Prison Rehabilitation vs Punishment

The purpose of prison should be to rehabilitate or, if necessary, to remove unrehabilitatable people from society. Treating the purpose of prison as punishment gets you higher recidivism and more overall crime. Compare the 83% recidivism rate in the US [1] to the 20% recidivism rate in Scandinavian countries [2].[1]: https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6266[2]: <a

Not in the US. The US prison system is for punishment first. A system that focuses on rehabilitation does not treat people this poorly, in general.

I think you're missing the point of the conversation. I'm not excusing or justifying what he did at all. The point of this is, other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve?I'd like prison to achieve the kind of justice that yes, does provide some sense of justice to victims, but aims to reform criminals and reduce crime. Now, independent of this case, America is clearly failing, because our recidivism r

If you truly hold this position you’d be well served to familiarize yourself with Scandinavian prison system which focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment and various American atrocities such as the war on drugs and the private prison pipeline such as “kids for cash”.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

That might be explained by the US prison system being one of punishment, not rehabilitation. [0][0] http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug03/rehab.aspx

Sounds like you're pulling stuff from out of your ass, the truth here is corrective vs punitive, corrective leads to a lot less recidivism, unlike punitive. All you have to look at is recidivism rates in the US vs northern European countries that have corrective prison systems in place. Norway has a 20% recidivism rate compared to the US's 67.8% withing 3 years, and 76.6% within 5 years.

Well, no, it's because jail/prison is supposed to be punishment, even though we occasionally pretend it's for rehabilitation. There are many studies like the one you link that show ways in which we could improve our prison system to reduce recidivism, violence, etc., but the people who run it aren't sympathetic to the inmates, and voters don't vote for politicians that run on helping those in prison.

The idea of punishment as a deterrent is hopefully dead and buried at this point.The U.S. has one of the harshest prison systems in the developed world, and an outrageous recidivism rate - 76% of prisoners are arrested again within 5 years of release [1].Norway, on the other hand, has some of the most humane prisons [2], and a recidivism rate of only 20% [1][1] https://harvar

I like the Norwegian penal system's view on prison terms: the punishment is the loss of liberty itself; there's no need to also treat prisoners inhumanely as an "additional" punishment -- which is what the U.S. generally does (and a lot of Americans agree with it). In the U.S. there seems to be this idea that "the worse you treat people in prison, the more it will scare people about going to prison". And yet, statistically that doesn't work. Norway's rate

It's understandable, but also a large reason why the U.S. prison system doesn't work well. People naturally want people to pay for their crimes, but what society actually needs is for those criminals to be rehabilitated. A very large number of the people incarcerated in the U.S. are repeat offenders, hinting that merely locking somebody in a cage and depriving them of their rights for a long time does little good after the prison term ends.There are some cases where it's simply