The Prison's Role In Crime Prevention By Austin Maccormick

When we think about prisons, we envisage a four-walled room where the inmates are neatly dressed in stripped black and orange attire, and from where it is impossible to escape. Our thoughts need to be amplified in this regard because there is something more beyond this. The real prisons are actually 10’ x 10’ rooms with toilet implanted in the same place, and a bunch of weak and hallucinating people with sorrowful stories. There is an acute lack of hygiene and a dearth of even basic requirements to live. For some people, prisons are places where criminals are locked up to prevent from committing other offenses. Others believe that the prison as it is unfair and is not helpful in reducing crimes. Therefore the prison system should be abolished …show more content…
Jail is, by definition, a facility in which convicts are compulsorily constricted and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the nation as a form of punishment (Williams par 30). Hence, one is indeed stopped from committing crimes since he/she is locked away, far from society, and so does not have a chance to reoffend. “The Prison's Role in Crime Prevention” is an article written by Austin MacCormick, and extracted from Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. In this critique, the author stresses that, “It is high time it were more generally recognized that the prison is more than an instrument of society's retributive vengeance, (…) that we penologists are not zoo-keepers but men and women engaged in a delicate and difficult salvage operation” (MacCormick par 2). Indeed, it is obvious that society is protected from the inmate’s chances of crimes once he is deliberately stopped from preventing one. While locking him up may solve the problems he may personally trigger, however, it is not going to solve the problem of crime in general. Punishment is necessary for purposes of justice because without that, wrongdoers would get away with no responsibility for their actions, as acute or drastic as they may be. Thus one can only imagine the possible results if the perpetrator is not held accountable for his actions. Not only would he get away with murder easily, but he would also feel free to repeat whatever crime he once did, without taking his actions into account since they are uncontrolled. Altogether, one cannot simply overlook a criminal’s actions by not even trying to stop him. That is why a judicial system is crucial in any