Prison Reforms and Alternatives
Proposals for prison reform and proposed alternatives to prisons differ significantly depending on the political beliefs behind them. Proposals and tactics often include:
- Penal system reforms:
- Substituting incarceration with supervised release, probation, restitution to victims, or community work.
- Decreasing terms of imprisonment by abolishing mandatory minimum sentencing
- Decreasing ethnic disparity in prison populations
- Prison condition reforms
- Crime prevention rather than punishment
- Abolition of specific programs which increase prison population, such as the prohibition of drugs (e.g. War on Drugs), gun control, prohibition of prostitution, and alcohol restrictions.
- Education programs to inform people who have never been in prison about the problems
- Fighting individual cases of wrongful conviction
Read more about this topic: Prison Abolition Movement
Famous quotes containing the words prison, reforms and/or alternatives:
“People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don’t know where to go.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”
—J.B.S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)