% of the current crime rate. I am winning this debate because all my arguments against rehabilitation are still standing and because my opponent's single argument has been disproved and outweighed. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org...(penology) 2. http://www.nytimes.com...