I always had the impression that for anyone who is not serving a life sentence or awaiting the death penalty, the primary goal of going to prison was to rehabilitate the individual with hopes of returning to society a changed person. I believed that individuals received the life sentence or the death penalty simply because the system did not believe they could be rehabilitated based on the severity of their crime. Is the current prison system we have now sufficiently meeting its goals for those individuals who are expected to return to society, or would a system more characteristic of a therapeutic community better serve said goals and improve the rehabilitation process?
The goals of prison are as follows: remove a criminal from society and punish them for their illegal behavior, deter the rest of society from committing the same or similar crimes, deter the individual from committing the crime, rehabilitate the individual, send a message to all society that such behavior is punished, and serve time as repayment (Gruman et al., 2017). The majority of these goals seem to be fair, though I am unsure whether the current system in place is best serving them. Arguably, our current prison system is more intent on the aspect of fear, punishment, and repayment rather than actual rehabilitation.
There are some concerns about this, one of which is that the prison environment is not optimized in a way that would support offenders in making the necessary personal changes required to reduce the risk of reoffending (Gruman et al., 2017). If one of the primary goals of the prison system is to remove a criminal from society but the environment itself is not properly designed to positively alter the behavior of said offender, are we not recycling criminals through the system and society? Essentially, one of the primary goals is to keep society safe by removing criminals from the streets (Gruman et al., 2017). When it is time for those criminals to return to society, the system places criminals back onto the street without proper rehabilitation, seemingly negating the original goal. In 2019, the recidivism rate in the United States was 70% within the first five years of being released (Hayden, 2023). This number is significant enough to tell me that the majority of individuals within the prison system are not deterred from committing more crimes after being released. If fear, punishment, and repayment are not enough to keep individuals from reoffending, why not try a more therapeutic and rehabilitative approach?
The current system involves horrific conditions in terms of poor sanitary and hygienic conditions, overcrowding, limited opportunities for healthy behaviors/outlets such as exercise, assaults on other staff members and inmates, hunger strikes, and riots (Gruman et al., 2017). As someone who comes from a fairly cushioned and comfortable environment, it is easy for me to say I would not want to experience prison, though that is not necessarily why I do not commit crimes. I have never felt the need to commit a crime nor been surrounded by crime. For some individuals, crime is all they know. “Prisons are microcosms of the larger coercive and maladaptive environment that inmates often inhabit on the streets” (Gruman et al., 2017). This being considered, of course, prisons are not deterring certain individuals from committing crimes if the prison does not look much different than their actual home life. It could offer more structure than their home life. What if instead of perpetuating the maladaptive environment and behaviors, we instead showed convicts how to live a different and more productive life and end the cycle?
Therapeutic prison communities are holistic residential environments that are designed to change the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in hopes of the individual returning to the community to live a healthier lifestyle rather than reverting to the lifestyle that led them to be admitted in the first place (Gruman et al., 2017). It is devastating to think that some individuals grow up never knowing or understanding the principles of honesty, openness, self-governance, and respect, though unfortunately, that is the case for many people within the criminal system. While I do not believe this excuses the crimes they commit, I simply believe we can offer them a better chance that they may not have had simply due to the environment they were born into. Therapeutic communities offer opportunities for people who commit crimes to experience a prosocial environment while still maintaining structure and security (Gruman et al., 2017). These individuals are still being removed from society for some time following their crimes, but they are being given the chance to learn a new way of life in hopes that they will not re-offend. Studies show that such communities can reduce the rates of recidivism (Galassi et al., 2015). Therapeutic communities do not thrive on punishment and fear as a deterrent for criminal behavior but rather they give offenders a fighting chance to improve their way of life and end a cycle of maladaptive behaviors.
Let us give offenders a fighting chance to change their lives. Tax dollars are already being used to uphold the system we have now, which has deep faults and shortcomings. The goals of prison are essentially to deter individuals and society from committing crimes, keep them separate from society, punish the individual, rehabilitate the individual, and take their time as repayment for the crime. Given recidivism rates, it is clear that our current system, despite how harsh and brutal it can be, is not “punishing and deterring” sufficiently enough and the answer is not to respond with worse conditions or consequences. Rehabilitation still involves time served, removing the individual from society, but teaching them how to return to society a better individual than they were before; giving them the tools and opportunity to rewrite their destiny rather than keeping them in the same vicious cycle. I believe that would be a much better use of our resources while still fulfilling the goals of incarceration.
References
Galassi, A., Mpofu, E., & Athanasou, J. (2015). Therapeutic community treatment of an inmate population with substance use disorders: Post-release trends in re-arrest, re-incarceration, and drug misuse relapse. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483748/#:~:text=Three%2Dquarters%20of%20the%20studies,in%2055%25%20of%20the%20studies.
Gruman, J., Schneider, F., & Coutts, L. (2017). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Sage.
Hayden, M. (2023). Recidivism rates in the United States versus Europe: How and why are they different? Western Michigan University. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4677&context=honors_theses