PRISONS CANNOT REHABILITATE INMATES

Correctional institutions serve to punish criminals and the belief that inmates are rehabilitated in prisons is a fallacy

Drug traffickers in Indonesia can expect to be executed by firing squad. Australia is in an uproar because two of its citizens, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, are nearing execution for ignoring the well-known fact that Indonesia along with Malaysia and Singapore do not give clemency to drug traffickers.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the legal team for Sukumaran and Chan is “surprised, stressed and horrified” because Indonesian President Joko Widodo is not “taking note of Sukumaran's and Chan's rehabilitation.”

It is hilariously laughable to think that the two young Australians have been rehabilitated since their confinement. Those lawyers must have been indulging in some of the dope their condemned clients were trafficking.

Let me turn to America’s correctional institutions by saying prisons cannot rehabilitate anyone and to believe otherwise is a fallacy.

Prisons serve to punish criminals, not to rehabilitate them. American prisons do however provide inmates with various programs – educational, vocational, psychological (counseling) – designed to give them tools with which they can rehabilitate themselves once they are released into the free world.

Unless one interprets the term ‘rehabilitated’ to mean that inmates are not committing crimes while confined in prison – not trafficking drugs in the Indonesian case – there is no way someone in the structured society of prisons can be rehabilitated.

The difference between life inside the prison and life in the free world is like the difference between day and night. The prison society is a very structured one in which inmates are told when to get out of bed or go to bed, when to speak up or shut up, when to stand up or sit down, when to shit, shower and shave, when to go to their work assignment, etc. In the unstructured fee world they are on their own, even when they are on parole. There are no authority figures to tell them what to do and when to do it.

Once in the free world it is up to the former inmate to rehabilitate himself by using the tools provided him while he was confined in prison. Prison did not rehabilitate him, nor will his parole officer. He must rehabilitate himself and if he fails to do so, he will end up back in prison.