Does Prison Rehabilitate?
By: Sara Tsompanidi
Tags: Prison Reform, Reintegration, Rehabilitation

“Noone truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.” Nelson Mandela

When we were children, our parents and teachers talked to us about that place where ‘bad people’ spend part of their lives — their whole lives even.

Those people have broken the law by doing something illegal. So they’re kept in prison, which will hopefully make them regret their previous actions and prepare them to go back to society.

This sounds good, right? A place where people who have broken the law will get all kinds of support to find the root cause of their problems. A place which will try to understand what’s really wrong behind their behavior; which cares about them and will support them even after their release. Incarceration as a way to reform.

If only it worked like that.

Prison is indeed considered to be a correctional facility but some questions torment my mind.

Can prison really rehabilitate offenders?

After years of imprisonment, do they go back to society ready to reintegrate?

In a few words, is it doing any good?

Pros and Cons of Imprisonment

Reading this article, you might be confused. Is prison the right place for offenders or not?

“Bad people are meant to go to prison; how else are they going to learn their lesson?” someone might wonder.

Well, there is not just one answer. Let’s talk about it.

Imprisonment shows the offender that breaking the law has serious consequences. It’s pretty straightforward. If we break the law, we’re going to be punished.

Just take a minute and think: “What would happen if people broke the law and got away with it?” I bet you know the answer to that.

To the rest of us, the possibility of imprisonment acts as a deterrent. When society punishes unlawful behavior, it makes clear what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t. Without punishment, many more of us would break the law. If we don’t want to go to prison, we should stay away from any kind of crime. The fear of imprisonment works like crime prevention.

Imprisonment satisfies society’s and the victim’s desire for retribution. Do you remember that Black Mirror episode (called ‘White Bear’), where people had taken the law in their hands and punished a criminal over and over again? Probably not, if you haven’t watched it.

Without state punishment, what would happen is precisely what you can witness in the episode: we would take the law in our hands and things would run wild. (If you haven’t seen that episode, you should. It’s intense, to say the least.)

However, in many cases, prison works negatively or even not at all.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the U.S. 68% of prisoners were arrested within three years after their release, 79% within six years, and 83% within nine years. This shows in numbers that prison didn’t play its part as a rehabilitation facility for those offenders.

If we now take into consideration that the prisoner might leave a family behind, we will find out that things are not so simple. When children are involved and the parent is away in prison, they grow up without him, which is a considerable trauma to them. In many cases, children learn that it’s okay to go to prison because their parents went and this can have a significant effect on future generations.