Mr. Pedantic
Diamond Member
- Feb 14, 2010
- 5,039
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A ton of it is because we don't even know what we want out of the system. Some want it to punish the bad people, some want it to rehabilitate, some want it to remove bad people from the general population, and most want some combination of those three things.
It is also a silent problem, most people don't have a clue and/or don't really give a damn since they don't see it impact their daily life.
^
You can't have the kind of environment described by the OP if the primary goal is rehabilitation - but it seems the United States doesn't really know what it wants. Some want it to be primarily for rehabilitation, and I think most people want some aspect of incarceration to be about rehabilitation, but for many the primary idea of prison is punitive - people are there to serve their time, and it should be as unpleasant as possible for those people.
Of course, then human rights organisations get in the way and this combination of compromises (like all political compromises) ends up creating a situation wherein only the disadvantages of the respective dichotomies are inherited, and all the benefits are discarded concessions.
This means that it's doomed to failure and then each side ends up blaming the other side, without really seeing the fact that they both contributed equally to the failure.
And all this completely ignores the fact that since nobody thinks about prison while they're planning or committing a crime, the idea of prison as a deterrent is just silly.