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Content: According to a Department of Corrections document, "Facts About Furloughs," 39 prisoners have "violated the Administrative Regulations as to the time of return" to the prison, and only 10 have been "arrested and/or (are) suspected of involvement in a new criminal offense." Behind Carey's charge and the defense of the program by Sielaff is the larger question about what we expect from our prison system and what it can deliver. Prisons have traditionally been expected to perform a Jekyll and Hyde function for society. Prison is a place in which people convicted of serious crimes pay their debt to society in total segregation from the community. At the same time, a prison is a place in which serious efforts will be made to rehabilitate, so that upon release the exoffender will follow a law-abiding life. The problem, of course, is that these expectations are often contradictory since it is hard to punish and rehabilitate prisoners simultaneously. Warehousing function
Another more immediate purpose not often discussed in polite society is the warehousing function of prisons. A criminal justice system overwhelmed with arrests, court cases, and rising crime rates increasingly looks to the prison as a place to stockpile those who are poor risks for probation or other community-based solutions. Very few people working in the system view our maximum security prisons as places which can either effectively punish or rehabilitate. Indeed, the rate of prisoners returning to state prisons for repeat offenses (35 to 45 per cent according to one accounting method) has long since led to the conventional wisdom that prisons are most effective at preparing first offenders for lives of crime.