RE: Prisons Should be Designed to Rehabilitate not Punish.
I think you would be very interested to read about the Norwegian prison Bastoy. It's situated on an island and has strikingly different conditions from what we imagine as prison; no cells, a natural environment, and various educational, craft, and leisure pursuits for the prisoners.
Most interestingly, it typically serves as a transitional prison, where people who have spent longer sentences at traditional maximum security prisons are sent for the last several years of a sentence. I think this is such a crucial thing that the American system is missing. Rather than the sudden jarring transitions of life to miserable subjugation and back, the qualities of imprisonment should gradually shift in a way that has prisoners functioning as healthy human beings with skills and prospectsbefore being released into society.
I think I heard briefly about it but couldn't remember the name of the place!! Thank you SO much. I have wanted to reference this idea when talking about this in the past but for the life of me could not recall the facts. I will now go learn more about it! :D
This is exactly the type of thing we need.
No problem! It was eye opening when I first heard about it, and if I wasn't already just clued in to the destructive and greedy nature of the prison industrial complex in the US, I'd wonder why we haven't implemented anything similar.