It definitely does not rehabilitate as rehabilitation is almost unheard of in most jails or prisons.
Prison is only scary for criminals the first time they enter. Once you've been through the system going to prison a second time is a walk in the park. When I got arrested and sent to prison last year for retweeting a government tweet I walked back in the jail like I ran the place. I knew all the staff, I had my friends there. Even one of the nurses at intake pulled me aside like I was a celebrity and congratulated me for my social justice work. I felt like a boss. Any deterrence factor had long since worn off. And I've only been locked up twice. The other guys around me had been inside dozens of times. One guy had been locked up 70 times.
And we talk about the cost of locking people up, let's say an average of $50K/year in prison costs. People also forget to factor in all the court costs, for the judges, prosecutors, staff etc, probably runs to another $100K+ for a trial. THEN, when someone is locked up they are not generating any income tax or paying any sales taxes. They are not buying any goods or services with their money. There is a huge negative loss there from their lost income and spending to the economy.
Then multiply it by the two or three million who are locked up or on house arrest.
Very quick summary as I can't talk about it much yet (maybe in a few months). I was on bail at my home in Chicago. I was getting arrested every day by the police for no reason. They would come cuff me up, drag me outside, uncuff me. The press caught onto it. I did interviews. The public defender's office tweeted a link to one of the newspaper articles. I retweeted. The police arrested me for it. The judge agreed that I shouldn't be tweeting about police harassment, especially not under a "fake name" (my Twitter username is my first name, and the tweet literally is a newspaper article about me). It took me three months of being in jail to even get in front of the judge to argue it. And we reargued it and lost again. After that I just sucked it up. I got out six months later after three months in a supermax.
It definitely does not rehabilitate as rehabilitation is almost unheard of in most jails or prisons.
Prison is only scary for criminals the first time they enter. Once you've been through the system going to prison a second time is a walk in the park. When I got arrested and sent to prison last year for retweeting a government tweet I walked back in the jail like I ran the place. I knew all the staff, I had my friends there. Even one of the nurses at intake pulled me aside like I was a celebrity and congratulated me for my social justice work. I felt like a boss. Any deterrence factor had long since worn off. And I've only been locked up twice. The other guys around me had been inside dozens of times. One guy had been locked up 70 times.
And we talk about the cost of locking people up, let's say an average of $50K/year in prison costs. People also forget to factor in all the court costs, for the judges, prosecutors, staff etc, probably runs to another $100K+ for a trial. THEN, when someone is locked up they are not generating any income tax or paying any sales taxes. They are not buying any goods or services with their money. There is a huge negative loss there from their lost income and spending to the economy.
Then multiply it by the two or three million who are locked up or on house arrest.