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:
“So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Education.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)