Rehabilitation: Benefit and promotion

Prison is a place where people are taken if they commit a crime and a been convicted in a court of law. Prison is a correctional facility that helps to correct criminals from their mistakes and lead them to the right path. But many occasions, if prisoners serve their prison sentence, they tend to commit another crime after sometimes. With this situation, there is a need for a rehabilitation program.

It may be better to rehabilitate prisoners to enhance their mental health, learn from their mistakes, and eventually be able to return to society. We need to ask the question of why individuals have ended up in prisons in the first place and what led them there. It is a necessity and not a luxury that prisoners should be offered medical treatment if they are unwell- it is only humane after all. Just because a physical symptom cannot be seen, doesn’t mean there isn’t a psychological problem present, preventing them from connecting with society and leading a normal life. This emotional separation from society leads to them committing crimes and not caring about the consequences of their actions to others in society. The underlying causes are complex. ‘Poverty, parental neglect, low self-esteem, alcohol, and drug abuse can be connected to why people break the law. Also, some are at greater risk of becoming offenders because of the circumstances in which they were born. According to the US Department of Justice, it says ‘today, somewhere between 15-20% of people in prison are mentally ill’. If these mental health issues were addressed in prison, the offender would be able to understand the crime they have committed, and learn from it, allowing them to progress and be rehabilitated; gaining skills for the workplace to better equip them to rejoin society. ‘Of those who took a full-length rehabilitation course, 83% fewer returned to jail within a year, in contrast to a group of men who did not partake in the program. The poll was taken of prisoners reoffending after a rehabilitation course is a solid confirmation that addressing the underlying problem of the offender has a positive effect. It reduces the effect of recidivism and also helps the offender become a normal member of society and can relate to others in the community and so care for them. So I believe that rehabilitation is key. If prisoners are rehabilitated they turn a new leaf as a result of the program which makes them feel among in the society. Once out of the prison, they easily adapt to in the community they come from or the place they find themselves.

‘Two-thirds of prisons in England and Wales are overcrowded, Government figures have revealed’. This statement sparks the debate as to whether prisoners should be released following rehabilitation, to solve the problem of overcrowding in prisons. However, this is only one of the myriad of reasons why a prisoner should be rehabilitated. Another is to address the problem of why the individual has ended up in prison in the first place- is it their mental state of mind? For example, drug use, physical and emotional abuse, and poverty are all factors that lead to this. Is it fair to impart blame on them for the crime that they have committed if there is a correlation between their unhealthy state of mind and their crimes? The criminal will therefore have an emotional detachment to the community and hence doesn’t care what their actions may cause, so they must be rehabilitated; gaining skills that they are able to use in the workplace and this, in turn, will reduce recidivism. There is always overcrowding in the prison across the world. Rehabilitation by definition is ‘to return someone to a good, healthy, or normal life or condition after they have been in prison, been very ill, etc. Therefore if prisoners are to be released into society, it must be safe for the public, and hence they must be rehabilitated as well as to reduce recidivism. Punishment can be defined as ‘the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense. Punishment is used as a deterrent for criminals reoffending and as compensation to victims and their families, but is it really effective? Should we be looking at the bigger picture and seek out what is beneficial to society? Should the level of crime affect whether the criminal is punished or rehabilitated? Can a murderer be rehabilitated or only a petty thief?

It is important to rehabilitate prisoners for the safety of the community. ‘95% of individuals sentenced to prison eventually return to their communities- they will become your neighbors’. Therefore it is vital that the community feels safe and is safe and this can only be achieved by rehabilitation and the offender has a healthy state of mind as a result. Martin Luther King Jr said ‘darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that’. This statement shows that an offender that has committed a crime should not just be punished and left to rot in a jail, but you can show them, love, by caring about their wellbeing and this is through rehabilitation. ‘By fixing the route of the problem, being the psychological behavior, then crime would significantly decrease’. This statement shows that rehabilitation is the only way to achieve this as the offender will understand the crime he has committed and feels remorse. This in turn will make the community feel safer if the offender is sorry for their crimes. Safety is of the utmost importance to society. Without it, we would be scared to leave our homes and it is understandable as tax-paying and law-abiding citizens, that people have the right to refuse criminals from rejoining society. However, morally we have an obligation to society to help people such as those who are mentally ill, so rehabilitation is a way to do this. There is a need for increased rehabilitation in the world prison in order to reduce the high rate of crime in the world.