Title: why prisons don’t work – Barbra Dozier's Blog
Headings: Barbra Dozier's Blog
Barbra Dozier's Blog
why prisons don’t work
Cancel reply

Content: 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. These experiences made the inmate embrace a criminal culture in order to survive in prison. The only possible way that an inmate could survive safely at the prison was to acquire a reputation, which often entailed stabbing another person. Then again, there is the problematic issue of drug abuse in prisons. To illustrate this, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (2006), new inmates that have never consumed drugs before in their lives get their first experiences in prisons. When prison officials fail to engage inmates with constructive activities, the inmates engage in drug abuse to fight boredom.