Should prisons rehabilitate or punish?

This essay hasn't yet been marked by one of our teachers

You can view all our essays on Capital Punishment that have been Marked by Teachers

The first 200 words of this essay...

Should prisons rehabilitate or punish?

In this essay I will focus on whether law offenders sent to prison should be rehabilitated, punished or both. In my opinion I have a fairly bias view towards punishing the criminal as I feel that people do not have to be deviant yet some chose to be; however I will discuss both usefulness of rehabilitation and the disadvantages of this.

With doing research for this essay I noticed that the majority of crimes were committed by the poorest of society (tend to be more of the unemployed council house families) and such crimes committed by this part of society is frowned upon; yet a crime committed by someone higher in the social hierarchy is most uncommon (yet it does happen perhaps its not publicised as much due to the whole Marxist theory of the bourgeoisies exploiting the people below). The work of Clarke and Mayhew can help support this idea because they believed that delinquency are results of choice. With this in mind this theory from Clarke and Mayhew is an excellent perception of how crime is committed and is one reason as to why I think prisons should be