Punishment over treatment in criminal justice systems

¶ … prisons have vacillated between taking a primarily punitive approach to prison inmates and in looking for ways to treat the problems that brought them to that state. These cycles occur because often neither therapy nor punishment prevents inmates from repeating their patterns of crime once they are released. This may be partly because our prisons have not always completely thought the therapeutic process through, but it is also partly because of the nature of the types of people who end up in prison.

One of the types crimes the general public is most concerned about involves sexual attacks. The public knows that both pedophiles and rapists tend to repeat their behavior once released from prison. As a result, many prisons have therapeutic groups for sex offenders. In many cases, the participants choose to attend these groups (Swift, 1998). Research in Canada on the efficacy of these interventions gave startling results: the men who were most cooperative in the prison groups were the ones most likely to repeat their behavior as sexual predators when released from prison. Success in the therapy group correlated with sexual crimes when released.

The idea of including therapy groups in prison stemmed from experience with non-incarcerated people, where for both depression and eating disorders, those who cooperated with treatment had the best outcomes. What the prison reformers failed to note was that for people not in prison, the choice to go into therapy was a voluntary one. By comparison, many prisoners join treatment groups not because they want to get better but because they want to reduce the amount of time they serve (Swift, 1998). So, they acted like model participants. The prisoners who displayed more negative behavior in groups, such as refusing to write letters of apology to their victims or stomping out of group meetings in anger, actually repeated their crimes less often than those who superficially cooperated. Unfortunately, some participants played the game of a good participant but learned new ways to lure victims from other sexual offenders in the group (Swift, 1998).

What the researchers finally discovered was that while the most cooperative participants were slightly more likely to re-offend, those whose psychological profile showed them to be psychopaths -- those who don't care whether what they do is right or wrong -- were four times more likely to repeat their crimes when released (Swift, 1998).

Experts on prison programs acknowledge that many prisoners have serious mental health issues. According to one study, mania is nine times as common among prison inmates as among the general public, schizophrenia is six times as common, and depression is about five times as common (Lovell, 1998). Obviously, it is inhumane to ignore these problems and leave the individuals to suffer because they are prisoners. However, it may not be a valid assumption that because the person has a serious mental problem, that this mental problem caused the person to commit crimes and that treating the mental illness will result in a prisoner who does not commit new crimes when released.