Title: why prisons don’t work – Barbra Dozier's Blog
Headings: Barbra Dozier's Blog
Barbra Dozier's Blog
why prisons don’t work
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Content: Indeed, according to the Human Rights Watch (2007), there is widespread victimization of inmates in prisons in America. Ideally, prisons should serve the purpose of punishing prisoners, protecting the public as well as rehabilitating the prisoners. This is not possible to achieve without proper reforms in prisons. Confining criminals for long in prison does not help them to reform. Instead, most offenders going to prison get to meet other hardened criminals who teach them worse forms of crimes. These experiences only serve to instill a criminal culture in the criminals. The hardened criminals usually glorify criminal activities and take pleasure in passing it on to new criminals; thus, the new criminals are likely to embrace a criminal culture, which is detrimental to rehabilitation efforts. For instance, Steve (2003) gives an account of an inmate that went to prison in 1979 for shoplifting a goose down sleeping bag worth $150. According to Steve, the inmate experienced all sorts of assaults, including sexual assaults from other inmates.