a new modest proposal
In the west, we’ve long regarded flogging as barbaric. Imposing a prison sentence is much more humane, right? However, in the earlier days of the prison system, Charles Dickens was far from sanguine: ‘I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body’.
In the USA the size and growth of the prison population is alarming by any measure. As Peter Moskos writes in this thought-provoking article, something’s got to give. So we should ask ourselves – especially considering the ‘pack em and stack em’ approach of certain Australian governments – who’s profiting from this system? Who benefits? Whatever happened to prison and prisoner reform? How can we do things in a better way for all concerned?
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