I don’t believe that our prison rehabilitates inmates in any way.

There I’ve said it, so bring it on.

Just one visit to Corradino Correctional Facility is enough to have you convinced that there’s absolutely nothing correctional about it. 

It is not structurally nor humanly equipped to help rehabilitate anyone, let alone a crowd that’s bigger than was ever envisaged.

Granted, a few convicts might leave jail with the fear of God in them but, in the long run, this does very little to help them stay on the straight and narrow.

If I were wrong about this we wouldn’t have 60 per cent of inmates being repeat offenders – one of the highest rates in the EU.

Having said that, prison is NOT completely useless.

Prisons are the only known way through which we can give victims of crime some kind of closure and some a sense of social justice.

And there’s a lot of value in giving victims closure and a sense of justice, so I’m not in any way suggesting that we abolish prison, but let’s not kid ourselves; let’s admit once and for all that the only thing that prisons help us achieve is this sense of justice for victims and society at large, no less, no more.

Unfortunately I’m not one of those tree hugging-all-loving and forgiving people, so if I had to have a crime committed against me or a person close to me, I too would want the perpetrators locked up.

More than likely I’d also be arguing to have them throw away the key, but I wouldn’t fool myself into thinking that prison will somehow change the criminal in any shape or form. 

Actually, I take that back.

Prison can change people.

They make people worse; the longer they stay in there for, the thicker their skin gets, the more drugs they’re exposed to, and the worse it is for the rest of us when they’re out.

And what about the latest amnesty – 100 days for nothing?

With the way our prisons work at the moment a 100 days here or there won’t make a tad of a difference except in making prisoners temporarily ecstatic and victims temporarily angry.

When you’re serving anything more than a few weeks in prison, one hundred days make no difference in deterring or promoting your next crime, and it makes no difference in rehabilitating you either.

This means that I’m neither hot nor cold about the 100 days amnesty that the Government just granted, but I do think that the way it was administered was unfair.

As much as I despise paedophilia, I do not think that putting paedophiles in prison ‘cures’ them and when performing a humanitarian gesture such as this, it is morally wrong to discriminate against one type of criminal and not another. 

Whilst I agree that not all crimes are the same, and that some are definitely graver than others, it is the law and the sentencing that should take this into consideration, not a humanitarian amnesty.

In other words, if paedophiles are to be considered worse than wife-beaters, drug dealers, or pimps, then the law should allow for harsher punishments in the form of longer sentences, but once an amnesty is going to be granted on humanitarian grounds, I don’t see why any discrimination should be applied whatsoever. 

It is also unfair to apply 100 days across the board, because 100 days out of a 10 year sentence is not the same as 100 days off a three-year sentence.  If we’re trying to teach our prisoners a sense of fairness,  if we want our prisoners to believe that the law is blind and that it treats everybody the same, then the amnesty (if we’re going to grant at all, but that’s a whole other blog) should be in a percentage form, thus levelling it out for everybody.

It’s called teaching by example, the most taxing but most effective kind of teaching there is.