There is just something irresistible about a good advice column. Whether or not the problem being discussed has anything to do with your life and your issues, it sucks you into a delightfully entertaining game of devil’s advocate.
New York Times’ “ethicist” Randy Cohen enters into exactly one such debate when he responds to a local bookseller’s inquiry about filling orders for incarcerated persons by mail. This particular employee feels inclined to fill orders and send literature to most inmates, on the grounds that “reading might in some way better them,” however is interested in a refusal to fill orders by inmates classified as “sex offenders” because, according to this individual, sex offenders “should rot in a cell with nothing but the walls to occupy them.”
Cohen gives an astute response about professionalism and negates this individual’s grounds for refusing to sell books to customers based on moral grounds: “Your duty is to provide books to anyone who walks (or writes) in to the store, not to determine a person’s worthiness to read.”
Well said.
However, there are now other, larger issues to consider embedded within this person’s inquiry, tangential to the sorting out of this one claim from L.T. in Ohio. Namely, is incarceration intended to punish or rehabilitate? Can it do both? And how is the general public involved in either of these two processes, anyway?
There are indeed volumes dedicated to answering these questions, so for the purposes of being brief, a possible starting place for current students at ASU, here and now, is simply to consider the idea that it is difficult to punish only one person when prison is concerned.
According to the University of Virginia, 75 percent of women currently incarcerated in the U.S. have one or more children and parents are more likely to be incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses than they are for violent crimes (like sexual offenses).
In general, people are usually pretty good at punishing themselves, particularly when taken away from society and their children and placed in hellish labyrinths of concrete. What people are not good at doing on their own is redefining the habits and thinking that land them in places like prison.
Would you rather have your mother or father come home from prison well rehabilitated or well punished?
Prison education, cognitive therapy and substance abuse treatment initiatives are all pushing for funding and permission to work in prisons but aren’t getting too far, and at this point in time are unable to fulfill their objectives within the prison system.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that in California, nearly two-thirds of parolees return to prison within three years. If this continues, prisons are only going to be more crowded and turn out increasing amounts of repeat visitors.
You may not like the idea of spending tax dollars to improve the quality and extent of rehabilitation programs in prisons now, but the alternative is to encourage the continuation of the aforementioned cycle and to return to society individuals who don’t have the skills to stay out of prison.
Let’s not put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. Let’s commit to reforming prisons as places of rehabilitation.
Weigh in with your prison related inquiries and responses at anna.bethancourt@asu.edu
