Prisons Prepare People for Return to Society

The argument

The unavoidable fact about prisoners is that nearly all of them come back. The overwhelming majority of people sent to prison are released — most within a few years — and they return to the same streets, neighbourhoods and labour markets as everyone else. The only question a prison system gets to decide is what condition they come back in: embittered, unemployable and institutionalised, or equipped to live lawfully. Seen clearly, this argument holds, preparation for return is not one purpose of prison among several; it is the only purpose that survives contact with the facts. Preparation works, and its absence fails measurably. Prisoners who take part in education programmes are dramatically less likely to reoffend after release — large reviews, including RAND's landmark study for the US Department of Justice, found correctional education cut reoffending by roughly a third and paid for itself several times over in avoided incarceration. Vocational training, addiction treatment, mental health care and maintained family contact show the same direction of effect. Systems built around these principles, most famously Norway's, release people into work and housing and enjoy some of the lowest reoffending rates in the world; systems built around bare warehousing release people into homelessness and produce the revolving door their statistics record. Every future victim of a preventable reoffence is the cost of getting this wrong. A prison that punishes without preparing simply schedules its own failure for the day of release. If society must take people out of circulation for its protection, the rehabilitative conclusion follows: the institution holding them exists to send back citizens, not better criminals.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Retributive and deterrence traditions deny that rehabilitation can be the sole or defining purpose of prison. Incarceration also delivers deserved punishment, deters would-be offenders, and incapacitates the dangerous — functions that operate throughout a sentence regardless of eventual release — and some offenders are not rehabilitable within any realistic term. The reoffending statistics are also confounded by selection, since motivated prisoners are the ones who enrol in programmes, so lower recidivism partly reflects who participates rather than the programme alone. Framing preparation-for-return as 'the only purpose that survives the facts' sidelines victims' legitimate claim to proportionate justice and the signal that sentencing sends to everyone else.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That prisoners are eventually released does not make reintegration the only legitimate purpose; punishment, deterrence and incapacitation all operate during the sentence irrespective of release. [Rejecting P2] Programme participants self-select for motivation, so lower reoffending partly reflects who enrols rather than the intervention alone; 'warehousing versus rehabilitation' is not the only axis. [Rejecting P3] Preventing future crime is also served by deterrence and incapacitation, not solely by preparing individuals for return.