Thread: Cushy Prisons

I read this article and thought that it was pretty interesting.

Norway's controversial 'cushy prison' experiment - could it catch on in the UK? | Mail Online

How do people feel about cushy prisons, if they actually work to reduce recidivism? Is the purpose of prison to punish, to reduce crime (either by rehabilitating or by just removing people from the population)?

Originally Posted by dex71

Reminded me of this: (video removed from quote)

I think prisons are as much for punishment as they are for rehabilitation. Our prisons are plenty cushy.

But when these two options don't coincide, which is more important? For example, if it were definitively shown that giving prisoners a comfortable environment where they could learn skills and trades reduced crime more than harsh prisons and long sentences, which would you choose?

Originally Posted by dex71

I guess it would depend on the crime.
I can see them for lesser crimes that don't involve violence, but for more serious crimes....no way. Murderers and cho-mo's need to be punished, until they die.

I would rather we tend to lean toward punishment, that , in of itself, is probably the biggest motivating factor for the person to want to be rehabilitated. Take away the punishment, and you take away much of the motivation to want to change.

But your second statement is still saying "punishment because it works towards rehabilitation." If it were shown that punishment-style prisons were actually detrimental to rehabilitation and crime rates, would you still support them?

For the record, I'm generally somewhere in the middle of the cushy prison question, but fully in the "reduce crime over punishment" camp. For some offenders, I think that the focus should be entirely on molding them into productive members of society. On the other hand, I think that some people can't be rehabilitated. In this case, the job of Prison should be to keep them away from society.

Personally i lean toward you have to want to change to begin with. Sending them to day care every time they get caught will never fix anything. Lets be honest if the result of doing something bad is you get an ice cream cone who would want to change? You get to do whatever you want and a reward when you get caught. Prisons should be there as a medigating factor of them wanting to change. They should be harsh enough that people do not want to go back to them and in fact should be scared to go back to them. Then you might see people change their life style after getting caught once.

Hell, we already give them 3 hots and a cot - and then some. Free healthcare and dental too. To me, they get WAY more than they deserve already.

We need to adopt what Arizona does and put tent cities up - then make them work for their food. Free labor ftw.

No TV's, no radios, no nothin...

Well, I'm a strong supporter of focusing on rehabilitation over punishment. Locking people in cells for 23 hours out of the day and putting them back out on to the street with nothing more than what they went in with is doomed to fail, and we see that it has. Recidivism in the US can be as high as 70% within 3 years of release. That's a system that is failing. If instead of focusing on punishment and revenge, we should try and rehabilitate prisoners by giving them skills to find a job, go to school, and treatment for any disorders they may have, and I bet we would see the recidivism rates plummet. Of course, none of that really applies to people who will never get out of prison. Living on your own little island paradise may be a little excessive, in my opinion, but if it works, more power to them.