Quote:
Originally posted by John Falcon
I don't understand how people think jail prevents crime by magically rehabilitating people.
The only way jail prevents crime is by keeping the crooks locked up...so they can't commit the crimes.
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I don't think jail prevents crime by magically rehabilitating people. It works (or should work) to prevent crime on a number of levels:
1. keeping criminals locked up. But if that's all it does, then as soon as you let them out, they're likely going to re-offend
2a. deterring crime in the first place by being massively unpleasant. Largely failing in that respect, as a number of people have noted.
2b. massively unpleasant: punishing criminals by restricting a number of their rights.
3. if you want to make #2 effective so that you don't have to rely so much on #1, there should be some kind of rehabilitative effect built into a prison sentence, at least for those who are able to be rehabilitated (I believe some aren't, and there's not much you can do about those folks but keep locking them up). Before you release them, give them some kind of job skill so they have some alternative to crime when they get out; work on developing a sense of empathy (hard to do) and give them something to lose if they re-offend.