What is the Primary purpose of prison, Punishment or Rehabilitation?

The primary purpose is punishment because that goes down well with the electorate ("Hang em all!") and the main objective of any political party is to get (re)elected. You could also argue that the objective of prison is to teach people how to be better criminals - that is what is actually achieved in a significant number of cases.

The primary purpose should be protection, followed by rehabilitation. There are better punishments. But the idea of rehabilitating criminals through proven methods and not by flogging them harder (which doesn't work) doesn't compute with the British masses.
 
Surely the primary purpose of prison is to put prisoners in?

It's role is to hold those found guilty of crimes and sentenced to imprisonment (punishment).

The act of imprisonment is the punishment (IE removal of freedom), the prison is the tool used to achieve this.

Rehabilitation is the act of trying to reduce re-offending rates by means of re-education during a period of imprisonment (punishment), which is a relatively new concept.

The role of the prison has never changed - it is to imprison people as punishment. What has changed is the additions politicians have made to how that role is conducted.

Well, that's my opinion on it anyway.
 
I believe that modern UK prisons are far too soft on the inmates. Reading this thread made me think of Oscar Wilde and the terrible 2 year sentence which he had to serve. It was hard labour and once his sentence was up, the toll it took on him actually shortened his life. He died young. It was horrific.

Now I'm not saying we should go back to Victorian methods of incarceration, but we must ensure that prison is unpleasant enough in it's self, that it discourages repeat offenders.

If prisoners were given the choice of say, 23 hour lockdown every day of their sentence, without the luxury of a TV / Xbox etc., or the freedom to attend educational courses and escape your confinement for that period. I'm sure most prisoners would opt for attending these courses. Obviously, rehabilitation is a two way street and so it would require a determined effort from the prisoner, but forcing them to make this choice can only be a good thing in my opinion.

Prisons should not be places that some criminals don't mind returning to. Inmates who leave prison, should be leaving with the thought, 'I never want to go back there' .
 
Sliver said:
Prisons should not be places that some criminals don't mind returning to. Inmates who leave prison, should be leaving with the thought, 'I never want to go back there' .
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Surely, for this to work criminals who are reoffending have to believe there is at least a chance they will get caught and sent back to prison.

I'd imagine that the vast majority of those people committing crimes do not believe they will get caught, and therefore what punishment they receive when they do get caught does not feature in their 'risk assessment'....
 
In an ideal system it is both. It's first role is as a punishment and deterrant to the act of commiting a crime. Once a criminal act as been commited it's first job is to punish the perpretrator of said crime. As the punishment then progresses the next process begins where by the system identifies the root cause of the commiting of the crime and devises a plan to rehabilitate the person.

Unfortunately the prison system is very much imperfect and victim to the whims of politicians and sensitive to the knee jerk reactions of the Capite censi and Vox populi.
 
Sliver said:
Inmates who leave prison, should be leaving with the thought, 'I never want to go back there' .
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That would be easy enough to achieve, but things like human rights tend to get in the way. Then there is the topic of punishments that reflect the crime. Sure if everyone sent down for car theft went to prison but also had one of their hands lopped off, I am sure the re-offending rate would reduce. Or would it? Would the criminals, knowing what their punishment would be, become more devious, more desperate and more dangerous? Likewise, those who were caught would then be disabled afterwards and possibly a greater burden to society.

One of the downsides of having a moderate/civilised justice system is you have to make sure you don't do anything abhorrent. In regard to imprisonment, is locking someone up in a small cell for 23hrs per day abhorrent? Of course it is punishment, but do you run the risk of said prisoner losing their sanity and becoming more of a danger to society when released? That is not to say though, that items like televisions, game consoles and mobile phones could not be removed.

Yet therein lies another question - if you take those things away what will the prisoners do without such diversions? Such 'luxuries' help to keep inmates occupied, and dare I say it complicit. If you remove them, the inmates will perhaps spend a lot of their time planning/perpetrating disruption, possibly violence and this creates an environment that is harder to manage, particularly when the prison service is trying to run on ever decreasing manpower and budgets.

Rehabilitation is a topic in itself and has such a broad range of issues above and beyond the prison establishment that I don't think you could adequately cover it without derailing this thread.
 
It is neither of those, the reason for prison is so these people cannot commit any more crimes.

I don't see how any sensible person cannot understand this? There is no need for either punishment nor rehabilitation, and both are irrelevant.
 
Sliver said:
I believe that modern UK prisons are far too soft on the inmates. Reading this thread made me think of Oscar Wilde and the terrible 2 year sentence which he had to serve. It was hard labour and once his sentence was up, the toll it took on him actually shortened his life. He died young. It was horrific.

Now I'm not saying we should go back to Victorian methods of incarceration, but we must ensure that prison is unpleasant enough in it's self, that it discourages repeat offenders.

Snipped for space.
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Rate of recidivism isn't reduced by a harsher regime or at least most of the available evidence shows that the "softer" regimes such as the Scandinavian systems who focus more heavily on rehabilitation and treating prisoners like humans actually have lower rates of recidivism. Alternatively if you do want to make it harsh enough that they can't repeat offend then it is possible but you've basically got to cripple or kill them - that's generally (and rightly) frowned upon in civilised society.

platinum87 said:
It is neither of those, the reason for prison is so these people cannot commit any more crimes.

I don't see how any sensible person cannot understand this? There is no need for either punishment nor rehabilitation, and both are irrelevant.
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If you think it's impossible to commit further crime in prison then you'd be sorely mistaken. It's not crime that the majority of the general public will be affected by but that doesn't mean it ceases to be crime.

Locking someone away to prevent them from committing crimes against the general public and doing nothing to address that behaviour is merely a temporary solution. At best you remove them for the duration of their sentence but the chances are you're not likely to get someone coming out of prison who does anything differently, you've simply shifted it out of sight for a period.
 
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