Why incarceration doesnt work

Education, housing, healthcare and job programmes prevent offences and reintegrate offenders. It is on these things and on reparations that money should be spent, not on imprisonment. Stuart Greenstreet earned his living as a business manager and writer before taking up philosophy at Birkbeck College, London.

After graduating from the Open University he did further philosophy at the University of Sussex. Prisoners are far more likely than the general population to have grown up in care, poverty, or an otherwise disadvantaged situation.

Compared with men and women in the general population, prisoners were:. The latter two characteristics interact. Around , children in Britain are affected by imprisonment each year.

Nearly half of all prisoners say that they have lost contact with their families since entering prison. Many are sent to prisons far from their homes.

Most prisoners have had their experience of school disrupted by truanting and exclusion, and leave school at the first opportunity, with no qualifications. Compared with the general population, convicted prisoners were:. Employment reduces the risk of re-offending by between a third and a half. But two-thirds of prisoners arrive in prison from unemployment.

The same proportion have never experienced regular employment or having a job that was really worth having. Over one in seven say that they have never had a job at all. This site uses cookies to recognize users and allow us to analyse site usage. By continuing to browse the site with cookies enabled in your browser, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy.

Rates of incarceration and re-offending approx. Many people would automatically say that such punishments are inhumane. But the very reason for this reaction - that such punishments are extremely unpleasant to contemplate - is exactly their advantage over prison time. Flogging is barbaric and ugly, but that in itself does not mean it is cruel or inhumane or otherwise unfit as a punishment.

Punishments, by definition, are supposed to be very unpleasant. Peter Moskos , who recently wrote In Defense of Flogging , notes that if convicted criminals were given a choice between being flogged and serving a lengthy prison term, they would probably choose the flogging and wouldn't we all?

While one would not want to make a general principle of allowing convicts to decide their own punishments, this thought experiment is interesting because it goes against the general consensus that prison is more humane.

When one considers the advantages of flogging more generally, one can see that it measures up well against prison time, especially longer prison sentences more than a year. Its drama makes it much easier to imagine - indeed, to over-imagine - and so it should work better than prison as a deterrent.

For the same reason, it also seems better able to satisfy legitimate demands for retribution by those who have been wronged. Seeing someone strapped to a frame and having their skin ripped from their body seems to me convincingly to satisfy the requirement that justice be seen to be done, in a way that prison cannot.

Yet, unlike prison, achieving this effect doesn't require that large chunks of a person's life be thrown away, together with their relationships and mental well-being. Thus, exactly because of its barbarism, flogging seems a more efficient punishment because the total suffering it inflicts is less. In my view, that makes it more humane. Execution seems to me an appropriate punishment for very severe crimes, such as certain kinds of sadistic murder for instance, Anders Breivik.

I do not suppose judicial executions are a particularly persuasive deterrent to most of the people who commit such crimes indeed, it is very hard to understand how such people look at the world. Nonetheless, they seem to be an appropriate retributive punishment. Such crimes are almost the definition of evil and undoubtedly merit a very severe punishment.

Furthermore, in such cases, society has a legitimate fear of the perpetrators ever being allowed to operate freely amongst them, and a legitimate distrust of claims about successful rehabilitation. Yet I do not think that even such crimes deserve any punishment more severe than execution. I do not believe that the perpetrators deserve to be locked away forever in a living tomb, perhaps even in solitary confinement for their own protection.

While people in prison do live considerably shorter lives than the rest of us, that still allows for several decades of monotonous hopelessness before a miserable, unmourned death. I follow Mill here in considering that death is not the worst of all things that can happen to a person, and that merely allowing someone's continued existence is not mercy. A truly humane approach to punishment must consider the severity of the punishment from the convict's perspective, the undramatic but unrelenting mental suffering that a life sentence means.

Let me conclude by returning what we mean by "humane" punishment. It seems to me that prison time is a humane punishment in one particular aspect. It is humane to those who impose it. Because it is difficult to imagine how awful it must be to be deprived for years on end of all the things that make life desirable or valuable, prison time is all too easy for a society to choose to impose on its troublemakers.

The costs of incarceration are high. There is wide variation between countries, but prison budgets average 0. This cost can be up to three times higher if considering other direct costs such as fees and costs to families. Non-prison-based responses to crime are more effective and cost less. Evidence shows that people given non-custodial sentences have no higher, if not lower, likelihood of recidivism than those given custodial sentences.

There is strong evidence of the effectiveness of alternative-to-incarceration programs that successfully reduce recidivism. Criminal Justice Reform. Tags: Criminal Justice Reform. Related Resources. Recent News.