Society-Prison: single ticket or return ticket?

by Andrea Bonavita

The world of the U.S. prison described in our Article of the Week – “Fixing America’s Broken Prisons” – makes me believe that incarceration is not the best way to deal with offenders.

American prisons hold a population grown up seven times in the last 35 years (up to 2.4 million people). Even the number of recidivists remains extremely high: the 60% of those who paid their debt to society find themselves returning in prison within three years. As shown by the author, at first we could think that having jails full of offenders is the warranty of low rates of crime; however, criminologists haven’t found yet a direct connection between people behind bars and levels of crime. On the other hand and despite of its name, the “correction” system doesn’t seem able to offer to the inmates a true reintegration into society.

Prison and society seem to be worlds related one another just for necessity, not with effective interaction. From the point of view of the Law, punishment works: it is the justifiable compensation from the offense caused to a member of a certain society. From the point of view of the human community, if punishment can redress an injustice, in itself it doesn’t help to mend the break between the culprit and the society that condemned him.

Where alternatives to prison has been tried, the outcomes have been good. The author cites the case of states that created mandating drug treatments for non-violent offenders (Texas, Kansas) or adopted periods of probation (Hawaii). The UCLA has been working on an important project that wants to encourage inmates at the end of their punishment to re-enter the society providing apartments and GPS bracelets. The aim of all these solutions is the increasing of the responsibility of the prisoners to make them more ready to re-enter into society.

If we consider the prison as the final stage of the process of Justice (imputation, trial, judgment), the process of reintegration covers the opposite way to rebuild the original situation. In this perspective, punishment is just the beginning of a long process that must have the society as its goal. One could have the opinion that locking people up and throw them away forever can be the best solution (it is the opinion against which the former Texas Governor cited in the article struggled when he was in charge). However, this implies the belief in a society in which there is an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’: a very questionable position. The human community is one, without any kind of ‘outside’, and it is even composed by those members who have decided, willingly or not, to act sometimes against the community.

The development of re-entry processes seems to be an effective way for the good of the whole society and for the future of every offender.