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Quote by: tinybear Hmm, I call it stupidity and injustice. Nothing whatsoever to do with democracy if you ask me. |
Imprisonment has NOTHING to do with "justice", it is simply a form of retribution. Justice demands that the wrong be corrected so as to restore a balance and sense of harmony within society.
It is all too simple to call for a person to be imprisoned for a lengthy period, for them to be sent to a place that few of us understand, even fewer of us want to know about. But, what do we do with them once they are there?
IMHO when society demands that a person be incarcerated the removal from society that should be the only punishment they receive. Being seperated from your friends and family, having your liberty severely restricted is punishment in and of itself. Instead we brutalise and allow a lawless sub culture to flourish behind the prison walls. What effect does this have for society? As is evidenced in most parts of the world, the prison rate increases as does violent crime. Recidivism rates skyrocket. (Speaking from Australia, where our rates of imprisonment for men have increased by 40% in the last decade and women's rates have doubled in the same period. Recidivism rates are around 60% and violent crime is almost the only form of crime on the increase - source, Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004) The end result is a far more violent and dangerous society for us all.
When we incarcerate, we should be obligated to do more with the person than simply punish and brutalise. We have these people controlled in a total institution, an environment where we can exert influence over every aspect of their lives, and yet we do nothing with them. Rehabilitation is offered in an ad hoc manner, and extremely rarely are such programmes carried out in a manner that will have any form of lasting impact or bring about behavioural change. The common justification for delivering rehabilitative services that the service providers themselves know are ineffective is that to provide more effective programmes would cost far too much. What of the cost of recidivism, of imprisonment, of social welfare services to people who are unlikely to be employable in the future? What of the costs to society itself through the increased crime rate?
In many years of research I have been unable to find a single penologist who is brave enough to claim that incarceration reduces crime. Increased use of incarceration through delivering longer sentences only serves to increase the prison population and worsen the demands on the public purse in a myriad of ways.
It is about time that we began to think smarter regarding the so called criminal justice systems we employ, and realise that retributive justice is a luxury we cannot afford both fiscally and through the cost to our own humanity. We cannot simply lock them up and forget about them.... the majority of prisoners will one day return to our communities, and how can we express surprise when they commit further violent crimes after we have subjected them to brutal treatment ourselves?
Throughout the world there have been, and still are, many experiments in alternative forms of punishment and treatment for prisoners. Restorative practices have demonstrated highly effective results in not only satisfying the need for victims of crime to feel vindicated in some way, but in reducing recidivism, and creating productive members of society from those we once labelled as scum. Projects underway in places such as Beligium and the UK have had great success. The criminal justice systems that operate throughout some of the Nordic countries have demonstrated that simply because a person commits a crime it does not mean that they must be written off entirely as never being capable of performing a socially productive role in the future.
What a waste of human potential prisons are, and what a blight they are on our own sense of humanity. During a recent debate among academics and professionals held here in Australia I pointed out research that showed 25% of 18-24 year old males in prison are raped during their incarceration. One person, a prison worker, suggested that as this indicated a minority of prisoners being raped, we should ignore the figure and phenomenon and focus on other areas instead. Imagine if someone said that only a minority of women in society are raped, so lets simply ignore it!
It is time to pull our heads oput of the sand and examine what we are doing through our reliance on imprisonment as a form of so called "justice". Demanding people spend longer periods locked away and brutalised is not going to produce a safer society, but rather, it promises us that our society will decay and become far more violent in the future.