Prisons in America - Their Effectiveness as Facilities of Rehabilitation

The United States has a prison population of over two million persons (Prison Statistics). This means that we imprison more of our own citizens than any other nation in the world (World Prison Population List). We do this because Americans generally believe that we can and should rehabilitate our criminals. We want to believe that we can mold the deviate into productive members of society. Whether or not this is possible and whether or not traditional prisons are the way to accomplish this rehabilitation are, however, questions that are very much open for debate.

Before we can decide on the effectiveness of prisons as facilities of rehabilitation, we should first examine what prisons are in light of the various sociological perspectives. Observers with Conflict, Functionalist, and Interactionalist perspectives will undoubtedly have very different ideas about what is right and what is wrong with our prisons today. These perspectives not only determine how these observers will look at the state of our prisons, but they will also be a key factor in determining which steps those individuals believe are needed to improve the state of those prisons.

Social-conflict theory, also called Marx Theory, states that stress in our society is the result of conflict between different classes. In particular, social-conflict theorists believe that the cause of virtually all stress in our society is the conflict between the "haves" and the "have nots". This conflict results when the rich try to dominate the poor in the attempt to retain as much of their wealth and power as possible.

Therefore, deviance is not seen as something that happens when individuals depart from norms that society has agreed upon. Instead, these theorists believe that deviance results when those in power label a particular threatening action, stealing for example, as deviant and then use their power to force their will on any whom so offend (Coser 1956). From this perspective, it would seem that the goal of prison rehabilitation programs is to make deviant individuals obliged to conform to the will of the powerful (Goodstein 1989).