Benutzer:Woozle/No Prison: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

== Prison Problems ==  

Expansion and acceptance are only one side of the coin, though. We should not ignore the other one, either - that of the shortcomings and the real (human and material) costs of prison. To begin with the shortcomings, we have to scratch the surface - and we will find a list of unkept promises ranging from unsatisfactory offender rehabilitation over questions regarding incapacitation all the way to the limits of deterrence.  

As far as rehabilitation is concerned, the history of the prison has been built upon a truly tragic illusion. The fundamental idea behind the Philadelphia penitentiary and its method of solitary confinement for all prisoners from day one until their release was utterly flawed from the start.  

Inspired by medieval monasteries the idea was to isolate prisoners from all contacts and thereby direct their attention to their own conscience and the search for salvation. But this parallel was a misconception. Even monks were not confined to their cells 24 hours a day. Their voluntary segregation from the world did not hinder them to have a gratifying and productive community life within the walls - praying, singing, worshipping, talking, eating and drinking together. And it was this part of the monastery that the cell prison did not replicate. The Pennsylvanian invention of the penitentiary with its principle of sensory deprivation had to drive inmates into desorientation, depression, insanity, and suicide. To think that the single-cell prison could serve as an efficient instrument of rehabilitation was a "petrified giant error" from the start (Schmidt 1961: 5) - but that did not hinder its expansion over the whole globe in the wake of 19th and 20th century colonialism and imperialism.

Offender rehabilitation was and still is the most noble and the least effective of the prison's purposes. The endless story of reform attempts are an impressive manifestation of both the seriousness and the futility of those efforts. After the separate system came the silent system Auburn style, followed by the so-called progressive or Irish system and its diverse ramifications all the way to the idea that what prisoners really needed was psychological treatment so they would be "healed" at the time they went throgh the prison gates and back into society. But in the end, nothing worked to a sufficient degree. The treatment ideology's idea of training people for liberty in custody has now exhausted itself. As experienced observers have pointed out again and again, there is simply no proof that constructive treatment is possible under the conditions of deprivation of liberty (cf. Busch 1986).  

The penitentiary had been greeted with enthusiasm by theoreticians and practicioners alike. Over time, though, the promise of the prison had to give way to a deep and general disillusionment. Once believed to be something like a panacea to delinquency in that it was both humane to the convict and effective in protecting society, contemporary descriptions of the reality of mass incarceration make it hard to believe that the difficulties by which the prison system is beset could ever be resolved by reform. There is no way to bridge the gap between the rehabilitative ideal on the one hand and the abusive and degrading reality of life in most of the world's prison systems.  

=== Incapacitation ===