Crime and Punishment
Oh, look, big surprise, drug treatment programs are more effective and cost less than prison:
Prosecutors can reduce drug crime more effectively by sending nonviolent drug offenders to a strict treatment program instead of prison, according to sponsors of a study released Tuesday.
Participants were 67% less likely to return to prison and the program costs about half as much as housing a person in prison for an equivalent amount of time.
Why don't we do more of this? Two reasons, we keep asking these methods to be perfect. Someone can make great political hay out of someone who went through a program like this and then went right out and did something heinous. But, guess what? Nothing's perfect. The question shouldn't be, were we decent to someone and they betrayed us. The question should be is it more effective than the alternative?
Second, we are a punishment culture. It doesn't feel right in some awful way that strikes at the core of what many of us believe, to change people who have done something wrong through positive rather than negative means. But really, in the end, what matters is they changed. Not whether they know they were wrong, not whether they had enough bad stuff done to them to make up for it. Is society better off with people who are brutalized or people who have changed? The answer is simple, although sometimes getting to the question isn't simple at all.
...via TalkLeft