Is There Truth in Sentencing?
Musings of an Ex-Con
For centuries, philosophers have attempted to justify society’s right to deprive some of its members of their liberty “in the interest of justice.” Some have argued that punishment deters future crime. Others have maintained that it restores a moral balance upset by wrongdoing. Still others have viewed prison as an opportunity to reform the offender, to return him to society a better man than when he entered its custody. Despite their profound disagreements, these competing schools of thought share one important assumption: that punishment serves some purpose beyond the mere infliction of suffering. That assumption, I believe, deserves closer scrutiny.
If prison is justified because it protects society, rehabilitates offenders, deters future crime, and/or restores justice, then it must ultimately be judged by whether it accomplishes those ends. If it instead returns men to society more damaged, more alienated, and no better equipped to live lawful lives than when they entered, then prison is not simply failing administratively. It is failing philosophically. I know this because I lived there.
For a time, I ceased being David. I became an inmate number, a cell assignment, another body counted every morning and every evening. During those years I had ample opportunity to observe not merely the people incarcerated around me, but the institution itself. I arrived with opinions. I left with convictions (pun intended).
This is not an argument against punishment. Societies have every right to protect themselves from those who would do them harm. Dangerous people sometimes need to be removed from the public, both to prevent further victimization and to affirm that certain conduct simply cannot be tolerated. I have never believed otherwise.
But, I do question whether the institution we call prison bears any meaningful relationship to the philosophical justifications offered in its defence.
Plato believed punishment should ultimately improve the soul of the wrongdoer. Jeremy Bentham argued that punishment is itself an evil and can only be justified if it prevents a greater one. Michel Foucault questioned whether prisons were ever primarily about rehabilitation at all, suggesting instead that they function as instruments of discipline, conformity, and social control. They disagreed about almost everything.
Curiously, each offers us a different standard by which to judge the modern prison. My own experience suggests it struggles to satisfy any of them.
When I first entered prison, I assumed rehabilitation was more than a slogan. I believed there would be serious efforts to understand why people offend and equally serious attempts to reduce the likelihood that they would do so again. It seemed a reasonable expectation. If society was investing enormous sums to incarcerate people, surely some meaningful effort would be made to ensure they returned less likely to commit further crimes.
Instead, I found an institution deeply in love with programs. Prison loves to “fix” people. Tell the powers that be that you’re addicted to alcohol and there’s a program waiting for you. Tell them drugs have controlled your life and another program appears. Tell them you have anger issues, gambling problems, poor impulse control, or almost any recognized behavioural difficulty and someone will eventually arrive with a binder under one arm and a curriculum under the other.
Just don’t be me.
Don’t be the fellow who neither drinks nor smokes. Don’t be the one who has never used drugs. Don’t be non-violent. Don’t arrive with a university education. Don’t be one of only two men with degrees in an institution housing hundreds of inmates.
Above all else, do not tell them that your deepest wounds came not from whatever crime you committed, or from the consequences, but from years of sexual abuse you suffered as a child. There' s no program for that. There were programs for perpetrators; none for victims. I never could bring myself to accept that.
Prison was extraordinarily well equipped to address the problems it expected to find. It was remarkably ill-equipped to deal with the ones that were actually standing in front of it.
That’s a big part of why prison cured almost nobody I met. It certainly didn’t cure me. Not because I was beyond help, but because the institution had no idea what help I actually needed.
That was my first glimpse of a larger truth. Prisons are often described as correctional institutions. The title itself carries an assumption. One cannot correct something without first understanding what is wrong with it.
Yet prisons frequently begin with the opposite assumption. They start not by asking, “Who is this person?” but “Which of our existing programs can we fit him into?”
That’s administration, not rehabilitation.
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Years after we’d both been released, I happened to run into a young fellow I’d served time with. We stood talking for a while before I asked him a simple question.
“Did you learn anything in prison?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I learned how to hate.”
I’ve never forgotten that conversation.
It has stayed with me because, in his off-handed reply, Rick posed a question that reached well beyond his own experience. If prison is intended to make better citizens, what are we to conclude when one of its enduring lessons is hatred?
It would be comforting to dismiss his answer as one embittered former inmate speaking only for himself. Unfortunately, the available evidence points in the same direction. In 1999, the Correctional Service of Canada commissioned one of the largest examinations ever undertaken into the relationship between imprisonment and recidivism. Drawing upon fifty studies involving more than 330,000 offenders, the researchers reached a conclusion that should have prompted far more public discussion than it received. Prisons should not be used with the expectation of reducing future criminal behaviour. If anything, incarceration produced slight increases in recidivism.
That finding ought to trouble anyone interested in the philosophy of punishment. Bentham argued that punishment is itself an evil and can only be justified when it prevents a greater one. If imprisonment fails to reduce future offending, and may even increase it, then the moral calculation is more complicated than politicians often realize.
This is where the discussion usually takes an unfortunate turn. Someone inevitably replies, “Well, prison isn’t supposed to be a holiday.” Quite right. It isn’t. Nor have I ever suggested otherwise. But it’s important to understand that criminals are sentenced to prison as punishment, not for punishment. The deprivation of liberty is the penalty. Everything that follows should exist for some legitimate purpose beyond merely increasing the amount of suffering.
In boxing we’re taught to judge a fighter by what happens after the opening bell, not by what he promised beforehand. Institutions deserve the same courtesy. It is not enough to ask what prisons claim to do. We must ask what they actually produce.
Consider the young offender raised in an environment where crime, addiction, unemployment and violence were commonplace. He is sent away for a period of years during which genuine kindness, compassion, and humanity are often in desperately short supply. But he survives. He serves his sentence, is released, and is returned to precisely the same neighbourhood and environment that produced him, the same “people, places, and things” that shaped him, with the same limited opportunities, carrying the added burden of a criminal record. Employers ask whether he has a record. Landlords ask. Volunteer organizations ask. Society tells him he has paid his debt while simultaneously slamming the door shut on him at every turn.
The prison sentence has an expiry date. The social sentence does not.
I have often wondered whether we have misunderstood recidivism itself. We speak as though it is simply a failure of individual character when, in many cases, it may be the entirely predictable consequence of the circumstances into which we release people — and the environment we released them from. Prison often has a tendency to perfect, rather than reform, criminals. We cannot reasonably expect to put a young man in an environment for years in which he is exposed almost exclusively to other more experienced, hardened criminals, then expect a model citizen to emerge. If we genuinely intend rehabilitation, then our responsibility cannot end at the prison gate.
There is another consideration that is too often overlooked. Crime has always been disproportionately committed by younger people. As our population ages, the proportion of young people naturally declines. That demographic reality places downward pressure on crime rates. Yet prison populations remain remarkably resilient. I leave it to others to decide what conclusions should be drawn from that observation. I merely note that institutions, like all organizations, have a remarkable capacity for preserving themselves.
None of this is intended as an indictment of the men and women who work inside our prisons. I met many dedicated correctional officers who treated inmates with decency and professionalism. Nor is it an argument that dangerous offenders should not be imprisoned. Society has both the right and the obligation to protect itself from those who present a genuine danger to others.
It is, however, an argument that we should be intellectually honest about what prison can and cannot accomplish.
If punishment is justified by rehabilitation, deterrence, or moral improvement, then prison must ultimately be judged by whether it produces those things. If it instead returns men to society more damaged, more excluded, and no better equipped to live within the law than when they entered, then the institution is not merely failing administratively. It is failing philosophically.
When philosophers debate punishment, they often ask what society owes justice. My years in prison led me to ask a different question: what does justice owe truth?
Perhaps truth in sentencing should mean more than accurately announcing the number of years a judge intends to imprison a man. Perhaps it should also require us to speak honestly about what those years are likely to achieve. If we lack the courage to ask that question, then we have confused punishment with justice and suffering with progress.
That is a distinction worth making.
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Author’s message
I was a victim of sexual abuse by a trusted coach as a child. That experience coloured far more of my adult life than I realized at the time. Determined never again to be powerless, I pursued success with extraordinary intensity. I wanted to become so accomplished, so financially secure, so independent that no one could ever again hold power over me. Yet no amount of success ever quieted the insecurity. No matter how much prestige, money, or achievement I accumulated, I still carried the feeling that there was a human stain upon me that others could somehow see. Eventually, in pursuing what I believed would finally make me safe, I crossed a line I should never have crossed. That decision was mine, and mine alone. But understanding why I made it has become part of understanding who I am.
David G. Villanueva on Daily Philosophy:
