Mantus

Well there are two paths to take. Either we use prisons as rehabilitation facilities, which seems to be the current trend. Or we use them as an object of fear to deter crime.

Neither of these concepts actually works. Prisons are a remedy of the symptom - not a solution to the problem. Crime is not a random occurrence; nobody walks down the street and suddenly decides to rob a back. Crime breeds from social decay and unrest.

Current rehabilitation programs are a joke. In order for them be effective we would need to infuse allot more capital into the system. The advantage of such a system, if we could get it to work, is that it will turn a good number of criminals into decent members of society. The flaw with the system is that the funding used for such an extensive program could be used for social reform, which prevents criminals in the first place.

Using prisons as a deterrent from crime is also not terribly effective. Crime happens because people are in desperate situations. Thus the amount of potential criminals on the street is still the same. Some will think twice about performing a criminal act, but since most crime is bred from desperate circumstance based on social decay, people who have nothing to lose will continue to commit crime no mater the consequences. The major flaw with a system that tortures and takes away all right of criminals is that it degrades the value of the entire society, which inflates social decay.

Either approach amounts to nothing more then a band-aid solution. Whether you want to heal the cut gently or threaten to use iodine the method doesn’t remove the thorn bush people are forced to crawl though. The solution to crime is removing the obstacle of social decay though social reform, which includes: education, Medicare, employment and social security.