Prison Reform Essay

If any other institutions in America were as unsuccessful in achieving their ostensible purpose as our prisons are, we would shut them down tomorrow.” said James Gilligan a professor of psychology and law at New York University.More than 90 percent of prisoners released to the public return to prison within a few years, many times for an offence more violent than the last.These are a few of the reason why prisons should focus less on punishing the prisoner and more on rehabilitating them.The current prison system has done nothing to improve our society like it was meant to, it has instead taken troubled individuals and made them worse. The current system of “reform” in prisons is to harm the person when they do something against the rules
A prisons job is to keep the prisoners away from the general public while they go through the change from a aggressive, irrational person, to a working and effective member of society.Others will also say that there is no proof that a change in the way we treat and reform out prisoners would have no effect, but this is not true.Many countries have prisons in which reforming the prisoners into memeber of society is focused on much more than punishing them, and it works for them.For the U.S. to know if we could also make a prison system that focused more on reform work. we would first have to try it