Concept
Prison reform
Overview
Prison reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, improve the effectiveness of a penal system, reduce recidivism or implement alternatives to incarceration. It also focuses on ensuring the reinstatement of those whose lives are impacted by crimes.
In modern times, the idea of making living spaces safe and clean has extended from the civilian population to include prisons, based on ethical grounds. It is recognized that unsafe and unsanitary prisons violate constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. In recent times prison reform ideas include greater access to legal counsel and family, conjugal visits, proactive security against violence, and implementing house arrest with assistive technology.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
To this coarser sense of justice a merely quantitative gradation of punishment is not satisfactory; the punishment must rather be made to correspond qualitatively with the crime that has been committed. Hence the many different modes of prison punishment--more numerous even than the modes of inflicting the death penalty--and of the means of torture, which are often conceived with devilish cunning. These means of…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Close in meaning to Prison reform; the term itself is not named.
Reform, reform, all men see and feel, is imperatively needed. Reform must either be got, and speedily, or else we die: and nearly all the men that speak, instruct us, saying, "Have you quite done your interesting Negroes in the Sugar Islands? Rush to the Jails, then, O ye reformers; snatch up the interesting scoundrel-population there, to them be nursing-fathers and nursing-mothers.
Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets
Close in meaning to Prison reform; the term itself is not named.
Penal laws are, or ought to be, those motives which experience has shewn capable of restraining the inordinate passions of man, or of annihilating the impulse these passions give to his will; from whatever necessary cause man may derive these passions, the legislator proposes to arrest their effect, when he takes suitable means, when he adopts proper methods, he is certain of success. The Judge, in decreeing to…
Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1
Close in meaning to Prison reform; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Family
- French Revolution
- Human rights
- Women's rights
- Joseph Stalin
- Democracy in America
- President of the United States
- Richard Nixon
- The New York Times
- Victorian era
- Freedom of religion
- Quakers
- Donald Trump
- Bolsheviks
- Workhouse
- Charles Dickens
- Europe
- Prison
Place in the tradition
Part of Liberalism.