A lot of people focus on just rehabilitation, whatever that means to them. But that alone isn’t workable.
There needs to be a much better system in prisons that teaches job skills. Focus on skills that have jobs open to those with records. Electrical work, welding, basic computer and customer service phone skills, CNA or medical assistant, so many more possible trades.
You literally have a captive audience for a year or more, there is no reason why you shouldn’t have them leaving with marketable job skills unless they absolutely just refuse to participate in any learning.
At the same time prison also needs to be a place that absolutely sucks to be, every single day. Like “when I get out of here I will never do anything to come back” horrible. Now we do a bad job of creating that environment and it’s that way now for many of the wrong reasons, but that same can be achieved in a better way.
It must be that way for multiple reasons. First, it will serve to push people to participate in the opportunities for training and rehabilitation offered and to take them seriously.
Second, there is a very large percentage of the prison population for who there is no rehabilitation. I think a lot of people who focus on on the idea of rehabilitation are just not aware of what the segment of society is like, and have likely lived lives privledged enough to just never be exposed to it to any degree.
But for these people there isn’t any rehabilitation. Maybe there will Be later in life, but not at any point soon. The best way to describe them sounds harsh, but they are for a lack of a better term “feral humans”. They have zero regard for morality, no regard for the law, and no care who they harm. They typically drift through life only caring about their next meal, next drink or chance to get high and next chance to get laid. And they don’t care what it takes to get there. And some of them hide it a little better and rise in place in society as executives and people of power but with the same disregard, only doing just enough to stay out of prison.
The only way to motivate these people to not behave in a way that harms society and the people around them is to make the punishment so harsh they don’t want to return and that fear of returning is enough to override the desire to harm others to easily meet their immediate desires and instead do it in an honest way.
For those without any experience to the kind of people I’m talking about, their attitudes woudlnseem foriegn and hard to grasp when it comes to the threat of jail or prison. The best analogy I’ve seen is to compare the relationship they have with the justice system and prison to the way a small business owner deals with the IRS. The small business owner wants to pay as little in the way of taxes as possible, but knows there must be some paid and sees them as a necessary evil. These career criminal types view jail and prison the same- a cost of doing business. And just like the fear of harsh penalties and harsh punishment keeps them from cheating the system and their level of comfort toelrating risk determines how much they push the line on their accounting to accept what they pay and what they deduct, legal or not, the criminals make a similar judgement regarding what they are willing to risk in punishment.
The harsher the punishment, the less likely the behavior. A good example of this is where states and cities have partnered with Federal prosecutors to combat gun crime by referring every felon caught with a gun to be prosecuted in the Federal system, where there are harsher penalties, you get sent to prisons far away, and there is no parole. The punishment for that particular crime goes up and the rate of people committing it goes down.
So you need a mix- a system that gives those that can be saved to become productive members of society a chance to come out prepared to do so but also a system so uncomfortable to be in that it pushes as many of those people inclined to never be safe, productive members of society into at least being marginally so out of fear of returning.
And of course for some there just isn’t any redeeming them. For whatever combination of factors they are just never going to be people we want in society because they will always be a danger to harm others in one form or another. In those cases all you can do is keep giving them their chances until they pile up enough to get locked away long term.
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