March is Criminal Justice month and while this post is late to the punch to reflect on the meaning of this designation for that month it’s never too late to reflect on the meaning of what mass incarceration says about us as a society. In this vein NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) commemorated the month by sharing stories of those impacted both by mental illness and the criminal justice system.
With this in mind, given the “tenets” described in this post, the only honest action of the industry, public or private, referred to as “corrections” is rehabilitation. Any other action, intended or “in effect” (as a result of flaws inherent in the system) is fundamentally wasteful and dishonest.
While detention of humans in “correctional facilities,” i.e., prisons, is warranted where harm to others is otherwise likely, relative to the severity of crimes committed, the only honest endeavors of correctional facilities and institutions can be rehabilitation because, otherwise, it is punishment. If all “crime” comes from crimes committed against us by others, in childhood, etc., then punishment is, simply, a re-enactment of the same cycle of abuse.
I would expect that those, from a political perspective, most often associated with strict attitudes toward the “proper” roles of correctional facilities and institutions in society would agree given the enormous expenditures of wasteful “correctional” practices.
But, then again, what is rehabilitation?
Observations from the Brink 