Can Prison Life Reform A Criminal?

An outsider's perspective on the inside culture.

by Roland Kriewaldt

If you were bullied in school as a child, then the "best years" of your life may have felt more like an endless, living nightmare. There is no shortage of social predators trying to boost their self-esteem or status at other people's expense. Now imagine a school of hard knocks where the concentration of bullies is much higher than their victims. That's what life may be like for many a convict serving time in prison.

How hardened and detached must one become under the constant threat of victimization? It's hard to imagine that reform is part of that equation when one's very life is at stake. Yet that is one of the impressions that we on the outside have of why criminals are in prisons: so that they will "get better." But do they? And at what?

In our efforts to make society appear to function properly, we have to close our eyes to many contradictions, hypocrisies and outright lies. Ironically, many are to be found within our justice systems.

Since the days of Al Capone, we have known that police forces can be even more corrupt than the criminals they claim to be protecting the public from. The police may be harboring drug and gun dealers, extortionists, pimps and worst of all — social bullies! We've also witnessed lawyers so hungry for money and advancement that they will protect criminals from incarceration at the cost of the next innocent victim. Another area of justice to which our eyes are closed are the prisons or "penitentiaries" where convicted criminals do their "penance".

The main reasons why criminals are sent to prison are:

1. To separate the "bully" from his next victim — whether it be a robber from the jewellery store, a rapist from women, or a drug dealer from his addicted customers, etc.
2. As punishment and revenge for the crimes the "bully" has already committed against his victims.
3. To reform or "correct" the behavior and reintegrate the "bully" back into our respectable, crime-free society.

The first reason — to separate the criminal from his/her next victim — is the proper use of social isolation for keeping the public safe from further harm. The second, using imprisonment as a form of punishment and revenge, is both a hypocritical and misguided use of justice. Why? Because revenge turns the oppressed into the oppressor; the punisher becomes the bully — perhaps even the murderer, or an accomplice, if a death sentence is carried out.

The minute a criminal is locked up, society is effectively protected and no further action is necessary. Our taxes pay for the bars that keep the convicted criminal out of public life. Therefore, no reason exists to kill that person, except our own rage, hatred or some other psychological imbalance. Ironically, we conveniently repackage these emotions as "justice" when our primal urges crave death to even the score.

So here we have a case of people within a free society acting out violently with the same emotions as those which are causing our prisons to fill up with perpetrators. As you can see, the world's a little confused at times. The rule seems to be "murder yes, but only under the right circumstances."

My greatest concern, however, is for the public's delusional ambitions that incarcerating criminals can somehow rehabilitate them; that being locked in a cage surrounded by criminals can somehow lead one to become a better person. Yet how is that possible?

And that brings us full circle, back to the bully scenario. Imagine yourself trapped twenty four hours a day for a span of two to twenty years in a prep school populated only by those who have beaten, robbed, stolen, murdered or raped others out of rage, hatred and some other psychological imbalance.

Add to that a world outside that fears and hates you, maybe even wants to kill you — whether it's justified or not. You have to work your way through the system (serve time) so that you can eventually graduate to being released among those who fear and hate you — or soon will, once they know you're an ex-con. Not a very inspiring homecoming, is it?

Are prisons truly designed for reforming criminals? They've certainly proven themselves effective in promoting the first two agendas of justice — isolation and revenge. But can such a tense, selfish, survival-based atmosphere promote a more empathetic and emotionally-balanced human being to exit? Not likely, given the constant negative reinforcement. In fact prisons are better known for helping to educate beginners in crime to become even better criminals. That's a poor investment in our collective future; where's the payoff?

A big rethink must take place if the "Department of Corrections" actually intends to correct a troubled life. There has to be an influx of therapeutic culture into the penitentiary regime. We must find methods and programs which not only heal the wounds and troubled minds of those who know not or care not what harm they've done, but which helps them understand that crime begins with an attitude that we take toward others: It begins with a conscious choice to lessen another person's importance for the sake of our own personal gain. And yet, isn't that a message that we constantly reinforce on the outside as well? How ironic.

Yes, a selfish, inconsequential attitude is one that many of us on the outside have difficulty shedding. What lesson, after all, do we learn by example from our multi-national corporations who unjustly rape and pillage our earth, its resources and the people? Beyond that, it is not the murderer who manufactures his or her own gun — it is the business person, the industrialist, who supplies us with the weapons of mass destruction with which we can lash out at one another in anger, fear and revenge as we do what we must to ensure our own gain.

And what of our governments who often unjustly send young men to their death in foreign lands, but first to kill other young men like them in that great organized genocide we call "warfare"?

There is still so much to heal, and forgive, on both sides of the fence. Let none of us think to judge ourselves better than our neighbour for we have not yet found a proper measure.