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by int_19h
2049 days ago
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It's very much the other way around. Prisons exist primarily to punish, and secondarily for isolation. But they were originally - as a concept - intended to be about rehabilitation. The end result is something that doesn't rehabilitate, is a very expensive way to punish someone in a way that makes it hard to control the severity of the punishment, and does a lot more than what's needed for simple isolation. On top of all that, it gets severely overused, not the least because of this broad assumption that it's "better than many of the alternatives", even when that's not actually true - in many cases, prison sentences that replaced one-off corporal punishments for minor crimes can be a lot more disruptive for the life of the person undergoing them. |
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