Clearly, they were not rehabilitated. Most specialists in criminology believe in the power of counseling, therapy and training, or education and jobs to set ex-cons on the right track. Samenow holds that people become criminals through conscious choice and they emerge from all kinds of environments. Criminals are unprincipled predators and victimizers who injure others in pursuit of excitement and ego gratification, he believes.
Legal leverage helps to provide vulnerability.
The threat of bad consequences stimulates motivation to change. No one contends that the process is not demanding, time-consuming and expensive. But some people with a criminal personality are not willing to change. So prisons exist to protect society from their destructiveness.