by Dan Mage

Created on: June 07, 2009   Last Updated: June 08, 2009

Prisons do not reform criminals. While there is no doubt that a significant minority of criminals choose to reform themselves while in prison, existing recidivism statistics seem to indicate that reform and rehabilitation take place in spite of the prisoner's experience, rather than as a result of imprisonment. Prisons actually increase the chance of recidivism in a majority of prisoners.

Prisons teach and behaviorally reinforce criminal thinking patterns and values. Prisoners have little choice but to conform to prison culture if they wish to survive, and prison culture is highly conformist, authoritarian, and contemptuous towards those who wish to abandon it.

Prisons do not deter criminals from committing crimes, although they may deter law-abiding citizens from turning to crime to some extent. However, even "hard time" doesn't seem to deter the serious criminal from re-offending; if anything, statistics seem to indicate the opposite.

Criminals do reform while in prison, of their own volition, and the educational and treatment opportunities that some correctional institutions make available, or even require in some cases, increase the chances that the criminal will choose to reform.

Programs known as "therapeutic communities" (TCs) within prisons actually force people to examine their lives and thinking patterns, and some studies seem to indicate that TC graduates have a lower recidivism rate than prisoners who serve their entire sentence in general population.

If anyone actually reforms as a result of a prison sentence, it is as a result of their own will to change, and not of the institution's conditions.

The failure of prisons to reform criminals does not mean that prisons are ineffective for purposes of social control, and the overall maintenance of an authoritarian society. Leftist author Christian Parenti states it thus:

"The politics of punishment works in two ways: it contains and controls those who violate the class-biased laws of our society, but prison also produces a predator class that, when returned to the street, frightens and disorganizes communities, effectively driving poor and working people into the arms of the state, seeking protection. Thus both crime control and crime itself keep people down." (Lockdown America, page 241)

If the actual purpose of prisons is to create crime, fear, and the need for more police, then prisons are in fact effective social institutions. There is no reason to believe, given the evidence that the prisons serve any other purpose or are intended to by the ruling elites who shape criminal justice policy.

Reference: Parenti, Christian, "Lockdown America" 1999, New York, NY, Verso

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