Theodore Dalrymple on Prisons.
People expressed dismay on this website about the rate of incarceration in America.
Essay by an extraordinary writer, psychiatrist in community and prison practice.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/142285/sec_id/142285
The author makes the succinct argument that this particular person needed to be in prison in order to achieve anything in her life.
Indeed, prison made her everything she is today.
That she does not realize this herself is more the pity…and the reason why we need prisons.
Whilst in her dogma she attributes blame to all and sundry bar herself, her rhetoric clearly demonstrates her lack of rehabilitation. The fact that taxpayers paid for her prison stay and her degree seems to have completely eluded her. She still considers herself the victim.
What a waste of a good education.
Each society seems to always max out its’ available prison space. When we run out of criminals, we simply start locking up people that we don’t like. Sometimes we even need to let criminals go free so we can use their space for more people we don’t like.
The author succinctly points out a prime difficulty in all debates. Logic fallacies and appeals are ubiquitous because they often work. He also wisely points out that there are times when being diplomatic and avoiding the harsh truth will prevent you from losing the crowd entirely.
He says nothing about the rate of incarceration, though. He merely laments the erosion of the concept of personal responsibility in the name of compassion. The hyperbolic claim that “everyone deserves a second chance” is indeed pablum, but I doubt you could find many who truly believe it when pressed. If anything, the takeaway for me is simply that there are indeed different classes of criminal who deserve different types of treatment. Resources are limited so space in prisons must be rationed out. It makes sense to reserve the harshest punishments for the most heinous crimes. The only arguments I’ve read concerning incarceration rates merely point out that, just as there are monstrous criminals that do not deserve a second chance, there are much lesser criminals that perhaps deserve more than two. At the very least, there are many criminals that deserve punishment less than imprisonment. It would seem that certain hot-button crimes garner a disproportionate amount of attention from executives and legislators. The decision to “throw the book at them” often arises not from a sound sense of justice, but from simple political posturing.
Regardless of opposing views concerning the fairness of prison, the severity of crime, or even the concept of personal vs. communal responsibility, prison over-crowding is a situation that needs to be addressed. From my stand point it seems like there are three choices: build more prisons, let people out of prison, or put fewer people in prison in the first place. The first option comes at great financial cost and the ever-present “not in my backyard” problem. The second and third reduces costs but has a potential for increased risk to society. There’s no such thing as a crime free society. At some point we have to decide which crimes we’re willing to put up with, and how much we’re willing to pay to keep certain members of society segregated from us.