The Failure Of The Prison System

The New York Times has an article detailing the failures of juvenile prisons.

A task force condemned the system for a host of problems including high levels of abuse, poor facilities, lack of mental health services, and nonexistent education programs.

As someone who occasionally does service work in a prison, these findings come as no surprise.

It’s often been said that prisoners come out more damaged and dangerous after leaving prison than before going in. That is because attitudes towards prisons have changed.

The rehabilitative function of incarceration has been discarded in favor of making the experience as punitive as possible. This sentiment is often driven by politicians and voters who have adopted a false image of prison as a place where people spend all day lounging around watching cable television.

That may be the case in some “Club Fed” prisons for white collar criminals, but that is far from the norm. In most cases, prisons and jails are harsh environments that encourage a survival of the fittest mentality. The lack of self-improvement programs in correctional facilities gives inmates no incentive to change their thinking or behavior.

We all pay a price for the absence of opportunities in these institutions, yet it seems people forget that most prisoners eventually return to society. States are already releasing inmates early to save money, as they have realized a policy of “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” is prohibitively expensive.

Without any new skills, support, or tools for changing their lives, prisoners are likely to return to the behavior that led to their incarceration.

The explosion and subsequent failure of the prison system speaks to a societal failing. The vast majority of inmates are either poorly educated, mentally ill, drug addicts/alcoholics, or victims of childhood abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual).

These are issues that are not fixed simply by locking people up. We need to invest resources in addressing the conditions that lead people to prison.