Prison Rehabilitation In The Shawshank Redemption

Prison is not a friendly place. Knowing that point, does prison have to be a place where one’s life comes to an end? In the United States, there is an incarceration rate of almost 700 people to every 100,000 people; this means the United States has the highest prison population in the world; over a period of ten years (2000-2010), the number of prisoners has increased from 1.937 million to almost 2.3 million (www.prisonstudies.org). Looking at The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the viewers see the elements of prison rehabilitation and incarceration at work. Unfortunately, for many of the prison bound, most tend to stay in prison. As seen through analyzing The Shawshank Redemption, getting rehabilitated to adapt to the outside world, and breaking …show more content…
Such was the case with Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption, who was the picture of a collected man when he was in prison, but broke down when he was released. Red Redding, a central character from the film, mentioned “These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That 's institutionalized.” The prisoners in the film do different forms of labor in the prison, but do not receive any sort of training to better themselves as people so they don’t end up in prison again. As a result of this lack of person building, when prisoners leave the facility, they end up worse off than they were before they entered; because they have a complete lack of real world skills, this makes former prisoners woefully unprepared for jobs professionally, and therefore, unprepared to be in the society they were cut off from. Brooks had been in Shawshank for almost fifty years, and the prison never took the steps to properly reintegrate him into society. As a result, he couldn’t handle being outside the prison he’d grown accustomed to. Being in Shawshank became a necessity for him to …show more content…
Looking at the recidivism (re-arrest) rates in a study done in the years 2005-2010, we can see that about two-thirds of released state prisoners were re-arrested for a new crime within three years of release, and about three-fourths were arrested within five years (www.bjs.gov). It can be assumed that the high rate of recidivism can be tied to the efforts of our prison’s poor rehabilitation process, thus, prisoners who go out aren’t prepared for what’s outside the prison. This leads to a cycle of people going in and out of prison. While Brooks wasn’t a repeat offender, he still fits in with the idea that prisons don’t usually prepare their inmates for a life outside of prison. A lot of people end up in a situation like Brooks, drastically unprepared, and potentially lost when they do get