As someone who has never been to prison and not worked in any part of the legal system, my opinion holds limited weight.
But I believe prisons were originally designed to act as dissuasion against bad behavior from regular folk, and a form of quarantine for more violent or harmful people. I think they've since turned into some horrible form of daycare for adults who don't know how to be adults, and which makes no effort to improve the lives of inmates because it has no incentive to.
Meaningful jobs have diminished to the point that someone who didn't make it through high school will have an extremely difficult time finding success in life (and those who did will boast so loudly about it that you'd think anyone could do it). Entire communities in low-income neighborhoods have developed where people have no idea what to do with their lives. I think a lot of other-wise decent and well-meaning individuals get arrested for stealing or public intoxication or whatnot because they have no idea what they should be doing with their time.
One story that has stuck out to me over the years is that of a kid who was a hero in 2013 for rescuing a young girl, and by 2016 he was sentenced to prison for armed robbery [1].
Prisons themselves don't get any funding if nobody's going to prison, so they have a perverse incentive where they want people to go to jail.
But I believe prisons were originally designed to act as dissuasion against bad behavior from regular folk, and a form of quarantine for more violent or harmful people. I think they've since turned into some horrible form of daycare for adults who don't know how to be adults, and which makes no effort to improve the lives of inmates because it has no incentive to.
Meaningful jobs have diminished to the point that someone who didn't make it through high school will have an extremely difficult time finding success in life (and those who did will boast so loudly about it that you'd think anyone could do it). Entire communities in low-income neighborhoods have developed where people have no idea what to do with their lives. I think a lot of other-wise decent and well-meaning individuals get arrested for stealing or public intoxication or whatnot because they have no idea what they should be doing with their time.
One story that has stuck out to me over the years is that of a kid who was a hero in 2013 for rescuing a young girl, and by 2016 he was sentenced to prison for armed robbery [1].
Prisons themselves don't get any funding if nobody's going to prison, so they have a perverse incentive where they want people to go to jail.
[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/temar-boggs-hero-t...