Misconceptions of Prison Rehabilitation by Progressives.

Journalist Bill Keller’s recent book poses the question, “What’s Prison For?” While the author doesn’t provide a direct answer, the book focuses heavily on rehabilitation, suggesting that prisoner reform should be the primary goal. However, achieving this goal seems nearly impossible for most of the prison population, even in Scandinavia, which is often held up as a model of progressive incarceration.

While rehabilitation is a noble aspiration, it’s important to recognize that prisoners must be internally motivated to change. They must want to live a clean life and obey the law. Unfortunately, achieving this mindset is extremely difficult in prison, which is built around security and suspicion, hardly a therapeutic environment.

“The significance of this distinction is that, as Keller recognizes, prisoners do not truly reform until they are ready to change.”

Some European countries have redesigned their prisons to reduce mistrust between guards and inmates, provide dorm-like facilities, and offer work and therapeutic interventions. However, it’s unlikely that the United States can replicate these facilities due to our much larger and more violent prison population. For example, Norway has only 2,900 prisoners, while New York State alone has 30,000 prisoners convicted of violent felonies.

Moreover, our inmate populations, especially in large states, are dominated by racial and ethnic gangs, making it difficult to deliver rehabilitation programs. The Europeans do not have this problem. Additionally, the best metric for measuring the success of European prisons, recidivism rates, is not significantly better than in the United States.

“We should not give up on these young men. We should give them the chance to turn their lives around. But we should have no illusions about the likelihood of success.”

While some prison interventions, such as cognitive behavioral programs, seem effective, most inmates are unprepared for school and must want to learn for voluntary programs to be effective. Ultimately, achieving prisoner rehabilitation is a