dose prison work ???

[Mortblanc]

Due to demands for "tougher punishment and longer sentences" to show we mean business, the U.S. now has 14% of its population in prison.

Combine that with the 14% actual unemployment figures and you wind up with minimum of 1/4 your people sitting idle.

Going into the system is a rite of passage in some families. a young man is not considered an adult until he has "done time".

No, prison does not work. Apparently it has never worked.

But what did work; hard labor, deportation, selling into slavery, branding, mutilation?

None of those things worked any better than incarceration.

Our "Society" as a whole can not admit the obvious. There is evil in the world and it rests in the hearts of men.

We try to hide it away, train it away and rehabilitate it and we are continually amazed that none of those things works.

As a historian I feel the best system, used right up to the advent of steam power, was chaining them to an oar in a galley. Second best was conscripting them into the Army or Navy and using them as cannon fodder, or in the present situation, to clear IED devices and car bombs.

Many of my squaddies were there because a judge sent them there, and that was in the 1970s. Amazingly, many of them thrived under the discipline and training, made good soldiers, survived their war experience and became productive citizens.

That might not be the answer in every case. Just one option out of many, all of which have largely failed due to man's evil nature.