Do you believe U.S prisons should focus more on rehabilitation instead on punishment?

Do you believe U.S prisons should focus more on rehabilitation instead on punishment?

Yes, but...

Speaking as the parent of a child who's spent most of his adult life behind bars, our "justice" system (at least here in New York) is seriously broken. And while I do believe we should focus more on rehabilitation, I don't think that begins to scratch the surface of what's wrong with our system.

To start with, we don't have enough judges or public defenders to go around. So everyone's overworked. Everyone's got a backlog. Everything takes longer than anyone wants it to.

This means that there's a huge push for plea bargains just to get things moving through the system quickly. Nobody wants to take the time for an actual trial.

And much like how health insurance masks the real costs of medical treatment and allows them to balloon... If everyone's taking some sort of plea bargain, then we don't really see the impact of some of the laws we pass. Things like three-strikes and minimum sentencing and whatever else seem a lot more reasonable when everyone's always taking a bargain to avoid those consequences.

Then there's the way our prisons have kind of become a one-size-fits-none solution for all of society's ills. We don't have many (any?) mental health institutions anymore. Treatment for substance abuse is generally just to mandate a 12-step program as part of somebody's parole or probation. So we get all sorts of people who need some sort of treatment just locked away in prison alongside all the other criminals.

Then we, as a society, kind of turn a blind eye to all of the abuses that happen in prison. We make jokes about dropping the soap and pound-me-in-the-ass prison. We act like losing years of your life behind bars isn't actually a punishment - the punishment is all of the other abuses they incur while in there.

So when they get out in a couple years... With absolutely nothing done to address the underlying reason why they were incarcerated in the first place. With a couple years worth of new, unaddressed trauma. With absolutely no services to support their transition back into society. We just toss them back out on the street...

And, unsurprisingly, they re-offend. And now they've got another strike against them, so now the minimum sentence is 15 years.

/r/AskAnAmerican Thread