The article is about the state of our prisons in the US and what it costs the tax payer to have just one prisoner. It also tells us asks the question if it is worth to house a prisoner rather than find ways to rehabilitate his behavior. It also speaks about the reform in the prisons and if the prisons really are working to rehabilitation or are just making them more hardcore due to the difficulties they face in there from their fellow inmates. I think to some extent the prisons are not a solution and this is because from the article we see that all that happens is abuse from fellow inmates which makes them want to be more hardcore and also it is horror as most end up killing each other and also molesting each other. The prison themselves are in such a bad state that to be declared unconstitutional. I think the way we could partner with the prisons is by coming up with rehabilitation programs where prisoners can get to be involved in activities that can help them mould their behaviors since we see even from the article that recidivism rates have gone high.
We could also come
up with plans like the one being experimented in Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma and
Minnesota where the idea is to penalize offenders by compelling them to make
due to their victims and the community that they offended. It was interesting
to learn that in California it costs $13000 to house one inmate and this is
ridiculous since if we invested this money in the education system then these
problems that we have been seeing about schools in the bay area would even be
reduced by half. It was also confusing to learn what the prisoners go through
as we see in the article the prisons foster inhumanity and violence and they
are punished in the most scary of ways and discipline is enforced by way of
flogging, beating and inserting of needles under fingernails and on the other
hand the prisoners have to also face their fellow prisoners who rape, abuse
them and even inmates murdering inmates at a rate of about 100 a year. This is
very confusing to me since I would feel that the inmates are taken to prison so
that they may reform and be better persons but the same prisons are turning
them into animals to say the least and becoming even worse that they went in. I
feel like rehabilitation would be the best option and I agree with the article
when it says that we should deal with the problem by finding alternative
penalties for the non-dangerous offenders and leave the prisons to just
confining those that are truly very dangerous and this way we will be able to
channel the money we would have used in expansion or adding space to better projects
like say education.
