From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Wed Dec 02 1998 - 04:32:16 MST
On Mon, Nov 30, 1998 at 01:38:49PM -0800, Paul Hughes wrote:
>
> The fact that today, prisons are:
>
> 1) Overpopulated with non-violent drug users.
> 2) Admittedly designed by prison architects to disorient criminals.
> 3) And run as a means to punish, rather than rehabilitate.
>
> I'd say the prisons have absolutely no desire to rehabilitate anyone; and in fact are
> the chief *cause* of crime, not a deterrent. If we spent half the money on education,
> we do now on prisons, this supposed "high crime" rate we see today would be seen as
> the joke that it really is.
An important recent study by the British Home Office concluded that
something like 80% of the people in prisons in the UK for non-drug-related
crimes had serious learning difficulties -- dyslexia was very common. They
conducted a trial of basic literacy classes, and were astonished to
discover a two-thirds drop in recidivism among prisoners who they taught
to read. Given the cost of keeping people in prison that strikes me
as being an extremely cost-effective treatment! While it's obviously
not a global panacea, it got enough interest that the Home Office --
who for the past few years have been tending towards the American "lock
'em up and keep 'em in prison" penal pattern -- has begun looking into
extended trials of this type.
(A possible mechanism which suggests itself is that today's society is
literacy-oriented; if you can't fill out forms at the DSS office you
can't get any social security support, if you can't fill out forms you
can't get a bank account, if you can't fill out forms you can't get
a job. If illiteracy is a major impediment to life in civil society,
it is not unreasonable to expect some illiterate people to turn to less
formal means of supporting themselves. If this _is_ a major cause of crime,
then we can actually do a lot of crime prevention work in primary school,
and massively improve the recidivism rate for those people who end up in
prison.)
As a side-issue, I seem to recall that South Africa was a television-free
zone until comparatively recently -- 1976 springs to mind -- and when
TV appeared, the crime rate doubled within a decade. Anyone else recall
any figures of this kind? Any association between TV uptake, declines
in literacy, and increasing crime rates welcome ...
-- Charlie
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