By Mandy Stussman ‘14

What’s the purpose of incarceration? Prison should punish, agreed. It should prove to criminals that there are consequences for their actions, and make them pay for whatever they did. However, prison should do much more than punish. It should be a place for rehabilitation, labor and education. Prisoners need to relearn how to be law-abiding citizens and function in society.

The United States needs a drastic prison reform. According to the PEW center on the states, the number of inmates who return to prison within three years of release has remained more than 43 percent for the past decade, a strong indicator that prison systems are failing to deter criminals from re-offending. Prison conditions in the United States are harmful, abusive, degrading, and damaging. For example, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, an estimated 216,000 inmates were sexually assaulted in 2008 while serving time, by other inmates, staff or both, compared to 90,479 rape cases outside of prison. A person cannot be expected to change for the better in a place teeming with fear and violence.

The solution? The re-appropriation of money. The priorities of the criminal justice system in this country are misguided. For example, from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled, due partly to the development in many states of “three-strike” bills that require mandatory and extended periods of incarceration to people who have been convicted of felonies on three or more separate occasions. These laws, along with similar ones mandating increased sentences, were adopted throughout the 1990s in an attempt to decrease crime.

These laws, however, have proved to be ineffective and a massive waste of taxpayers’ money. The total cost per inmate averages about $31,286 per year, according to a study conducted by the Center on Sentencing and Corrections. With four times the prisoners, the government spends four times the money. If these bills requiring mass incarceration were repealed, the United States government could pour that money into bettering prisons’ educational facilities, living conditions, safety features (including video surveillance), and medical facilities, especially drug rehabilitation centers.

The facts are compelling: take Norway, for example. The Norwegian government has one of the most lenient criminal justice systems in the world. The maximum sentence in Norway, even for murder, is 21 years. Since most inmates will eventually return to society, prisons mimic the outside world as much as possible to prepare inmates for freedom. Prisoners are given personal laptops, private rooms and exercise facilities. They go to school or work from eight in the morning to eight at night, and the rest of the day is their own. And Norway has one of the lowest prison return rates in the world, at 20 percent. Compare that to the United States, the highest rate in the world, more than double that of Norway.

Though the benefits Norwegian prisoners are given may conflict with popular demand in the United States for strict punishment, the reality is that in 2011, only 8 percent of Americans in federal prisons were convicted for violent offenses, according to a study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Criminals are not all heartless murderers, and deserve a chance to get back on their feet. They deserve the protection of their basic human rights and dignities. Prisoners should be treated like people.

To reform prisons, state governments must first repeal these draconian laws that have proved ineffective after two decades, and use the excess money saved by fewer incarcerations to protect and educate prisoners, so they can learn how to function in the world beyond the confinement of prison.