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This is an important book.
Why prison?
At the outset it seems obvious. We have prisons becausewe have crime. We have prisons also because we want to stop or at least reduce crime. But as David Scott shows in the opening chapter of this book, it is not so simple. There is an unclear relationship between prison and crime. Prisons have something to do with crime, but it is not clear how the two interact.The question of
why prison? becomes all the more thorny when we go into detail. From a large number of empirical studies, we know that recidivism from standard prisons (and most prisons are standard or less) is very great despite attempts at rehabilitation. This holds for old as well as new attempts; from the Nothing works period of the 1970s to the What works period of our own time (Mathiesen, 2011). Prisons are generally a fiasco. Why, then, do we keep on?
Why prison?
Via ThePlanetaryArchives/BlackHorseMedia - San Francisco
