Joshua Finley
Monique Williams
English 1A
31 October 2013
Punishment Vs Rehabilitation
The article
“Punishment vs. Rehabilitation: A Proposal for Revising Sentencing Practices”
was about how our prison system doesn’t serve justice to criminals. The article
gets into detail about the time sentenced to offenders doesn’t rehabilitate the
inmates and the longer they stay in prison the more comfortable they become,
which makes them want to stay longer. Being that we are talking about gang
members in class, I don’t think that prison makes much of a difference for
them. When gang members are incarcerated they are segregated with who they
affiliate with outside of prison, so there is no separation from what they were
doing outside anyways. I think that the prison system now does not work for any
criminals because they get treated better in prison, whether its health,
education, or even housing. Many people that go to prison for a long time like
being there because everything is handed to them. There is no structure in
prison because the offenders are more scared of going to prison because of the
inmates then they are scared of the guards, which proves that guards have no
control over the inmates. In my opinion I don’t think we can partner ways to
make prison more successful because ultimately it comes down to money. The
article talked about a 2 way sentence where the first part will be the criminal
is incarcerated for a short period of time so they won’t become comfortable
with the environment. The second part is parole supervision for the rest of
their sentence. I think this could work but at the same time cost the same. It
would take more parole officers to match up with all the prisoners we have in
the country to supervise criminals outside of prison. You have to take into
consideration of the type of people that are being supervised. There are a lot
of crazy people out there who will not cooperate, which could cause harm to
officers. I think generating a successful prison starts with the people, there
will always being crime and violence because everybody has their own opinions
and choices. But when wrong choices are made, there has to be a severe
consequence for them not to do that again. Prison has to be scary for the
prisoners, there has to be structured punishment inside the building. Inmates
are more dangerous than the guards, so they can’t gain control in they have no
authority. I feel that prisons will continue to grow and so will the
population, the only way to minimize the problem may be to maximize the
punishment. The one thing that interested me the most about the article is how
they talked about when offends are sentenced to 25 years in jail, they don’t
even end up serving a third of that behind bars. They basically make it that if
you kill someone, as long as you follow the rules in prison you will be able to
get out.
