Title: Some Reasons Why Incarceration Does Not Work Very Well
Headings: 
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Content: Released prisoners carry extremely high rates of communicable diseases, AIDS, HIV infection, syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and tuberculosis, often undiagnosed, into their communities, families and neighborhoods. Released convicts face many re-entry obstacles, most do not make the transition successfully, and huge numbers are recycled back into prison. Instead of making people less prone to commit crimes, prisons increase the likelihood that convicts will commit more crimes upon the completion of their sentences. Prisons, especially overcrowded ones where different levels of offenders are mixed together, are "criminogenic," they cause more crime. Prisons are, as Jens Soering's 2004 book title reveals, An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse. Possessions are removed, family excluded, sexual desire frustrated. The sex ratio is at its most forbidding for normal sex, 100% of one sex versus zero of the opposite sex. Sexual deviancy increases. Life is unpleasant. Sanity depends upon mental toughness.