On Prison Reform
Sven Gelbhaar
9/21/2025
Prisons, or more abstractly: the Penal System, haven’t improved much in recent
years. We still lock people away who transgress against our legislated ethics
just once for 20+ years in some cases. These people are bored, lonely, scared,
cold, and foresaken for all of those years, surrounded by other transgressors
who perpetuate the attitude of criminality amongst one another in a lot of
cases. This system of preventing future crimes and transgressions doesn’t work
very well, as we see by the high rates of recidivism (a return to prison) in
most countries. But maybe there’s a cheaper, and better solution to all of
this.
Therapy works to fix the problem at its root. It aims to change the moral and
ethcal character of its subjects, to better adapt the patient/subject to their
(in this case: social) environments. If we were to show these prisoners the
error of their ways, by maybe putting them (psychologically) in the shoes of
their victims, then room for moral growth is very much possible. Ideally we’d
start this whole process by mandating legal classes in middle- to high-school
wherein we explain, philosophically, the necessity of all of these laws.
These teachings could be expanded upon after incarceration, where we tell these
transgressors the (potential) harm that they’re doing to other people, who
really are just like them and their loved ones.
A movie came out in the 70’s, called /A Clockwork Orange/, where this idea was
hypothesized. Only, in the movie, aversion therapy was the modus operandi of
the penal system. Psychology and Psychiatry have come a significantly long
way since this movie came out, with much better treatments than mere aversion
therapy. And as to those who still seek vengance, trust me: therapy can be
excrutiating (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in my case), so not to worry:
there’s still an element of punishment latent within this proposed idea of
prison reform.
Ideally, and this is just a framework, when a person is legally convicted of
a crime, they’d be separated from society and offered therapy as a way to
lessen, if not completely replace, their punishment. The idea is to prevent
future crimes from being commissioned, and if we heal the mindsets, and there-
fore the future actions, of these people, then we’ve fixed the problem.
Anything less than this is punishment for the sake of vengance, and is not
in keeping with our better natures.