“I gotta get out of here! You run this place like a prison!”
One of the issues on the NY state ballot this last election was a question of whether or not to allow prisoners to do volunteer work while in prison. I presume this would be work of the kind that could be done reasonably in a prison - envelope stuffing and the like. I have to admit, that question gave me pause.
One of the places I lose my “liberal” cred is law and order, crime and punishment. I’m for the death penalty, I’m for harsh sentences, I’m for prisons being a crappy place to have to live. I’m not all “conservative” on my law and order stances - I’m for rehabilitation over punishment of drug users, for example - but by and large, I’m pretty harsh on those who break the law.
But you’d think the spirit of volunteerism would be something we’d want to foster in even the harshest, roughest souls, even in such soil as criminals. You’d think that, as a former volunteer coordinator for a non-profit, that I’d be sympathetic to allowing giving such groups access to any volunteers that they may have available.
But none of that really crossed my mind as I considered the question. I’ll tell you what did, and I’m still not sure of the answer. My question, as I considered the question, is what is the point of a prison? I figure there are two options: it is a place of rehabilitation, or it is a place of punishment.
If it is a place of rehabilitation, then learning to give to your fellow man, learning that volunteering is a good thing, would be part of that rehabilitation. If it’s a place of punishment, then letting them get the “volunteers high” would be a mistake, because it wouldn’t fit their punishment to let them feel good about their accomplishments.
So I ask you, readers, what are prisons?
I once asked some of my friends almost the same question, and I got a third option: Prisons are simply storage facilities for people who break the law. It is a place to put criminals so that they are no longer in ‘general circulation’. Along these lines punishment need not be harsh, nor should rehabilitation be wasted on them. Since the assumption is that they are in a sort of holding tank, a prison has only two tasks: 1. To keep criminals from getting out. & 2. To do so as cheaply as possible.
I’m not sold on this idea, but I must admit I can’t simply dismiss it as silly.
Okay, that certainly seems plausible. In which case, I guess the answer for volunteering would be… yes? Because they might as well do something useful while they are at it?
In a lot of ways, I feel there be 2 types of prisons in our country. First time offenders and drug offenders need to be given the opportunity to do some volunteering. These are the people who still have a chance at rehabilitation.
repeat offenders need to be put in a horrible place. These are the people who just refuse to live under the rules of society.
I tend to generally agree with all these ideas. Some people in our prisons need treatment, not punishment. They aren’t sociopaths, they are addicts. Treat the addiction, and they stop committing crimes. Alternately, there are certain behaviors for which the recidivism is so certain, they should just be locked up forever, not punished for a few years and then released to ruin someone else’s life. I think we try to make it too simple, lock them up for x years then let them go. The realities of crimnal behavior are soo much more complex, we just can’t be bothered.
Hello fellow Centrists. I hope you will do us the honor of checking out our new site: http://www.centermovement.org. Keep up the good work. And be in touch.