Crime rates has been drastically increasing especially in bigger cities and some underdeveloped parts around the world. Pertaining to that, in some cases capacities of prisons and similar kind of facilities started to become insufficient. Therefore a question started to emerge from this situation: Do criminals need directly to be sent to prisons and complete their sentences in there or is there any alternative ways that will be mutually more beneficial for them and the society? I strongly believe that sending all criminals to prisons and keep all of them in there for a long time is not the best way to deal with this. Other alternatives such as rehabilitation, public service can be taken into consideration for some cases. This essay will examine this question in a comparative way.
On the one hand, some people claim that criminals should be sent and kept in prisons for quite a long time to suffer the consequences of their actions. The essential reason for this is, according to their point of view, those individuals disobeyed the law and most probably caused severe troubles, damages for some people. Therefore they either need to be punished and separated from the society or they will most likely do it again. I cannot say that they are totally wrong. There are some valid points in their claims, however the part i disagree with them is ‘cannot there be any better ways to solve this problem?’
On the other hand, some individuals claim that putting all of them in prisons and so isolating them from society is not an effective way to solve this problem. Because as a result of this isolation process, after their penalties finished they will have difficulties in re-integrating to society and they may end up committing crimes again. Recent studies conducted in US have shown that of former prisoners have committed similar crimes after they have been released. Therefore according to these individuals the best way is to prevent crimes with better life conditions and higher education before even they have been committed. Furthermore if that cannot be achieved, they claim that rehabilitation and public service will be more effective to deal with the problem. Because with rehabilitation criminals’ tendencies which caused crimes will be treated and public service will allow them to be integrated to the society again.
Different perspectives about how should we handle the problems in regard to criminals have been discussed in this essay. In this sense while some people contend that criminals belong to prisons, on the contrary some individuals believe that we need to be aware of other alternatives, such as rehabilitation and public service, to deal with this problem. In my opinion, sending all criminals to prisons is not an efficient way to deal with this problem. Thus depending on the criminal and the committed crime, firstly rehabilitation process should be put into practice and then those individuals should be sent to work in public service.