Punishment Over Treatment Term Paper

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prisons have vacillated between taking a primarily punitive approach to prison inmates and in looking for ways to treat the problems that brought them to that state. These cycles occur because often neither therapy nor punishment prevents inmates from repeating their patterns of crime once they are released. This may be partly because our prisons have not always completely thought the therapeutic process through, but it is also partly because of the nature of the types of people who end up in prison.

One of the types crimes the general public is most concerned about involves sexual attacks. The public knows that both pedophiles and rapists tend to repeat their behavior once released from prison. As a result, many prisons have therapeutic groups for sex offenders. In many cases, the participants choose to attend these groups (Swift, 1998). Research in Canada on the efficacy of these interventions gave startling results: the men who were most cooperative in the prison groups were the ones most likely to repeat their behavior as sexual predators when released from prison.

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Success in the therapy group correlated with sexual crimes when released.

The idea of including therapy groups in prison stemmed from experience with non-incarcerated people, where for both depression and eating disorders, those who cooperated with treatment had the best outcomes. What the prison reformers failed to note was that for people not in prison, the choice to go into therapy was a voluntary one. By comparison, many prisoners join treatment groups not because they want to get better but because they want to reduce the amount of time they serve (Swift, 1998). So, they acted like model participants. The prisoners who displayed more negative behavior in groups, such as refusing to write letters of apology to their victims or stomping out of group meetings in anger, actually repeated their crimes less often than those who superficially cooperated. Unfortunately, some participants played the….....

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