When Prisons Don’t Work BY THEODORE RADVANYI
Imprisonment is a common form of punishment for convicted criminals around the world. Guilty individuals are sentenced to time in government-operated facilities to be detained for up to a lifetime. Rehabilitation and other forms of punishments have been in place around the world such as mandatory drug counselling, therapy, anger management, and community service work. An analysis of imprisonment as a punishment and tool of justice is called for when constructive and rehabilitative practices can serve similar purposes with a possible societal net benefit. This article asks the question: under what circumstances is imprisonment an ineffective punishment?
There is not a definitive punishment for all crimes. Imprisonment is common, but corporal punishment and rehabilitative approaches are also in practice around the world. In a retributive sense, if we seek proportionality for crimes, we would want to reflect the exact suffering that the perpetrator has caused upon the victim.
In this discussion we will examine and deconstruct the idea of imprisonment as punishment in retributive justice, which is committed to three principles: “(1) that those who commit certain kinds of wrongful acts, paradigmatically serious crimes, morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment;
The best way to do this would be to reflect the exact action, but for extreme crimes, this is often cruel and may not even work. If a father were to kill another man’s son in cold blood, the wholly proportional punishment would be to reflect the same action upon the perpetrator: to kill the father’s son. Our idea of justice has now necessitated the killing of an innocent, thus violating our third principle. In crimes against individuals, terrible punitive outcomes would occur with wholly proportional punishments in cases of sex crimes and other violent crimes. The proportional punishment is unclear when crimes are committed against
(2) that it is intrinsically morally good— good without reference to any other goods that might arise—if some legitimate punisher gives them the punishment they deserve; and (3) that it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers” (Walen and Dahan Katz) .
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