Sin Eater: Memoirs of a Prison Psychologist
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Sin Eater: Memoirs of a Prison Psychologist
Sale price
$42.99
Regular price $51.99
It’s a regrettable fact that our society celebritizes criminality. Despite its fascination with crime and punishment the public knows little about the justice system or the correctional institutions used to punish criminality. Imprisonment is meant to correct deviant behavior the way an adult might discipline a disobedient child. Punishment is intended to be rehabilitative, not merely punitive. While it works for some, more often the results are very different.
Most people understand the connection between parental abuse/neglect and psychopathology. Despite that awareness we continue putting people into prisons that are like the worst possible parents and expect those released from them to be somehow rehabilitated. If the citizenry understood what’s going on in most correctional facilities, their expectations would quickly change.
Prisons are hotbeds of psychopathology. They nurture all that’s wrong with human nature, and propagate a culture of criminality/violence which spreads from inmate to inmate
like a viral contagion. That pathology transforms those touched by it as surely as combat transforms soldiers exposed to the horrors of war. Prisons are more like finishing school for felons than bulwarks of civil society.
Rehabilitation programs clearly do some good, but in most instances prisons only contribute to a corrosive counterculture that holds polite society responsible for its misfortune. Anger stoked by that misfortune foments deviance as surely as violence stimulates retributive violence. The result is that prisons––as they exist––foster the criminality they’re intended to curb.
The question of what to do about this is a thorny one. Sin Eater illustrates the problem, not the solution. There is surely no single solution anyway, but housing hardened criminals together is a poor one, and housing those who are not hardened criminals among those who are is still worse. All men must be treated equally under the law, but all men are not equal, and neither are their crimes.
Most people understand the connection between parental abuse/neglect and psychopathology. Despite that awareness we continue putting people into prisons that are like the worst possible parents and expect those released from them to be somehow rehabilitated. If the citizenry understood what’s going on in most correctional facilities, their expectations would quickly change.
Prisons are hotbeds of psychopathology. They nurture all that’s wrong with human nature, and propagate a culture of criminality/violence which spreads from inmate to inmate
like a viral contagion. That pathology transforms those touched by it as surely as combat transforms soldiers exposed to the horrors of war. Prisons are more like finishing school for felons than bulwarks of civil society.
Rehabilitation programs clearly do some good, but in most instances prisons only contribute to a corrosive counterculture that holds polite society responsible for its misfortune. Anger stoked by that misfortune foments deviance as surely as violence stimulates retributive violence. The result is that prisons––as they exist––foster the criminality they’re intended to curb.
The question of what to do about this is a thorny one. Sin Eater illustrates the problem, not the solution. There is surely no single solution anyway, but housing hardened criminals together is a poor one, and housing those who are not hardened criminals among those who are is still worse. All men must be treated equally under the law, but all men are not equal, and neither are their crimes.