Incarceration: Are Prisons a Suitable Punishment?

Who is the course for?

This course is for anyone looking to investigate whether prisons are a suitable punishment for offenders.

The course will be useful for professionals such as social workers, probation officers, and anyone that supports prisoners.

This course is also useful for learners interested in studying criminology or related disciplines at undergraduate or postgraduate level.

What topics will you cover?

Identify the aims of imprisonment as punishment and recognise the justifications and ethical implications of subjecting individuals to custody.

Explore prison conditions and regimes, considered in relation to punishment being solely ‘loss of liberty’.

Identify issues facing prisons, including safety and security, overcrowding and drug misuse.

Compare jurisdictions with different aims and objectives.

Explore the criminal justice system: what sanctions are available and where punish and imprisonment fits.

Examine rehabilitation as a key to reducing reconviction rates and crime by changing the individual and/or providing skills ready for release.

Explore alternatives to custody for less serious crimes: fines, community orders and suspended sentences.

Assess the effectiveness of such sanctions in comparison with custody.

Discuss the extent to which rehabilitation and resettlement are key to reducing reoffending.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to…

Explore the role of imprisonment as a mechanism of punishment, its legitimacy and ethical standpoint and identify its aims.

Discuss how prisoners should be treated and what ethical considerations should be considered in deciding physical conditions of custody.

Identify issues within the prison system, including overcrowding, drug misuse and safety.

Compare different prison systems and evaluate which might be most effective and the most ethically sound.

Explain the concept of rehabilitation in both changing the individual and its wider role of crime reduction.

Explore alternative punishments to imprisonment, their effectiveness and discuss if these are ethically more acceptable than custody.