Incapacitation Vs Rehabilitation Essay

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Prisons are generally thought of as a form of punishment for committing a crime and is meant to control the population, resulting in social stability. The four main concepts that depict the reasons behind prisons are retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation (Gilmore 2007:14).
Retribution and deterrence are closely linked. Retribution keeps functions to stop previous convicts from committing the crime again, based on their knowledge of the prison, and deterrence stops people from committing the crime in the first place because of stories told by released inmates. This is how these two concepts are intended to work, but statistics have not been favorable to this line of thought. According to Gilmore, “those jurisdictions that
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Rehabilitation seeks to reform the people who enter into prisons. Under rehabilitation, the prisons should provide “an occasion for the acquisition of sobriety and skills” (Gilmore 2007:14). Rehabilitation seeks to reform the prisoners into what society would deem a functional member of society. This concept would help to alleviate the stigma of the ex-prisoner because they would learn a skill and hopefully stay away drugs or alcohol. Incapacitation simply seeks to remove the offender from the general population, therefore they “cannot make trouble” (Gilmore 2007:14). Even though this is the simplest way of understanding the use of a prison, it has become the justification of a massive building project. With the increase of harsh laws, especially to minority groups, there has been a need for more prisons to house them. This feeds into the incapacitation concept and with the prisoners sitting idle in the prisons, there is no chance for rehabilitation. Therefore, when they leave the system they are not likely to find employment with a prison record and a period of time where they held no job.
Overall, the prison system as it is run currently seems to favor the incapacitation concept and does not work to deter people. People will still commit crimes for their own reasons and the thought of prison does not stop them from committing a crime. I think that what causes a person to commit

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