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In this week’s podcast, host Anthony Gangi speaks with C1 columnist and probation officer Curtis Isele about the topic of rehabilitation, and how it affects more than just prisons.
Prisons have evolved over the years from simply holding prisoners to attempting to rehabilitate the ones that will be returned to the community. Correctional officers, prisons and the criminal justice system at large cannot be held solely responsible for the full rehabilitation of offenders if when they are returned to the community, they are ostracized for the crimes they’ve served time for.
“A lot of the public don’t understand that 90 percent of these inmates will return to the same communities they came from,” Isele said. “They’ll be your neighbors, they’ll be working at Kroger. They’ll be somewhere and you’ll have no idea. So the main question I pose is, do you want them to come out of prison worse than when they came in, or do you want to do something proactively to address that issue as best we can?
“We can’t cure everything, but there is a system in place where we can reduce the prison population and hopefully make people more productive.”
