Question 8 - Does prison work?

It'll be tricky to get too many jokes into this one. And I dread to think what advertisements Google is going to see fit to put next to these words.

Firstly (and most easily), I'll answer the question literally. Most prisons successfully imprison most of their prisoners until the end of their sentences and so, at least in one way, prison works as a mechanism for keeping people out of society and in a place of less comfort.

Obviously that's not what the questioner was hoping to get so let's break the question down into sections. I should stress at this point that I have done no research whatsoever and so what follows is a combination of my own prejudices and some questions for you, dear reader, to roll around for yourselves.

Deterrent
To state the obvious, deterrents only work if people are afraid (or otherwise averse) to encountering them. A person with a loving family, an enjoyable and reasonably paid job, a well-appointed home and a season ticket for the local football ground is not going to want to lose all of the above as punishment for a crime. This, even without morals to stop misbehaviour, is going to be a strong factor against transgression.

Someone with none of the above (or nothing to lose as common parlance and rubbishy films would put it) is less likely to be bothered about prison and may, in fact, relish free bed and board for a period of time.

Protection
As the hysterical tabloids would tell you, society needs to be protected from criminals by their being locked up in secure places. Some feel the need to reverse the situation by living in gated communities, thereby effectively imprisoning themselves against the screaming hordes or, as they probably see it, imprisoning the rest of the world while keeping the nice part (i.e. their street) as the free bit.

If we can successfully identify the dangerous people and put them into prisons then society is indeed protected from them. Unfortunately, this normally involves waiting until they've already done something horrible to some poor sod. Given that the alternatives are draconian at least, if not Orwellian at most, we normally wait to check that people really are horrible rather than just look like they're about to be.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am conflating prison with secure hospitals. If anyone would like to pose the interesting question of 'bad or mad?', please do so separately. But hurry - only ninety-two more free questions before you'd have to pay me one pound for the answer.

Rehabilitation
Do people come out prison better than they went in? I fear the answer to this one is unsatisfying. Some do, some don't. Some will learn new trades, see the error of their ways or even (Lord help us) find religion. Some will learn better ways to be a crook in the hope that, once out, they can be bad more effectively and evade capture.

In conclusion
Yes, prison works but needs to be used in conjunction with other techniques depending on the nature of the crime and the psychological make-up of the perp.

Community service is much more useful to society overall than putting someone in a box for a number of years but this disregards the deterrent and protection aspects of prison which are strong factors. Facing victims can be character changing but then some criminals have a poorly developed sense of empathy so could probably breeze through such encounters without it touching them.

No easy answers here - but then I suspect you probably knew that was what you were going to get. Congratulations if you read this far - give yourself a biscuit.