The question I want to answer today is: are prisons a way to punish criminals, or a way to rehabilitate and re-integrate an individual in modern society? Even though different people have different opinions, I think that prison should serve many different purposes.
First of all, prison is often a place for people that committed serious, heinous crimes. Modern court procedures take time and resources in order to divide inmates by the level of crimes they committed. Prison also serves as a place of isolation, and people that came here do deserve to face consequences for their actions. And even if in some cases people can be released earlier than others, I believe that some people deserve to be punished for actions they committed against another human being. Therefore, prisoners are held responsible for law-breaking acts, justice is supposed to be served, and society is protected from deviant individuals.
However, today’s prisons also have to serve a variety of different new roles, including rehabilitation and mistrial victims protection. Modern experience from Nordic countries shows that for inmates to serve a sentence in more humane conditions is essential in order to return to normal life once they are released from prison. Additionally, not all crimes are equally evil, and even modern courts are not perfect just. Nowadays, there are known cases of abuse of power, corruption, or negligence. Giving potential victims of the judiciary system humane conditions is also very important to me.
In the end, having more humane conditions in prison provides more advantages than disadvantages: it preemptively prevents inmates from returning to criminal life after being released, it protects possible victims of mistrials, and it seems to result in an overall decrease in the amount of violence in society.