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Reading 1/1:
Read the argumentative essay by Kassy Bloxham, titled "Prisons: Rehabilitation or Punishment?" and then answer the following questions.
Prisons: Rehabilitation or Punishment?
Prisons were originally made to hold those individuals who were involved in some sort of crime. For most of the history of prison, placing offenders there was "a ritual for redemption through incarceration" (Esherick, Sullivan, & Culotta, n.d.). The purpose was to keep innocent civilians on the street safe from these unlawful acts. Prison's main focus was usually to punish criminals.to take away their freedoms so that they would reel remorse for what they had done. However, as time has passed and more people have focused on morals and ethics, there is the question of whether the main focus of prisons should be punishment or rehabilitation. Factors such as the personal issues affecting inmates need to be taken into account in order to hope for a future for them once they are set free, while also maintaining the true, underlying purpose of prison: justice.Behind every crime is a motive, and behind every motive is the personal drive of the person doing the crime. Why do children hit each other when they are playing? The chances are that one
child took the other's toy; therefore, the child got angry. Here, the criminal would be hitting the other child, while the motive would be getting revenge for stealing the toy. In this scenario, the motive is simple enough to understand and resolve, leading perhaps to a kinder, fairer playing future. In real life and truly unlawful crimes, the motive can be harder to determine, and often once it is discovered and the individual is found guilty, they are thrown behind bars to waste away their lives. It isproven that there is a "high and growing prevalence of mental health issues in corrections" (Zinger, 2016). pulling the need for more appropriate responses in aid. Punishment forces individuals to live with their troubles even if there is an underlying issue, such as a psychological one. Rather than receiving aid to resolve these issues, the act of punishment shows that criminals should not have the guidance to better support a normal life after their faults.therefore ignoring the help that can be given to try and solve their personal problems. Rehabilitation would focus more on the supportive side of the spectrum. By focusing on helping these individuals, rehabilitation gives them the aid and support that they need in order to control and resolve those underlying problems that caused them to do what they did. I. personally, may just have a positive humanistic outlook on life and the world, but I believe that everyone has some good in them somewhere. Therefore, every individual should be given the opportunity to
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receive any form of help they can get to break through that negativity to hope for a better future for themselves rather than be locked away and forced to ignore any psychological demons they may have.
The world is obsessed with right and wrong. Children are taught right from wrong from a very young age in order to grant them the knowledge to make good choices for the brightest future possible. Individuals who are guilty of very serious, inhumane crimes are in some cases given the death sentence or sentenced to life behind bars with no hope of ever seeing the outside world again. Individuals with less serious crimes often do not learn their lesson from spending a short amount of time in prison. Relating to deeper, underlying issues, punishment alone may not open the door for a change in the criminal's life for the better. Studies prove that it may be beneficial to provide multi-focused interventions (Elison et al., 2016). With professional help and support, criminalswill be given the chance to turn their lives around and once again become positive members of society. I strongly believe that rather than keeping bad people off the streets and in jail cells to try and assimilate them, we should be teaching them how to be good citizens. Not only will this increase many people's faith in humanity, it will also offer criminals the chance to a second life.
While solving criminals' personal problems to help integrate them into society once more is arguably the morally correct thing to do, the argument of justice is still in question. Prisons that mainly focus on punishment are based on the premise that inmates should suffer to allow the nature of their wrongdoing to sink in. The purpose is to make criminals feel like their life is taken away from them; that they are not even a person any more. Rehabilitation, on the other hand, focuses more on the idea of fixing and moving forward rather than staying in the same place.The overall goal for rehabilitation is for the output to be greater than the input. Instead of making the criminal feel worthless and hopeless, rehabilitation works on changing the mindset of the individual to make them realize what they did was unjust. While I truly believe that justice is a fair desire to obtain, I more so believe in the hope for the future. A study done by McCorkle
(1993) using opinion polls revealed that the public holds a strong punishment orientation towards criminals. While I understand that citizens may wish to seek revenge on those who have wronged them by seeing them rot in a prison, if we were to only focus on the negative actions of individuals and then not help them right their previous wrongs, we are giving no hope to a
future with the idea that people can change.