Does Prison Work
Putting away offenders permanently by executing them refers to the implementation of the death penalty. For some people, the implementation of capital punishment does not only help society rid itself of offenders permanently It is also necessary so that would-be offenders could be deterred from committing crimes. This is called deterrence. The advocates of deterrence as a form of punishment believe that man is a sensible being whose one primary motivation is self-protection. Thus, his tendency is always to avoid being harmed physically and emotionally. Under this theory, once would-be offenders realize that the punishment for committing crime is more severe when compared to the benefits of committing it, they are effectively dissuaded (Macionis, 2006). Therefore, when murder or rape is punishable with execution, the expectation is for people to refrain from committing these crimes.
However, statistics gathered after death penalty was re-instated in the country in 1977 shows that it is not an effective deterrent. The rate of murder in the United States per 100,000 inhabitants in 1976 was 8.7 while that of rape stood at 26.6. In 1977, after death penalty was re-instated, the rate for murder increased to 8.8, while the rate of rape also increased to 29.4. During the succeeding three-year period from 1978-1980, continued increases in these rates were recorded. For murder, the rates steadily climbed to 9.0 in 1978, 9.8 in 1979, and 10.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1980. The rates for rape similarly rose from 29.4 in 1977 to 31.0 in 1978, 34.7 in 1979, and 36.8 in 1980 (The Disaster Center, 2007). Therefore, if the function of prison is to execute offenders to deter crime, then it is safe to say that it is not working.
Besides being an ineffective tool for deterring crime, some people believe that capital punishment should not be implemented because of two compelling reasons. One of these is the staggering economic and psychological costs involved. Although the financial cost varies from state to state, the fact remains that it is, indeed, staggering. For example, in California, a Los Angeles Times report dated March 6, 2005 explained that the state spends 90,000 just to house one death row inmate in a private cell, amounting to more than 57 million for its total death row population every year, several more millions in litigation costs, besides spending more than 250 million for each of the eleven executions that took place during the year (Death Penalty Information Center, 2010).
Texas, which topped the list in execution with 405 convicts as of the latest count and which has 330 convicts in death row as of February 2008, claimed to have spent 2.3 million every year for every death row inmate. A simple mathematical computation would show that the state of Texas has to set aside at least 759 million every year for the expenses of the 330 inmates which populated its death row cells during the year (Death Penalty Information Center, 2010). The question now, is this is it moral for society to spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars just to avenge the death of a handful of Americans Any rational-thinking American would surely declare that these millions or billions could help more people in need if government allocates them to fund more humane projects. If prisons are judged according to such a function, the inevitable conclusion would be that they simply do not work.
The psychological cost is just as staggering. Psychological cost takes the form of secondary trauma experienced by people who are involved, directly or indirectly, in the process of implementing the death penalty. These people include prisons officials, people who sit in the jury panel during capital cases, the families not only of the victims but also of the convicts, the members of the clergy, and even journalists who are allowed to witness the actual executions. For these people, witnessing a man actually die has been proven to be very traumatic. Numerous cases have already been documented about members of execution teams who suffered from severe trauma which resulted from their roles during executions. Some of these roles include the strapping of the convict to the gurney, inserting or sometimes reinserting the needle used in lethal injection, and the removal of the remains of the inmate from the gurney after he or she has been pronounced dead (New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, 2010).
One executioner from New Jersey who later served as executioner for the state of New York committed suicide ostensibly because of this. In Alabama and Mississippi, execution team members claimed that they suffered from physical and mental health problems as a result of their participation in lethal injection executions. Because of the emergence of such cases, the Department of Corrections in New Jersey started offering psychological counseling to the execution team members after every execution (New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, 2010). So by killing one condemned person, the process effectively destroys several lives. Is this a way for a civilized society to go If Americans consider themselves moral, they should not allow this process to go on just to satisfy their barbaric thirst for revenge. Judged within this context, prison really does not work.
Secondly, death penalty involves a sense of finality which precludes any possibility of redeeming those who have been wrongly convicted. This view was already raised by John Fortescue, the Chief Justice of England more than five centuries ago, when he said that one would much rather that 20 guilty persons should escape the punishment of death, than that one innocent person should be condemned, and suffer capitally. He stressed that any error in judgment could no longer be amended when a convict has already been sent to his or her death. Whereas if a person is wrongfully convicted of a crime and only sent to prison there is always the possibility that the error could be discovered later, the ruling reversed, the accused exonerated of the crime and released from jail to resume his or her interrupted life. While it is true that no one can ever make up for the time spent in jail, at least the person is still alive and can enjoy the rest of his life (U.S. Department of State, n.d.). This argument is not only valid it is also very humane. The history of American justice system is replete with wrongful convictions especially if the accused are poor African-Americans and Latinos. Since poor people could not afford to hire a lawyer, they are provided with court-appointed lawyers most of whom are not defending their clients wholeheartedly. What if an innocent individual who has been wrongly accused gets the death sentence because of an anemic defense put up by a disinterested court-appointed lawyer Could society ever be justified in killing such a man What happens to the family especially young children who could not fend for themselves that such an innocent person leaves behind This situation would only mean that the death of one innocent convict would also amount to the death or the condemnation of several other innocent people. The foregoing discussion only proves that the desire for revenge of advocates of death penalty does not only cost American taxpayers their hard-earned money but also destroys the lives of people involved in its implementation as well as the lives of innocent children orphaned by the practice. As a matter of fact, these reasons are compelling enough for government to abolish death penalty and replace it with other, more humane forms of punishment. . If one considers the psychological costs of the death penalty, therefore, prisons, in the process of implementing the death penalty for the purpose of permanently putting away convicts for the safety of society, does not work for the good of society.
Developments finally convinced policy makers and prison officials to consider an alternative method of punishment rehabilitation. This is supposedly a type of punishment which is based on the hypothesis that crime is a result of social problems (such as poverty) or personal problems (such as mental illness). Proceeding from this line of reasoning, social scientists argued that since deviants or criminals are products of worsening social conditions, offenders could be rehabilitated by improving their social conditions. Rehabilitation, therefore, consists of programs aimed at reforming offenders by exposing them to improved social conditions. Under this concept, prisons are transformed into forms of rehabilitation centers which offer programs designed to teach offenders the proper social behavior so that they would know how to behave when they are released from prison and could rejoin society.
Most prisons nowadays are not only for incarcerating offenders they are also centers for rehabilitation. As a matter of fact, according to its website, the Federal Bureau of Prisons proudly declares that it
protects public safety by ensuring that Federal offenders serve their sentences of imprisonment in facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure. The Bureau helps reduce the potential for future criminal activity by encouraging inmates to participate in a range of programs that have been proven to reduce recidivism.
According to this statement, prisons have two vital functions. The first is that of confining offenders (in humane environment) so that they are effectively separated from society, thereby ensuring the safety of the latter. The second is to design and implement various programs aimed at rehabilitating offenders so that they rejoin society as reformed individuals, freed of the urge to commit crimes. The first is easily achieved. Once offenders are incarcerated in secure prison facilities, they are no longer in the position of harming society. However, there are serious doubts whether all prison facilities are safe and humane. As long as this element of the prison system is languishing under a cloud of doubt, prisons could not be pronounced as a working proposition.
In considering whether a prison is safe and humane, the question of overcrowding comes into mind. Clearly enough, an overcrowded prison could never provide inmates with a safe and humane environment. Diseases could easily spread and could prove difficult to contain. In addition, the environment would never be safe because riots could easily erupt when inmates are stressed out, depressed, and angry because of the feeling that they are being neglected and deprived of their basic rights. This is a major problem in the state of California. As early as 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger placed the corrections system under a state of emergency because of overcrowding. He warned of the dangers that overcrowding could cause not only to the inmates and the prison personnel but also to the public in general. In view of this, he pronounced that immediate action is necessary to prevent death and harm. Apparently, the situation was not alleviated enough because in 2009, three federal justices required California to meet prison standards required under the constitution by implementing a two-year plan that would reduce the prison population by 43,000 inmates. According to the judges, The constitutional deficiencies in the California prison systems medical and mental health system cannot be resolved in the absence of a prisoner release order. The situation was considered urgent enough for the judges to give California only 45 days to formulate a plan that would solve the problem of overcrowding. They emphasized that only prisoner release could solve such an urgent problem, referring to the alternative of constructing new prison facilities as being too distant to be effective. In all cases similar to the California case, the first function of prisons as enunciated in the bureau statement is far from being met, rendering prisons as virtually unworkable.
As far as rehabilitating offenders is concerned, prisons could only be adjudged successful if a decrease in the rate of recidivism could be proven. A low rate of recidivism means that only few released inmates commit more crimes after they rejoin society. The rate of recidivism, therefore, measures the rate of success of the prison systems rehabilitation efforts. The states of Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota modeled their rehabilitation programs after that of the Humaita Prison in Brazil where the whole prison was turned into a religious community. Religious volunteers, who were given the task of handling the day-to-day operations of the prison, saturated the prison environment with religious programming and instruction. Family visits and spiritual mentoring were also promoted. According to Byron Johnson, director of the University of Pennsylvanias Center for Research and Urban Civil Society, the prison gained international recognition by reducing recidivism rate from 36 to 16.
The most popular of these programs was the Innerchange Freedom Institute IFI which was run by the Prison Fellowship Ministry (PFM) established by Charles Colson, an ex-convict who became a born again Christian. The PFM ran its program at the 378-bed Carol Vance Prison in Richmond, Texas. The program consisted of three phases. Phase I was a one-year program which was conducted inside the prison. The purpose of this phase was to build a spiritual and moral foundation among the inmates. Included in this phase were GED tutoring General Educational Development, substance abuse prevention, and life skills. These programs continued into the second phase, but the inmates were already allowed outside the walls of the prison to engage in community service. The third phase was referred to as the postrelease component of the program. Under this phase, the released inmate is provided with adequate assistance in looking for work and a place to stay. The subject was closely monitored and his or her connection with a local church was established. An inmate is considered to have graduated if he or she had spent a total of 16 months with the IFI program (including 6 months or more after being released), had successfully held a job, and had been actively involved in church activities before leaving the program. A preliminary evaluation of the program which was conducted by Johnson and David Larson showed that 17.3 of the graduates of the program were re-arrested after two years, 8 percent of whom were imprisoned. This was definitely lower than the re-arrest percentage of 35 percent and incarceration rate of 20.3 percent of another group of inmates who did not graduate from the IFI program.
Some prisons have formulated their own programs of rehabilitation. One of the most talked about programs was the GED program of the New Jersey Department of Corrections. Its effect on recidivism was the subject of a study which was conducted by Kirsten Zgoba. The study was conducted to answer the question Does correctional education have an impact on rate of recidivism A sample of inmates who attended the GED from 1999 2000 while in prison was compared with a matched sample of those who did not take part in the GED. It was found out that the GED participants had a much lower level of re-offending than those who did not attend the GED. In other words, significantly less GED graduates were again arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, indicating that GED participants were able to rejoin society more successfully.
A new twist in prison rehabilitation programs which represented a departure from the general education and vocational training programs was pioneered by the state of Oregon. This resulted from a referendum conducted in the state in 1994 mandating that prisoners work as hard 40 hours a week as the taxpayers who provide their upkeep. In order to carry out the mandate of that referendum, the Oregon prison officials coordinated with business leaders in the state to put together a comprehensive training program that would train inmates for actual jobs available outside the prison. For starters, inmates were provided trainings for telemarketing and using computers to map water and tax districts from aerial photographs. Small bonuses are given to inmates who perform satisfactorily. Later, they started offering advanced classes in computer which, according to an inmate who was learning how to build customized computers, would enable them to earn as much as 50,000 a year when they leave the prison.
An inmate who completes the training program leaves the prison armed not only with a letter of recommendation duly signed by prison officials but a professionally printed rsum to boot. The program appears to be working. The percentage of parolees who returned to the different prisons in the state of Oregon in 2000 decreased to 25 percent from 47 percent in 1995. The program was also responsible for improving the behavior of inmates because they could be expelled from their favorite training programs for bad behavior. As a result, disciplinary reports for acts like fighting or attempted escape decreased by 60 percent. The program starts as soon as the inmate enters the prison. He or she immediately takes several tests to identify his or her mental, social or educational barriers that would be addressed by the training program.
So, does prison work Finally, this question could be answered in the affirmative. Prison does work as long as it becomes successful in implementing a sound program of rehabilitation.
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