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:
“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums ... who find prison so soul-destroying.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“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)
“The last alternatives they face
Of face, without the life to save,
Being from all salvation weaned
A stag charged both at heel and head:
Who would come back is turned a fiend
Instructed by the fiery dead.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)