http://www.cjpf.org/crime/crime.html

There is a controversy over our current correctional system. Is it an effective deterrent to make people not commit crimes or not? There is evidence to show that it can go either way. For example we talked about in class how if clean up petty crimes people are less likely to commit bigger crimes, so we have a cascade effect of people not committing crimes and therefore our jail system works. However, this does not work in general. I once read an article describing inner city neighborhoods that have a significant percentage of their population in jail. The article argued that when an area reaches a critical percentage of their population in jail that it actually start to break down the society, and creates more crime, and leading to a cascade effect of putting more people in jail. It breaks down for several reasons. Let’s say that now we have greater percentages of households without a father. This has been shown to have a negative effect on the children. In addition if everyone you know has been to jail then it becomes normal to go to jail.

The article that I link to describes some of these effects. It goes beyond the damage that is done to the society by taking members out; it talks about how it changes the people in the correctional system. It says “First, the prison culture extends respect to more serious offenders. The culture values the transmission of increasingly sophisticated and more remunerative criminal techniques.” So once a person leaves jail it becomes hard for them to be reintegrated, and during the reintegration process might create other future felons, and thus a cascade that creates further crime.