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Ethics in Society

Prison Doesn’t Work

Stuart Greenstreet on the abysmal failure of theories about crime and punishment.

Prison doesn’t work. Theories about the punishment of lawbreakers fail in practice because they disregard the real conditions of people’s lives.

The apparatus of criminal justice exists to secure a society in which everyone is free to do pretty well as they wish so long as they don’t inhibit others from doing as they wish – provided, that is, that we all obey the law. Nevertheless, prison does not work for the great majority of offenders because all the evidence shows that far from cutting the level of crime, prison actually increases it. I display some facts about offenders’ lives in the panels below.

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