I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.
So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.
America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.
I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.
The purpose of the criminal justice system is both to rehabilitate and to punish. If we can rehabilitate somebody, that's a huge, huge win.
The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.
Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.
Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Prison works.