[Livia]

Originally Posted by swinearefine

Good. I think society places too much importance on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Normally living in a good environment and acquiring skills to transition into a crime-free life on the outside produce the lowest recidivism rates. Where I live they once did a program that allowed prisoners to earn bachelor's degrees and the focus was on achieving that rather than punishing them for their crimes, and not one of the prisoners in the program returned to jail after they were released.

Surely what this teaches us is this: work hard and pay your way, take out a student loan it will take you years to pay off and study. Or... become a criminal, rob or beat someone, or break into their home or steal their car or maybe even rape or murder someone... and not only get it all paid for on the taxpayer,but also study in an environment where you're not going to have to work as well to be able to eat and buy books.

Spend the money that would be put into making prisoners' lives comfortable into schools and education, because if there's one thing the majority of prisoners have in common it's a lack of education and opportunity. Waiting until they've committed a crime to give them an education sounds ridiculous to me.