@Timsup2nothin One of the big pushes in liberal/progressive criminal justice circles is focusing on prisoner rehabilitation through better treatment in prison (less dehumanizing conditions) and rehabilitation programs such as job training or counseling to try and prevent recidivism. In your experience, do you think that is workable? That meaningful rehabilitation programs are both technically possible (not talking politically viable here) and would have a strong positive effect?
That's a tough one.
I think recidivism has a whole lot more to do with dehumanizing conditions
outside of prison rather than in it. For the most part I think the prison system is doing pretty good at playing the crappy hand it gets dealt. The worst card in their hand is overcrowding, and the better response to the wildly common public mindset of "well, just lock up
everybody but me forever" would be to change that mindset rather than just endlessly building more prisons.
I regards to rehabilitation directly, I already pointed to one aspect. I went to work in the factory
to get readjusted to working. When I was a bank robber I obviously didn't have any compelling need for a typical job. In prison I didn't have any compelling need for a typical job. If I had just ridden that seven year run out the gate the shock of going to work at a lumberyard (my first post prison job) and just the simple requirement to show up every day and stay there would have probably reminded me of why I had thought robbing banks was a good idea in the first place. To be honest even before I started robbing banks I was in sales and that's another seven years where I pretty much came and went as I pleased. So despite the obvious issues of "prison slave labor" the factory was, in fact, a key element in my personal rehabilitation.
It's important to recognize though that I made it that way. I knew what I needed, and I got it. I also participated in a pretty avant garde drug rehab program that I was kind of lucky to qualify for. It had had a very successful test run, in that graduates of the pilot program had a shockingly low recidivism rate over three years post release. So in their infinite wisdom the BoP appealed to congress to be allowed to incentivize it. Inmates serving sentences for non-violent crimes could get a year taken off if they completed the program. Bank robbers like myself couldn't get the year off because bank robbery is by definition a violent crime, but when I was in prison the lawsuits were flying regarding whether someone who didn't use a weapon or make any threats was really a violent criminal, yadda yadda yadda.
Anyway, to clarify how I qualified. My particular methods involved taking a road trip for a week and hitting three banks in a pretty wide scatter. I was always pretty wired on adrenaline when I was out on the job, between the obvious rush of the robberies and the long hours of driving. This friend of mine gave me a little bag with some pot in it, suggesting that I could and probably should use it to mellow me out a little bit so I wouldn't be so frazzled when I got home. I never used it, but it was tucked in my sock when I got arrested. Carrying drugs at time of arrest made me a 'drug related' case, so I could get into the program.
But of course
all the drug guys could get in, and almost all of them were designated as non-violent offenders so they qualified to get the year off. Also of course the massive success of the pilot program went completely off the cliff, because people who took the program just to get a year off were no less likely for recidivism than people who didn't take the program at all. It was a really effective program for people who wanted to understand the nature and consequences of addiction, not a miracle barrier against recidivism.
I do
not credit the BoP with getting me off dope. I also don't deny that maybe they did. At the same time I did their program I did NA and worked it from the perspective of 'if I ever say this doesn't work it will not be because I didn't give it a fair shot', made a massive commitment to practicing Yoga, got older and theoretically wiser, gave at least a cursory exploration to every religion known to man, and had the advantage that my addictive nature had actually shifted from chemicals to the natural rush of committing major felonies and I didn't feel much incentive to shift back. If I gave in to addiction it would most likely be in a bank, and that still holds true today. As people in the program would say, I had found my drug of choice.