I’ve long wondered whether imprisonment, especially for long terms in unpleasant conditions, is the most effective ‘industry-standard’ consequence for criminal behavior. In the NY Times Magazine, Jim Lewis writes of a strikingly-‘civilized’ prison in Austria, musing about how American prisons came to be the way they are, and wondering whether “to borrow a phrase from a Conservative British home secretary, [prison] has been ‘an expensive way of making bad people worse.’”
Excerpt:
Does imprisonment work? It seems like a bottom-line question, but the answer depends on what you want prisons to do, and that’s not an easy thing to decide. * * *
… most crimes are committed either in the heat of the moment or by career criminals who consider themselves invincible. Few people in either group think about where they might wind up.
When I asked one of the prisoners at Leoben if he was surprised by how nice it was, he said no; what surprised him was that he’d been caught in the first place.
In fact, though most of us are reluctant to admit it, we mainly use prisons as storage containers, putting people there with the hope that, if nothing else, five years behind bars means five years during which they can’t commit more crimes.
It’s called warehousing, and we do a lot of it.
[Emphasis in original, extra paragraphing added.]
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