It's good new that state governments are beginning to see that we can't continue to build more and bigger prisons. The average American household already spends around $500 per year to keep people behind bars.
For the short term, the alternative most often considered is directing juvenile offenders into rehabilitation-oriented programs for shorter periods of time, while keeping punishment as the primatry objective for older offenders. It's a step in the right direction, but let's hope it's only the beginning of a trend.
Rehabilitation has gotten a bad rap for decades now. Fear is a strong motivator, and a single news story about an ex-con committing a horrendous crime makes a strong impression. By comparison a news story at the same time detailing the spiraling cost of incarceration, the savings to taxpayers that accrue from reducing recidivism with carefully crafted rehabilitation programs, and figures on the millions of ex-cons who work, support their families, pay taxes, and stay out of trouble, would be mostly ignored. If any news medium even bothered to feature such a report.
Rehabilitation programs don't amount to "coddling criminals." Incarceration in a prison where inmates are required to participate in a variety of rehabilitation-oriented programs would make serving time harder work than the standard prison where inmates are largely idle. It's more fun to sit around gambling or "hanging with the homeboys" or planning future illegal activities than to attend sessions that confront criminal thinking, take anger management classes, listen to lectures and face loss of privileges if you don't pay attention.
Does rehabilitation actually work? Yes. There is a mountain of scientific evidence that the right programs reduce recidivism. Depending on the inmate population and the crimes for which they were imprisoned, and other factors, the actual recidivism rate may be dramatically lower than expected rates, or only moderately or slightly lower.
Of course rehabilitation does not work 100% with 100% of offenders. Antibiotics don't cure every bacterial illness in every patient either, but we're not about to abandon them and go back to bleeding sick people with leeches. Remember, rehabilitation is saving you money and making the public safer if it effects any reduction in recidivism.
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