Prison Rehabilitation

Prison Rehabilitation

Ryan Winter
B block
5/19/08
I believe that our prison system is corrupt. We do punish the people, who commit crimes, and it is a deterrent, but it doesn’t help rehabilitate people in any way. And when you get out of prison, there is nowhere to get a job to start a new life, so you are forced to resort back to crime.
The first goal in fixing our prison system is rehabilitation. We should do more to rehabilitate those who are in jail so they will be better people when they get out. The only way we can begin to do this is by rewarding them for good behavior, and giving them more options to rehabilitate themselves.
We don’t want to give them too many options or else we will be wasting our tax dollars on people being locked up and punished. I think a good way to help prison goers rehabilitate themselves is by having drug classes and a library in the prison so inmates can read. There should be no limits on what they can read or how much they can read, all knowledge is valuable. That is about as far as I would go with rehabilitation.
So is using prison for punishment good or bad? I believe it is both good and bad. The good side is, prison is a horrible nasty place, so it serves as a deterrent from crime. On the other hand, prison guards defiantly abuse their power. You would figure that full-grown adults would be mature enough to have control over their power and not abuse it. You would also expect them to realize that the prisoners are still people, with common sense. This is not the case however. The reason prisoners lash out is because the abuse of power. It is just like school, if the teachers were more respectful of the students and the rules were more flexible, then students would learn a lot more and get better grades. Since the rules are so tight, and there is so much work all of the time, nobody has respect for school and nobody cares about learning. By the guards abusing their power they take punishment in prison too far. After...

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